Det er nu ikke helt rigtigt at hårde straffe ikke virker. Det skal bare tages ud i den helt ekstreme grad, med “state of emergency” og så ikke lukke dem ud igen. El Salvador er som forvandlet efter de mest hårdhændede metoder er taget i brug.
“In March 2022, following a sudden spike in violence, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele declared open war on the country’s criminal gangs. Bukele and his allies quickly established a state of exception, allowing law enforcement agencies and courts to bypass due process guarantees and other constitutional protections. The legislature—where Bukele controls a supermajority—instituted harsh new sentencing guidelines for gang-related crimes, lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 12, and introduced a gag rule banning journalists from spreading “gang messages.”
Over the past year, the government has conducted almost 70,000 arrests (about one for every 100 Salvadorans), built a new megaprison to house the country’s burgeoning inmate population, and renewed the month-long state of emergency 12 times. Bukele’s state of exception amounts to one of the most intensive crackdowns against criminal organizations ever recorded in Latin America, a region where tough-on-crime policies are so common that they are known simply as mano dura (“hard hand”).
Bukele’s crackdown appears to have worked—at least for now. Ten months after the state of exception began, reporters from the investigative news outlet El Faro visited 14 communities across El Salvador that had spent years under the thumb of criminal groups. The reporters found the gangs had all but vanished. And these 14 communities appeared to mirror trends in the country as a whole: In a December 2022 poll, 88.2 percent of Salvadorans said they felt “safe” or “very safe,” up from 61.5 percent a year earlier. Of those who said the country had become safer, almost 95 percent credited some aspect of Bukele’s hardline policies. “Yes,” a veteran gang leader told El Faro, “[Bukele’s government] has thwarted the gangs as you know them.”
