«Bukele negotiated with gang leaders…that explains a good part of his success.» – Tercera Dosis

Do you want to bukelise your country? Political scientist José Miguel Cruz examines the nuances of the authoritarian response to crime, a trend which is gaining popularity across Latin America and that has recently secured Bukele’s re-election. Step 1: negotiate with gang leaders to prevent them from unleashing a war against the state. Step 2: grant the president almost absolute control over the legislative and judicial branches to imprison thousands of young people, whether they are gang members or not. We asked Cruz if it is time to accept that authoritarian regimes are better equipped to control violence and crime than democracies. The answer is unsettling.

Translated by Emilia Guzmán / Proofreading: Mark Biram

In 1996, José Miguel Cruz trained 20 gang members to survey The Maras. That is how he gathered the material for his first investigation on these groups. When, 10 years later, he tried to get back in contact with those very youths, he discovered that only four were still alive. «Later, those four were also killed. I remember that some of them had decided to leave the gangs, but they ended up killed anyway, due to past grudges,» Cruz told TerceraDosis.

Such a high mortality rate should quickly put an end to any organization. But since the 1990s the gangs have only grown, which speaks to the speed with which Salvadoran society offers up new generations to replace the fallen.

Most of the gang members are between 11 and 17 years old. Most are barely literate. Too many family and institutional structures have failed them for too long, exposing them to a brutal cycle of «systematic and systemic brutality,» Cruz explains. Today, they are capable of horrible things because they seek the respect of their bosses and their peer group, who are their «family». If we talk about gangs, we are primarily talking about those who survive deeply damaged childhoods before – as the researcher highlights – seeking revenge. Those who are in jail and who we see with shaved heads, handcuffed with their hands behind their backs and their legs spread wide open, and locked together, are those who have somehow survived to come of age.

Jose Miguel Cruz holds a PhD in Political Science and is the director of research at Florida International University’s Kimberly Green Center, a center dedicated to researching Latin America and the Caribbean. Those who believe that to avoid the horror that El Salvador has experienced, countries must apply the Bukele model would do well to hear what Cruz has gleaned from over 30 years researching gangs. Those who believe that democracy has quick fixes to solve the problem should also pay attention. The truth is that it doesn’t.

In this interview Cruz explains what the Bukele model is and what it is not, he highlights the collateral damage that his supporters tend to overlook, and he highlights the very specific characteristics of the country where he has been successful, making it difficult to export to other regions.

Something that the model is not: in the disorderly Latin American debate the model is often credited with the ability to defeat drug organizations. However, the truth is that the maras’ business is essentially extortion: that is to say, Bukele has imposed his model on organizations that do not even have the resources or the strength of the drug-trafficking gangs of Mexico, Colombia or Venezuela for example.

Another thing that is often overlooked: the model requires almost absolute control by the president over the executive and legislative branches. A side effect of that concentration of power can clearly be seen in Nicaragua, where the authoritarian government created by the Sandinistas kept crime at bay for a long time, but that very same concentration power ended up facilitating Nicaragua’s transformation into a narco-state (see box).

A crucial feature: the Bukele model has so far only worked in a country which is eight times smaller than Uruguay. Applying these policies in larger territories, such as Honduras, has not yielded the same results, Cruz explains.

HOW A GANG IS CREATED

The concept of ’damaged childhood’ is at the heart of this researcher’s analysis. Some believe that to allude to it is to pity or to justify offenders. However, this argument overlooks two important things. Firstly, part of the Latin American punitivist wave is justified by the hope that we can reduce crime by increasing «the cost of committing a crime”. But how do you raise «the cost» for someone who was tortured in his childhood, for a gang member who knows he is very unlikely to live long and thus does not care? More prisons, harsher treatment, says Cruz, are measures that make sense for those who have enjoyed a more or less protected life, for those who have something – or a lot – to lose. But for gang members, violence is nothing new to them.

Secondly, if damaged childhood is one of the important factors behind the expansion of organized crime, then it is not possible to expect or to promise any short-term solutions to crime, as the task of creating protective networks for children and their families is both gradual and costly. Think of Chile which, despite having increasing economic resources and be one the most sable country in the region, systematically violates children’s rights according to a 2018 UN Committee on the Rights of the Child report.

Of course, not every abused child ends up joining the ranks of organized crime. In examining the history of El Salvador, Cruz identifies three moments that give us considerable insight into understanding how groups of more or less violent adolescents standing on street corners came to control large swathes of the country.

