A cacophony of right-wing commentators now believes that El Salvador, under Nayib Bukele’s dictatorship, is the “safest” country in the Western Hemisphere. Bukele himself certainly wants us to believe it’s because he’s gone to war with the gangs.
They’re all wrong — and disastrously so.
According to El Faro, the country’s most respected investigative outlet, the relative peace in El Salvador is not the result of a decisive war on gangs, but rather, of a secret pact negotiated directly between Bukele’s own Director of Prisons Osiris Luna and his head of the Social Fabric Reconstruction Unit, Carlos Marroquín, and gang leaders, starting in late 2019. He also took on similar negotiations with gangs as a mayor of San Salvador, from 2015 to 2018.
These revelations are based on extensive access to prison intelligence, government documents, and insiders within the security apparatus and the gangs themselves.
The U.S. Treasury backed these findings in 2021, sanctioning Luna and Marroquín and other Bukele allies for offering financial incentives and prison perks to MS-13 and Barrio 18 leaders in exchange for reducing homicides and supporting Bukele’s party in elections.
Numerous Latin American leaders have gone to jail for these kinds of deals — including Salvadoran cabinet members. Politicians of all stripes, including from Bukele’s former FMLN party, have negotiated with gangs; these pacts in El Salvador go back at least two decades. Negotiated peace isn’t a new solution, Bukele’s deal just worked, for now.
These deals, coordinated through the intelligence service, have been deliberately concealed and officially denied by the administration — because acknowledging they exist within his own government would undermine his image as a no-compromise strongman engaged in a just war against narco-terrorist gangs.
Bukele’s government is jailing politicians from past governments who signed deals, but that is all part of rewriting history. He is also prosecuting critics, purging the judiciary, and aggressively going after El Faro’s journalists, to conceal the truth.
Part of Bukele’s truce is to allow gangs to run their networks within the prisons, while their wealth and power remain untouched. In exchange, they have to keep homicides and violent crimes down. The leader of Barrio 18, one of the country’s two most powerful gangs, also alleges that they helped Bukele rise to power directly.
Data suggests that drug outflows from El Salvador have not stopped increasing, including for cocaine. Peace will be kept as long as the money keeps flowing — yes, that is a narcostate.
Thousands of gang members from El Salvador’s most brutal gangs have bled into neighboring countries, bringing instability, crime, and violence to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and other countries. Salvadoran gangs are even reaching Chile. The crisis isn’t solved, it’s just moving zip codes.
The truce deal is quite thin; gangs seeking a better cut of the drug market or better prison conditions could, in a moment, plunge the country once again into a bloody war. This time, there will neither be security, nor democracy left.
In Bukele’s crackdown, the rule of law is completely gone, with the Supreme Court being replaced by loyalists, and no term limits or checks on Bukele’s power. He has called those who dare speak out “terrorist sympathizers”, threatening them with jail where “the only way out is in a coffin.”
Thousands of innocent people have been swept up, without a trial, access to a lawyer, or even basic necessities in prison – all while drug kingpins get special privileges. More than 400 detainees have died in extrajudicial detention from beatings, starvation, and untreated illness — their bodies returned to families with signs of torture.
Many Latin American countries, past and present, have tried Bukele’s model of suspending all rights while targeting, jailing, or killing suspected gang members. Bukelismo is now the most popular security philosophy in Latin America. The fact that you haven’t heard it working anywhere else is no accident.
At best, “Mano Dura” (hard hand) has a very mixed track record. At worst, it destroys democracy while reinforcing what social scientist Graham Denyer Willis called the “killing consensus” between the state and gangs.
In Colombia, the Peace Agreement hasn’t been fully implemented, with FARC dissidents having expanded their operations into Venezuela and Ecuador, ELN resuming their attacks in Catatumbo, and a continuing harsh military campaign only fueling further killings and displacement.
In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa’s state of exception has not decreased the homicide rate, while he has used security forces to crack down on protests and opposition. InSight Crime’s analysis points to gang reorganizing as a result.
In Honduras, Xiomara Castro also suspended all constitutional rights, including freedom of speech, association, and assembly, copying Bukele’s playbook. Yet the homicide rate is still one of the highest in the world, as are the violent crime and extortion rates, and there are countless cases of state security forces using torture, forced disappearances, and murders of political opponents.
Throughout Latin America, some of the areas with the highest rates of incarceration and police killings, continue to have some of the highest murder, crime, and violent crime rates in the world.
Almost all Latin American countries have some form of a “state of exception” with high state violence, extreme police power, a corrupt criminal justice system that favors the security state, and extreme incarceration and overcrowding rates. Full martial law won’t improve those odds.
El Salvador already tried “Mano Dura” and “Súper Mano Dura” in the 2000s, jailing tens of thousands of suspected gang members. The outcome was: Gangs grew stronger, more centralized, and more violent, operating directly from prisons.
People want revenge and quick solutions, which is understandable after decades of violence and corruption. But adopting Bukele’s vision is a fast track into a fascist abyss, where power is concentrated in the hands of a small political-criminal elite, while there are no free elections, no free speech, and no dissent.
Bukele and his allies have pushed the dangerous lie that the only way to deal with gangs is to wage war, dismantle democracy, and accept the jailing or killing of innocents as collateral damage. That is dead wrong.
