Crime and Punishment in the Americas

As 2024 ushered in, newly-elected Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa issued a state of emergency in his country, citing a wave of gang violence spurred by the prison escape of a local criminal leader with ties to Mexico’s ruthless Sinaloa Cartel. In a series of coordinated attacks, gang members burned vehicles on the streets, planted explosives in police stations, targeted public servants, kidnapped citizens, conducted shootings inside university campuses and held a television crew hostage live on air. The news and images of the small nation descending into chaos spread all over the world, with many pundits in English-speaking countries framing the story as a cautionary tale about progressive policies that prioritize human rights, open borders, and an overall soft stance on crime.

Aside from the local criminal leader’s jailbreak, the violence seemed to be more of a reaction to Noboa’s attempts to take back control of the country’s prisons and build two new maximum-security penitentiaries modeled after those in El Salvador. The violence did not intimidate the president but apparently pushed him to double-down on his strategy, deploy the military in the streets and designate a handful of gangs as terrorist organizations.

Now, for better or worse, Ecuador and other Latin American countries with similar problems are on the fast track towards adopting a model promoted by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. The populist politician has garnered praise from young people and the global right because of his off-beat ways, ranging from pushing El Salvador to officially invest in Bitcoin to ranting against leftist activists who, he asserts, seem more concerned with the rights of MS-13 gang members than the rights of law-abiding citizens. More importantly, Bukele was recently reelected by a landslide, marking another win in a region that, following the triumph of aspiring Argentine strongman Javier Milei, has begun flirting with hardline policies in light of rampant violence, economic instability and an exodus of people displaced by crime and hardship.

The Bukele Model

Whether you love or hate him, it is hard to deny that President Nayib Bukele has accomplished an incredible feat: his government has managed to significantly reduce crime in El Salvador. In 2015, the small nation had the world’s worst murder rate with about 106 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. A year later, the murder rate began dropping after the country adopted a series of measures such as waging a frontal war on MS-13, announcing a state of emergency in several prisons, and transferring criminal leaders to maximum security penitentiaries. When Bukele took power in 2019, the trend accelerated.

In 2022, Bukele declared another state of emergency following a wave of violence orchestrated by the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs. The president suspended a series of constitutional rights for 30 days to attack the criminal groups without reservations. It worked. Months later, Bukele inaugurated a new mega-prison with the capacity to hold 40,000 inmates. The so-called Center for Terrorism Confinement was unlike any other prison: No visits for inmates and no reform or recreational programs. Gang members often appeared shirtless and completely subdued in press photographs. If they did not behave, the president himself threatened to reduce already scarce meals, among other punitive measures. Tough actions, words and bravado imagery made up the strategy.

Salvadoran soldiers

In 2023, the government declared El Salvador had achieved the lowest homicide rate in its history with only 154 murders or 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. Statistics may differ, but the government’s numbers seemed mostly in line with those of international agencies such as the United Nations and USAID.

Of course, this did not happen without controversy. As of today, El Salvador is the country in the world that puts the most people in prison per capita and the government’s methods have unleashed a flurry of criticism. However, Bukele has yet to shy away from troublesome imprisonment statistics. In fact, in 2022, the Salvadoran government boasted of imprisoning more than 70,000 people. At the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the United States, Bukele dismissed his critics, blaming criminal violence in El Salvador on senseless public policies and political agendas imposed by foreign NGOs, activists, the media and liberal actors such as businessman and philanthropist George Soros. “The global elites, they hate our success,” Bukele told the crowds at CPAC. “We transformed El Salvador from the most dangerous country in the world to the safest in the Western Hemisphere. We did it by defying the global elites, we told them ‘No more’ and that is my message to you, put up a fight, because in the end it will be worth it.”

 U.S. officials have repeatedly accused the Salvadoran government of working behind the scenes with gangs to reduce violence while violating due process. People have also denounced extrajudicial killings, detentions and disappearances. NGOs and journalistic reports have decried the hellish conditions inside the mega-prison. Still, none of this has deterred a defiant Bukele nor has it seemingly damaged his immense popularity, solidified during the most recent election, which he won with more than 80% of the vote.