The first milestone occurred after the end of the Civil War in 1992(1), when several thousand gang members living in the U.S. were deported back to El Salvador and subsequently mixed with the gangs that already existed in the country. The local groups were fascinated by the identities, styles and the organization based on units or «clicas» that the deportees brought with them. Among the many that arrived, the Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and Barrio 18 became the most dominant gangs.

For several years, this did not lead to major changes in the operation of the gangs. They remained local and autonomous groups. The fact that the gangs in different cities shared the same name did not imply that they were coordinated, or even that they knew each other. That coordination occurred only in the early 2000s when the Salvadoran state resorted to an iron fist approach to confronting these organizations. This is the second key moment Cruz identifies that «gave the gangs an excellent opportunity to organize themselves nationally and begin to behave like organized crime.

The paradox that heavy-handed public policy ends up encouraging the disaster it aims to prevent has also been documented in the case of São Paulo by political scientist Benjamin Lessing, who shows that it was mass incarceration and state brutality that prompted criminal groups to organize as a large crime syndicate, the PCC, and thus defend themselves from an abusive state (see interview with Benjamin Lessing in TerceraDosis). Given the disastrous outcomes of these two examples, it seems imperative that policymakers use prison policies with extreme caution.

-The iron fist of Francisco Flores’ government in El Salvador consisted of arresting anyone who looked like a gang member and incarcerating them. As there were strong conflicts between the MS-13 and Barrio 18, in order to avoid further violence and riots, separate prisons were created for each faction and for gang members from all over the country, who until then had never met each other. They were locked up and left to rot. Nobody cared about what happened in the prisons, the only concern was to keep them there. So, these young men were together 24 hours a day, with nothing to do, with no one intervening. When I explain this to my students, I tell them to imagine building a huge prison in the middle of the United States, in Kansas, for example, and filling it with young people from different places, who don’t know each other. Well, what is going to happen is that they are going to organize themselves and when they get out, they will have nationwide networks and contacts. Whoever is from Miami will have contacts in Boston, in Los Angeles and vice versa. That’s why Flores’ iron fist profoundly changed the gangs.

The third milestone occurred 10 years later, in 2012, when hardline policies had failed and the government of Mauricio Funes attempted to sign a truce with the maras.

-This truce consisted of giving benefits to the gangs in exchange for a reduction in the levels of violence. This was a final milestone, because from that moment on the gangs understood that if they could control their violence, they had plenty of leverage with which to negotiate with the government. That is, they understood that they could offer «peace» in certain communities and that the government would pay for that peace, either through bribes or by allowing them to do certain things. So, the maras then organized not only to commit crimes but also to regulate their violence. For example, since the government was interested in lowering homicides, the gangs modified their extortion business: they no longer threatened to kill, but rather to burn down houses or businesses; or to rape the daughters of those being extorted, a crime that is underreported and somehow outside the ‘violence’ statistics. So, the deal was ideal for the gangs: they reduced the homicide rates, in line with government objectives, but achieved an even greater control over the communities. This was also possible because in order for the gang leaders — who were in jail — to be able to order the reduction in homicides, they needed to communicate with their members. The government facilitated this communication. And the gang members used it to increase their territorial control and ultimately to improve their business conditions.

-Let’s analyze the gangs that Bukele faces, what is their business?

-Drug trafficking has never been as important for the maras in El Salvador as it is for the maras in Honduras. Drugs don’t necessarily pass through here because it is a very small and densely populated country and the traffickers face a lot of problems when they cross through. So the drugs coming from Colombia or Costa Rica pass through Honduras and Guatemala on their route to Mexico. The gangs have mainly dedicated themselves to extorting business owners, and in the last few decades, they have come to realize that they could go from extorting to actually taking over businesses. So they started buying at low cost, because if you don’t sell to them they will kill you, and they became entrepreneurs, especially in the area of clubs, bars and public transportation lines.

-If they are not in the drug business, the maras should be a weaker rival for the state than, for example, groups that traffic and have access to substantial resources.

-That’s right. They have made many agreements with strong criminal groups in Mexico and Honduras, but they have not been as successful. In Honduras, the MS is strong, but it does not have the power it once had in El Salvador. And in Guatemala, it is a very weak organization, because there are many other criminal actors which actively prevent it from expanding. The Salvadoran MS has tried to penetrate the southern border of Mexico and control the flow of migrants and drugs, but they have not been as successful as they had hoped. So, they have a lot of power within El Salvador, but outside its borders only in very specific places.

