Follow this authorEduardo Porter's opinions
FollowIn Europe, for instance, rising crime has gradually pushed left-leaning liberal parties to embrace punitive platforms over the years. The politics, however, have not always worked out. Less than two years ago, the left-leaning Social Democrats in Sweden were voted out of the premiership largely because of voters’ impatience with gang violence.
I was in Bogotá, Colombia, a few weeks ago, at a conclave of center-left and left-leaning politicians and policy experts from across Latin America to discuss precisely this subject: What should the progressive prescription to combat rampant crime be? The left there, it appears, is stuck, too.
Violence in Latin America is in its own class, an order of magnitude deadlier than anything happening in the United States. Latin America and the Caribbean are home to 8.2 percent of the world’s population but 29 percent of its homicides, according to the latest report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. In 2022, Honduras suffered 35 homicides for every 100,000 people. Jamaica suffered 53; Ecuador 27; Mexico 26. The world average is fewer than 6.
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Organized crime groups in the region have branched out from illegal drugs to human trafficking, protection rackets, gold mining and logging in the Amazon. They are even involved in the avocado business in Mexico. Multiple gangs — splinters from larger criminal cartels and former guerrilla groups — fight bloody wars over disputed markets. And frustrated citizens from Quito, Ecuador, to Buenos Aires are calling on their rulers to get “tough on crime.”
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, credited with slashing the homicide rate to fewer than 8 per 100,000 from some 107 in 2015, is seen as the country’s savior, despite (or perhaps because of) scorched-earth tactics that ignore human rights and due process to imprison anyone who looks even vaguely like a gang member.
These policies have turned the Salvadoran right-winger into the most popular president in Latin America — so much so that he ran for reelection, despite a constitutional ban against doing that, and in February handily won.
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And the policies have further discombobulated the left.
“The relationship of progressivism, and maybe other movements on the left, with the security agenda, remains problematic,” said Lisa Sánchez, who runs the nonprofit Mexico United Against Delinquency. But, she emphasized, “it is urgent to stop this vicious cycle of degradation of security and democracy.”
Focused on addressing deep poverty and vast inequality with threadbare social safety nets and weak, corrupt states, the Latin American left often treats public security as an afterthought. As in the United States, when pressed for a response to rising crime, it pulls from the right’s hard-line playbook.
Xiomara Castro, the candidate from the left who assumed the presidency of Honduras in 2022, quickly took a U-turn to emulate Bukele’s approach, declaring states of exception across much of the country. And though Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador came to office offering “hugs not bullets” to combat crime, he has continued to rely on the military as his main tool.
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Consider the Brazilian state of Bahia. It has been governed by the left-wing Workers’ Party for the past 16 years. Still, in 2022, Bahia’s cops killed 1,465 people, making them the most lethal police force in the country.
The irony here is that the left’s core conviction is not wrong: Repression and mass incarceration will not quell crime and violence for long.
The United States has locked up about 1.9 million people, 583 people for every 100,000 residents, still one of the highest imprisonment rates in........