 This is the definitive factor, beyond the stellar drop in homicides, which has made neighboring leaders take notice. For example, Honduras, a country also ravished by gang violence but ruled by a leftist politician, has attempted a similar approach by declaring states of emergency and announcing the construction of an isolated prison in a nearby archipelago. Nonetheless, the murder rate there remains high, with more than 3,500 homicides registered in 2023, according to the National Observatory on Violence of the National Autonomous University of Honduras.

 The Case of Ecuador

Ecuador’s 2023 election was mired in violence. Those running for office faced numerous threats and presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated in the aftermath of a campaign rally. The attack was attributed to criminal gang Los Lobos, which has ties to Mexican drug cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación.

 Upon winning the presidency and mostly campaigning on eradicating crime, millionaire heir and businessman Daniel Noboa announced the implementation of a security strategy dubbed Plan Fénix (Phoenix Plan) to reference the country’s rise against organized crime. The strategy involved creating a central intelligence unit for crime prevention, providing tactical equipment to security forces, and using facial-recognition drones, among other measures that remain shrouded in secrecy or have yet to materialize. Noboa also borrowed from the Bukele playbook by announcing the construction of two new “mega prisons.” The security plan and its first steps were met with fierce resistance. Come January 2024, Noboa was forced to declare Ecuador in a state of internal armed conflict after chaos erupted in a series of penitentiaries and the coordinated gang violence spilled onto the streets to pressure the new government to back down.

 Ecuador’s penitentiary system was the trigger point. Prisons in the country are severely overcrowded and have been historically controlled by inmates. The lack of government resources is staggering. In December 2023, about a month before Ecuador descended into chaos, Expreso reported that only 2,910 prison guards oversee the whole prison system population—about 31,000 inmates. To make matters worse, these guards work in eight-hour shifts, with each responsible for an average of 60 inmates. Although Ecuador’s penitentiary system (SNAI for its Spanish acronym) reported that overcrowding in prisons was lowered to 13.45% by the end of 2023, the efforts to alleviate overcrowding were insufficient and came too late.

 As of December 2023, SNAI reported there were more than 30,000 inmates in Ecuador scattered throughout 36 prisons, four of which are considered mega-prisons. The latter house more than half of Ecuador’s incarcerated people. According to the Inter American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), these huge detention complexes have become hubs for the worst kind of prison violence, with narco-terrorist groups often battling each other for control. Noboa’s strategy to create two more mega-prisons aimed to solve overcrowding, but the plan lacked a specific path to wrestle control back from criminal groups that reign in existing prison complexes. The president also floated the idea of creating prison ships off the coast of Ecuador to separate kingpins from their crews and break criminal dynamics. Both the viability and implementation of this proposal remains unclear.

 Beyond building more penitentiaries and enhancing security, corruption is a deadly component that has allowed criminals to wreak havoc both inside and outside the prisons of Ecuador. In 2023, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) gave Ecuador a score of 34/100, placing the country 115th out of 180 nations analyzed. It is important to note that Bukele’s El Salvador ranks 126th. Yet corruption in El Salvador does not seem to be having a direct effect on violence, as Bukele has been able to bring rates down without, according to his critics, necessarily advancing robust democratic and transparent institutions.  That said, what Bukele did have in his favor upon assuming power were strong security forces. This is something Noboa does not have at his disposal, as noted by the IACHR 2022 report on Ecuador. The report also highlights institutional fragility as a crucial factor in the country’s struggle against transnational crime.

 As of now, both Noboa and Bukele seem focused on targeting the symptoms but not the root causes that allow gangs and transnational crime groups to thrive and grow powerful enough to challenge nation states. Nonetheless, shortcuts, understandably so, are much more politically attractive as they tend to make a splash and win elections. 

(From left to right) Salvadoran Defense Minister René Merino Monroy, Head of Penal Centers Osiris Luna Meza, President Nayib Bukele, Public Works Minister Romeo Herrera and Director of the Salvadoran Civil Police Mauricio Arriaza Chicas touring CECOT.

One Size Fits All?

Organized-crime related homicides represent half of all homicides in the Americas, according to a 2023 UNODC study.  In 2021 alone, eight of the ten nations with the highest homicide rates in the world were in the region, the study found.

