The El Salvadorean Miracle?
In 2015, El Salvador was the most dangerous country in the world with 103 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.
In 2023, that number is down to 2.5.
In 2015, you were 20x more likely to be murdered in El Salvador than the United States.
Today, you are 70% less likely to be murdered in El Salvador.
This relative change is due to government policies.
While progressive politicians in America flirted with de-funding the police and saw violent crime rise 40% as a result, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele did the opposite. He militarized the police and let them trample on due process as they pursued MS13 gang members.
His approach worked and turned a war zone into Switzerland.
However, rather than celebrate this achievement, the Western media from both sides of the political spectrum attacked Bukele.
“El Salvador’s cool dictator has cracked down on gangs, but is he really a hero?” asks the Miami Herald.
“Nayib Bukele is no Conservative Hero” answers the National Review.
Even, Vice did a short segment, sarcastically calling him the world’s coolest dictator (see here).
The media has tried to claim that the fall in crime is due entirely to a deal between the gangs and Bukele (see here). However, that deal if it ever was struck fell apart in early 2022 as the gangs went on a brief crime spree, hoping to pressure the government. That was met with an even more brutal crackdown, which led to crime plummeting in the second half of 2022 and into 2023.
At the end of the day, the Western media has a problem with Bukele’s creeping authoritarianism. In his zeal for control, Bukele has weakened judicial processes and the democratic institutions of El Salvador, in all the classic ways aspiring Latin dictators do.
Regardless of whether these criticisms of Bukele are correct; they don’t land with the citizens of El Salvador.
Today, Bukele has the highest approval rating of any leader in all Latin America.
You don’t just have to look at opinion polls, simply click here on the Vice video and scroll down.
Hundreds of heartfelt comments from El Salvadoreans personally testifying in favor of Bukele’s regime.
You can find these testimonials in any comment section in any article about Bukele. Salvadoreans abroad feel a very heartfelt sense of gratitude for the changes that have taken place.
This dichotomy between the Western media with its strident opposition to Bukele and the citizens of El Salvador shows the blind spots that we in the West have about governments.
We have forgotten why governments exist in the first place.
To understand why a government exists, you have to understand what life is like before one.
As Thomas Hobbes points out in The Leviathan, life in the state of nature is “poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
To level up from that brutal state, we agree to give up freedoms in return for a central authority that gives us security from those who might kill us.
Steven Pinker points out in his seminal book The Better Angels of Our Nature (see here), this transition from non-state to state is what caused the first big step change in the rate of societal violence.
The classical liberal view of humanity (which was shaped by the writings of Rousseau) is statistically wrong. The peaceful noble savage has never existed. The state although imperfect helps hem in bad impulses.
If you remove those shackles, you don’t get a bunch of Burning Man hippies blissing out to the song Imagine but rather a bunch of deranged psychopaths trying to kill each other (as the statistics above demonstrate).
Pre-Bukele El Salvador was a case in point of this.
El Salvador’s functioning institutions had been wrecked by a Civil War and the country had slowly devolved into a version of Apocalypse Now, overrun by criminal kids with face tattoos.
It might have had a government and it might have been called a democracy but none of that mattered to your day-to-day existence as citizen. You were terrified walking to the grocery store.
Bukele has turned around this Hobbesian reality. He did so the only way you really can – centralizing power in himself and deploying extra-judicial brutality.
These sorts of methods offend our delicate sensibilities but that is because our existence is much further removed from the Hobbesian realities of a place like El Salvador. The further you are from those brutal realities, the more you can concern yourself with other governing ideals.
But the reality is that when Americans have attempted to impose their governing ideals on places that are much closer to the Hobbesian reality – the result has been disastrous (see Iraq).
Americans and rich/educated people in general don’t get the Hobbesian reality, because they don’t live it. Ergo they squirm at the ugly trade offs required to solve it.
It would be nice if Bukele pivots away from some of his authoritarianism, but it would also be nice if Western journalists and political elite listened to the actual people of El Salvador and heard their perspective.