-In other words, the mara has more fame than real power.

-Exactly. And in a certain way the mara has had an easier path because El Salvador is a mini country: it has just over 21,000 km2. Uruguay, which is the smallest in the south, has 170,000 km2. That is partly why policies like Bukele’s have not worked outside of El Salvador. For example, in Honduras, Xiomara Castro tried something similar to Bukele, but it has not had positive results because it is a bigger territory and there are more criminal actors, and thus the state cannot handle them all.

«BUKELE NEGOTIATED»

-The president of El Salvador represents a model that has been consolidating in Latin America. In Chile we have several people who are already talking about Bukele’s criminal policies as a panacea for our security problems. What advice would you give to those people? What things don’t they know that they should understand to evaluate what Bukele is really doing?

-One issue that explains much of Bukele’s success, and which is rarely discussed, is that he  negotiated with the gang leaders. Bukele represses the lower ranks, puts them in jail, but at the same time, he negotiates with the higher echelons and even treats them well. He even got one leader out of jail and sent him to another country. Thanks to this pact, the gangs did not unleash a war against the state. Bukele has denied this negotiation took place, but the U.S. has been capturing leaders in Mexico who were previously imprisoned in El Salvador. This is one part of Bukele’s success that he makes sure no one talks about.

«Besides that, I think it is important to understand that most of the criminal violence has come from just two gangs — the MS and the 18 — which have a very efficient national organization. That is why, if you manage to make a pact with their leaders, you have control over almost everything that happens criminally in the country and you can apply an iron fist throughout the territory. What many people overlook is that in most Latin American countries suffering waves of violence, you have not two, but multiple organizations. And if you launch a war against them what you are going to produce is the fragmentation of these actors and ultimately more violence. That is something like what happened in Mexico, although the contexts differ obviously. In 2006 Felipe Calderon launched his war against organized crime, which was made up of several criminal organizations. The result was a fragmentation of the groups and a marked increase in violence. This also came about because Mexico is a very large federal country, meaning it requires coordination across many police and security institutions, and that is difficult to coordinate effectively.»

«Another particularity of Bukele is that he has absolute control over all institutions, especially the justice apparatus. This is much different from what happened in the era of Flores’ iron fist, where there were still independent judges who freed those arrested by the police without any evidence. What must be understood, then, is that there are many conditions and particularities in the case of El Salvador that do not make it possible to replicate in most Latin American countries. These conditions do not even exist in neighbouring Honduras, which is why Xiomara Castro has not been able to achieve the same results. In Honduras, for example, there is some political opposition and independent judges that do not allow the president to have the same absolute control and imprison everyone by overriding constitutional guarantees, checks-and-balances and human rights. I think that, if Honduras has not managed to import the Bukele model, it is even less likely that bigger and more complex countries like those in the south will be able to do it.»

-When analysing how Bukele’s punitive policy has affected civil rights, some talk about a «democratic recession» or an «authoritarian drift» in El Salvador. What do you think about that argument?

-In general, I agree, because Bukele’s measures are built on his absolute control over the state apparatus. The State of Exception allows the police to arrest anyone without any reason. Human rights organizations have documented that there are many innocent people who have ended up in jail and who remain there because of the measures passed by the Legislative Assembly – which Bukele controls – allowing the police and prosecutors to keep anyone in jail for weeks without even seeing a judge. They also allow for mass trials without individualizing the charges. In other words, you arrest a group of students simply saying, ‘you are gang members, we are going to charge you with illegal association or of murder’. They are tried collectively and they are all sent to jail. So certainly Bukele’s policy depends on absolute state control. Imitating his model in other countries would require doing exactly the same thing, running roughshod over democratic institutions.

-Bukele’s success awakens the macabre temptation to say that less democratic regimes control violence and crime better. What do you think of that and what can we say in favour of democracy, considering that in El Salvador people seem to be very happy with the authoritarian drift?

-Most of the studies I have seen show that when you compare the indicators of criminal violence and those of democracy, it is not a linear relationship – as it could be, for example, the more democracy the more crime – but that violence forms an inverted U on a totalitarianism-democracy axis. And what usually happens is that violence is lower at the extremes, i.e. there is less violence in totalitarian regimes – where there is absolute control – and in liberal democracies, where there is a strong respect for fundamental human rights. As you move towards the centre, i.e. when you have, for example, purely electoral democracies, where respect for due process and the rule of law is low, the levels of violence then increase. Unfortunately, it is in this zone where many Latin American countries have been located for the past 30 years or so. It is very terrible to say it that way, but if you want security, either you have a completely totalitarian regime like the North Korean one, or Bukele’s…

– Or like China, with its control technology…

– Exactly, and Bukele aspires to that technology, by the way. So, either you have that or you have a real, fully functional democracy. Being on the side of liberal democracy is difficult. The United States, for example, is not there, but rather close to us, in that «middle» violent zone. The United States is a case of a democracy that has been degrading and has endemic urban criminal violence.