 However, homicide has gone down in some nations. For example, Brazil has experienced a drop, which the UNODC study attributes to “demographic change, changes in policing and the increasing dominance of certain organized crime groups, as well as public policies, including those relating to gun control.” The study also highlights the fact that Peru and Venezuela have seen a reduction in homicides in recent years. The research suggests the difference may be in the prevalence of organized crime and gangs in each country.

Now, unlike large drug cartels, Salvadoran gangs such as MS-13 and Barrio 18 tend to focus mostly on extortion, kidnapping and theft. That said, bigger criminal corporations often use them to do their bidding and provide muscle for large scale drug-trafficking operations.

 In the case of Ecuador, Renato Rivera-Rhon and Carlos Bravo-Grijalva, researchers at Ecuador’s FLACSO University, explain the nation is no longer just a transit country for the international drug trade. It has become a place that occupies a privileged position in the drug-trafficking value chain, exponentially increasing its participation in the production, refining, storage, and transportation of illicit drugs.

This is illustrated by the case of the Ecuadorian narco-terrorist gang known as Los Choneros, the group whose leader escaped from jail and triggered the wave of violence at the start of 2024. Los Choneros often function as a proxy for Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel to distribute cocaine and other drugs worldwide. The latest wave of violence in Ecuador evidenced the global reach of cartels such as Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación, their tentacles now spread throughout North, Central and South America.

The consolidation of Mexican cartels in the international drug trade was a key factor that led to the globalization of Ecuador’s narco-terrorist gangs. Ecuador, with its weak judiciary and penal institutions, corruption in both military and police, and its privileged position in the Pacific, makes for an excellent base of drug-trafficking operations. However, President Nayib Bukele’s hardline policies, although an attractive approach to deal with violence in the Americas, do not necessarily guarantee the same results for Ecuador. Same goes for Mexico, where a frontal fight was already unleashed in 2006, driving up homicides, collateral damage and brutality, which has become a fixture of the Mexican drug war. Moreover, Mexican cartels have far more funding, armament, connections, and know-how than gangs in El Salvador, Ecuador, and Honduras.

While a single security strategy will not work across nations, Latin American governments need enhanced cooperation mechanisms and agreements considering how criminal groups, big and small, are increasingly borderless and often rely on one another to conduct their business. Cartels and smaller criminal groups have established deep alliances. Latin American nation states have yet to follow suit to counter this. A regional approach that creates more bridges between multiple security agencies is a must. For example, Ecuador is working closely with the United States, but it would help the country if it worked as closely with Mexico, home to the big criminal corporations that control or fund many aspects of the smaller Ecuadorian criminal gangs.

 Furthermore, cooperation between local agencies is necessary. For example, Chile’s security plan involves close collaboration between the police known as Carabineros, Investigative Police (PDI) and agencies such as the Office of the Public Prosecutor. Effective inter-agency coordination has been key in reducing homicide rates, which dropped to 3.7 for every 100,000 people in 2021, according to the World Bank. Social programs can also alleviate the problem. For example, Uruguay has invested heavily in these initiatives coupled with strong police collaboration and judicial institutions. According to the World Bank, in 2021, this approach led to a decrease in the intentional homicide rate, with 8.9 murders for every 100,000 inhabitants. These strategies have a proven record for producing lasting solutions. However, they do not deliver quick results nor are bombastic enough to grab public attention and votes.

While Bukele’s hardline policies have achieved fast and in certain instances commendable results, they may not solve the underlying issues of corruption and institutional fragility that make for lasting change. As Latin America continues to grapple with the scourge of the international drug trade and its violent side effects, the pursuit of serious regional security collaboration and development initiatives is paramount. Only through a stark commitment to transparency, accountability and institution building, can the Americas truly counter the ever-encroaching criminal wave. Bukele could focus on this after pulling El Salvador out of what appeared to be a limbo of gang violence. Noboa could do the same if and when the dust settles in Ecuador. Latin Americans should be aware by now that without root changes, and a series of security strategies that recognize and address the interconnectedness of different criminal organizations, even the most draconian policies are bound to become ineffective in the long run as cartels and gangs regroup, readjust, establish new alliances, and continue recruiting from a pool of impoverished and disheartened young men who are all too frequently abandoned by the state. Perhaps this is the real cautionary tale.