Lessons from El Salvador

Bukele’s “Peace Model”

Throughout 2024, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele incessantly repeated that his tough measures against violent gangs finally brought peace to the country. He said it at the United Nations General Assembly; he said it in an interview with Tucker Carlson, he said it on his campaign to be reelected—despite Constitutional prohibitions on reelection—, he repeated it when he was sworn in for a second term and even at the Christmas season opening, last December. On X, formerly Twitter, he posted four photos of a Christmas town set up in the center of San Salvador, with a text: “Now we live in a country with true peace…”

His security strategy, based on arbitrary detentions and massive incarcerations, effectively dismantled criminal gangs in El Salvador and lowered the homicide rates from one of the highest in the world to the lowest in the Americas. When he claims peace, he has numbers to show.

Mayors and politicians from South American cities with serious crime challenges, as Cuenca, Ecuador, or Barranquilla, Colombia, are demanding the application of what is now widely known as El modelo Bukele. So are millions of Latin Americans.

Yet, for almost three years now, El Salvador has been living under a State of Emergency that allows police agents to arrest any person they deem suspect of collaborating with gangs, without the need of a judicial order. Provisional detention terms have been extended from 72 hours to 15 days, which in practice turn to months now, and those who finally get a day in court are subject to trials en masse, sometimes next to as many as one hundred detainees, where their common fate will be decided by an anonymous judge.

With almost 80,000 people incarcerated during the Regime of Exception, on top of the 30,000 previously imprisoned population, El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world, 1.7 per 100,000 inhabitants, surpassing even the United States. Hundreds of detainees have died in prison under torture. Bukele brags to have built the biggest prison in the Americas, called CECOT (Confinement Center for Terrorists) with capacity for 60,000 inmates. His propaganda team constantly feeds international media with images of hundreds of naked gang members, tattooed all over their bodies, sitting inside the immaculate white new prison in perfectly geometric formations, with their hands behind their necks, surrounded by heavily armed police agents dressed all in black. A horror show.

According to international human rights organizations, at least a third of the tens of thousands of detainees have no relation or links of any kind to gangs. And still they languish inside prisons where no one is allowed to visit, without due process and subject to systematic torture. We at El Faro have confirmed the detention of minors with severe autism or Down syndrome; and documented dozens of cases of torture and killings inside the prisons. Human rights groups claim that more than 300 persons detained during the State of Emergency have died with signs of torture.

Most Salvadorans know this is happening. And still Bukele is the most popular leader in the Western hemisphere, with an approval rate above 75%. Asked why, most of his supporters credit Bukele with bringing peace to their neighborhoods, now constantly patrolled by soldiers and police agents with legal license to arrest anyone without a judicial order, leading to thousands of abuses.

But before Bukele dismantled the gangs, he did that with our democratic system. He has threatened and prosecuted his critics and political opponents; he staged a coup against the judicial system, unconstitutionally sacking the Supreme Court’s serving judges and the attorney general and replacing them with loyalists; the new attorney general has vastly proven his inertia to prosecute police abuses, human rights violations or corruption cases, while the newly appointed judges reviewed the Constitutional prohibitions for a reelection and reinterpreted them effectively giving a green light to Bukele’s reelection. It was a preposterous ruling, but no one was surprised. By then, Bukele controlled all the state institutions. There is no independence of powers in El Salvador anymore, and public information barely exists. We are at the birth of a new dictatorship, without any control or limits to Bukele’s exercise of power. Can this be called peace?

 “True peace”?

A very obvious definition of peace is the absence of war or violence. We Salvadorans achieved peace in 1992, after the end of the Cold War, ending a decade-long civil war that left almost 100,000 dead. The government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front  (FMLN) guerrillas signed a Peace Accord brokered by the United Nations, and just like that, war was over.

The signing parties committed to definitively separate the Armed Forces from our political life; to administer every disagreement through the institutions of the state and to put human rights at the forefront of our democratic life. The Chapultepec Peace Accord (as the document came to be known, since it was signed at the Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City) became an international model for peace negotiations, since it truly marked the end of armed conflict and established the basis for a democratic life. It was, for us, something akin to a second independence.

But the accord had a couple of mayor flaws—easy to say now that we know the consequences. One was the lack of socio-economic measures to reduce the scandalous inequality gap and commit to a much wider distribution of national wealth. The other was the absence of transitional justice mechanisms that could restore some dignity to the hundreds of thousands of victims and recognize the criminals and the crimes they committed. A Truth Commission was appointed to investigate some of the most emblematic war crimes. It delivered such a devastating report, particularly for the Armed Forces, that an amnesty law was passed shortly afterwards and the country started an amnesia period living by a “don’t look back” unofficial policy.

Peace, we soon learned, is much more than the absence of war.

Any peacebuilding process requires addressing the root causes of conflict. Most actors of our civil war would agree that the causes were mainly the lack of spaces for political views other than the military regimes in alliance with big estate owners; and the unjust social structures that left most Salvadorans without agency.

Social justice should have been prioritized. But it was not.

