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Organized crime accounted for at least half of these deaths. When the government of Nayib Bukele managed to slash the homicide rate in El Salvador to 7.8, from 106.8 in 2015, by declaring a state of emergency and imprisoning anyone who looked like a gang member — due process and human rights be damned — rulers around the region sensed an opportunity.
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President Xiomara Castro in Honduras declared a state of emergency in 2022; Ecuador did so last year. Even Chile, comparatively free from crime, passed a “legitimate defense” law to make it easier for police officers to kill bad guys. In Argentina, incoming president Javier Milei’s public security minister met last month to “share experiences” with her counterpart from El Salvador.
Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinionsFollowSalvadoran voters are loving it, by the way, encouraging Bukele to flout a constitutional ban on reelection and run again for the presidency. He is the top-ranked president since the start of Latin America’s democratic transition, according to Latinobarómetro, a regional public opinion survey.
Yet the iron fist, slammed down at the expense of justice, accountability and civil rights, will fail Latin Americans. Bukele’s attempt to hang on to power underscores the threat to the region’s fragile democratic institutions from populist authoritarians empowered by voters’ revulsion against crime.
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The hard-line strategy, moreover, rarely ends well. Civil rights suspended to fight crime are rarely restored. Human rights abuses become normalized. Security forces come to believe there is no such thing as the illegitimate use of force. And as the people of Honduras are figuring out, the harsh tactics often fail to quell crime. As the U.N. report points out, states of emergency and repressive measures can reduce lethal violence by gangs. But they can also increase it.
In Honduras, a small, underfunded and corrupt police force has proved unable to make headway against criminal gangs. Rather than suppress violence, pressure from law enforcement has mostly spread gang violence beyond the traditional hotspots of San Pedro Sula and the capital, Tegucigalpa.
The appeal of Bukele’s policies is not surprising. Less-violent approaches, such as President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” plan and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s offer of “hugs not bullets” to gang members, have roundly failed to check the violence in Colombia and Mexico. But Latin American leaders might want to consider the following:
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Organized crime does not always lead to a lot of deaths. The homicide rate is relatively low in the countries along the Balkan heroin-trafficking route in southeastern Europe. Japan has an extremely low rate despite the pervasive presence of the Yakuza.
Lethal violence is mostly driven by conflict among rival crime groups over markets and resources. It tends to decline,........