Peace and democracy came together to El Salvador at the surge of the neoliberal fever. The rebel fighters turned politicians were just adjusting to institutional life while the big businessmen and a neoliberal government rolled out a privatization program which, as it happens, just increased national inequality. Our politicians were so busy keeping an eye on their former war enemies that they started disconnecting from real people and real problems.

Still at the dawn of our democratic peace, some Salvadorans started talking, publicly and privately, in nostalgic tones about General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez—an eccentric dictator that ruled with a tough hand over the country from 1931 until 1944. Those missing General Martínez attributed him with a mythical law-and-order reign that cleaned the country of burglars and criminals. When the waves of the 1929 New York crash reached El Salvador in 1932, large numbers of hungry and jobless people were imprisoned by Martínez’ police, accused of vagrancy. When Indigenous peasants, living on wages of hunger and semi-enslaved conditions at coffee and cotton estates, rose up in protest demanding to be paid, Martínez accused them of communism, ordering  massive repression which ended with the killing of 30,000 peasants in 1932, in what is known as La Matanza. Peace ensued, claimed the estate owners. No more protests, no more revolts, no more strikes, no more communists. Indigenous identity was criminalized, so the languages were lost, as all their cultural expressions. If this was peace, it was the peace of the graveyards in a reign of terror. La Matanza was a bloody lesson that scared off workers’ demands for almost half a century.

Something must be rotten if some people, other than the old estate owners, lament the bygone times of General Martínez.

As soon as the Peace Accords were signed, the U.S. administrations of George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton allowed massive deportations of Salvadoran criminals, most of them war refugees’ children who joined Latino gangs in the streets of California to gain a sense of belonging. They came back to a country they barely knew (some hardly spoke Spanish). The United States deported them together with undocumented migrants and refused to send along their criminal records, so there was no way in El Salvador to know who was who. But we could have observed better.

Disengaged from the national democratic and economic processes, thousands of poor Salvadoran teenagers began to join the newcomers and form local cliques of the California gangs. While the powerful people were busy with the political and economic problems, gangs grew quickly in slums, called comunidades in San Salvador, poor and disenfranchised neighborhoods in the middle of the city, without state presence. And the rival gangs, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 (Los Angeles’ 18th Street gang) started a war for turf control. The state responded with repression. This was our peace.

By 2016, El Salvador had become the most violent country in the world. A whole new generation, for which the civil war and the Peace Accords didn’t mean anything, knew that this situation could not be called peace. Not when very violent youngsters controlled whole neighborhoods all around the country, extorting workers living on minimum wages, raping local girls and deciding who could enter the comunidades and when. This was not peace. Those expressing nostalgia for General Martínez were older, but agreed with the youth the acknowledgment that this was not peace.

For here is another definition of peace: The harmonious relations among the members of a group, be it a family, society or a country. That was not happening in El Salvador. Gang members were treated as bloodthirsty monsters as if they had landed from outer space, and not as what they were: the most violent and cruel expression of our society, a consequence, rather than a cause, of our dysfunctional social and economic structures. In other words: they were always addressed as the problem, not as the most extreme and brutal expression of deeper problems.

Bukele, as President Funes did before him, saw gangs as a political opportunity. He told the nation he had a security plan that included army and polic patrolling the streets. But the real plan was out of public eyes.  As soon as he took office, he made a deal with gang leaders: he guaranteed them a seires of benefits in exchange for a pause in their war. Death rates lowered to impressive levels while he was secretly—and illegally—liberating gang leaders and, according to the U.S. Justice Department, paying them big sums of money. When the pact couldn’t hold anymore, gangs went out and killed 87 Salvadorans in one single weekend. Congress approved the State of Emergency and security forces did the rest.

If the secret pact was unsustainable, so is the repression strategy. Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador killed at a church altar in 1980 while offering mass, used to say that the most acute kind of violence was the “institutionalized violence, product of a situation of injustice in which the majority of men and women –and mainly children– are deprived of the most basic needs to survive.” Violence, he said, seems historically inevitable if its root causes are not addressed. For him, peace could not be achieved without justice.

Stark lesson from El Salvador: Peace doesn’t come by decree. The Chapultepec Accords were meant to end the war and were very successful at that. But they didn’t bring peace. They were a starting point that established very basic conditions to start building peace.

History has shown us one and again that repression by itself can never bring peace anywhere. Bukele’s repression and massive incarcerations strategy has been tried before, although arguably never with such results. But where there is no independent judicial system, where security forces act with impunity and where the poor and marginalized have no agency, peacebuilding is an impossible task.

Communities formerly controlled by gangs are now patrolled by policemen abusing their impunity, threatening and extorting, arbitrarily arresting people at will and torturing those in prison. Unfortunately, under these conditions, soon violence may become, again, historically inevitable.

Carlos Dada is the founder and editor of El Faro. He is the author of Los Pliegues de la Cintura, Crónicas Centroamericanas. He has received the Maria Moors Cabot and the ICFJ Trailblazer awards. The International Press Institute named him World Press Freedom Hero.