– That curve is terrible because it seems evident that it is much less costly to maintain a dictatorship than it is to sustain a democracy.

– Exactly. A dictatorship is the least expensive, least complicated way to achieve relative security, obviously at the expense of having everyone locked up.

Children in violence

-In a TED Talk, when you talked about the childhoods of gang members, I remembered the book Morir es un Alivio, where you show that the tortured childhoods of the hitmen are a key factor in explaining their violence. If this is true, to stop the gangs it seems necessary to deploy policies that protect children, right?

-No doubt. One question to ask here is: why do young people get into these gangs if they are so violent and brutal? And the answer is that those who get there come from extremely violent environments: they are abused, and they are mistreated by their families, they have very few opportunities for education and they are abandoned. So, when they reach adolescence, the only ones who take them in and offer them some respect, solidarity and friendship are the gang members themselves. It’s a brutal relationship, of course, but when you talk to kids between 13 and 17 years old, they will tell you «this is my family, here they respect me, they protect me, we take care of each other». And that explains, to a large degree, why gang members are very young, many are teenagers, unlike the typical Mexican criminal organizations. Young people are very easy to manipulate and that allows the leaders to avoid killing directly by sending young people to do it. And these young people, who are trying to show their bravery, obey unquestioningly. At 13, 14, 15 years old they do unimaginable things to gain the respect of their «family». But when they reach 19, 20, 21 years old, and they mature, that is, their neuronal connections are consolidated and they can think better about what they have done, most of them tell you, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing, today I realize that everything I did was wrong and I regret it’. However, at that point it is too late, they already have a terrible history of violence and have already spent their best years of learning potential out of school. These are young people who can’t read or write, who don’t know how to do anything except use a gun or a knife very well. So it becomes a social tragedy, because what do you do with them? If you want to get them out of there, you have to train them. But nobody is willing to train them or give them jobs either. So those who want to get out, they really have no other opportunities and they continue doing the same thing because it’s the only way to make a living.

-One economic argument holds that to reduce crime you have to increase the costs of committing it. But when you have gang members who are willing to die, how do you increase the cost to them? Does that argument make sense when we are talking about people who have grown up in the midst of violence?

-It makes sense up to a point. In the case of gang members, many are so used to living with violence, that raising «the costs» by offering more violence has very little power in terms of offering a deterrent. That threat works with people who grew up in non-violent environments and had a family that cared for and protected them, where of course there may have been problems, but people were not brutally and chronically exposed to violence. I remember a conversation I had with a gang member that helped me understand this. I asked him, why are you still doing this, knowing you could die or, at best, end up in jail? And he said something which stuck with me: ‘at home my stepfather beat me, he did whatever he wanted with me and since I was small, I couldn’t respond to it, I couldn’t fight back. But today in the gangs and in the streets I can get revenge, I can do whatever I want, I can respond in the same way’. That’s when «the five fell on me» (the penny dropped) as we say in El Salvador. They come from such chronically and structurally violent environments that you are not going to dissuade them with more violence. That’s their normality, that’s the language they speak. That’s why the iron fist doesn’t work. Not only because it gave the gangs opportunities to organize by putting many young people in jail, but because it legitimized a brutal state response that affected many young people who had nothing to do with the gangs. The iron fist normalized the violent response among young people. I remember another young man who told me something that stuck with me: ‘the government treats us like it treated the guerrillas during the war, they do these operations with police and soldiers, they lock us up, torture us, mistreat us, they put us in jail. But there is an important difference between the guerrillas and us. If you are a guerrilla, you cannot respond in the same way because you want people to support you in your political cause. You can’t do to the police or those with the police what they do to you. But we don’t care, because the only thing we want is for these dogs to pay for what they have done to us, and we are going to kill them.

«The gang member made the issue of revenge crystal clear for me, based on everything they have suffered. And the difference he pointed out is true. Guerrillas sought social legitimacy, so they did not do what the gangs used to do: kill the family; or what a clique did in El Salvador in 2010, which was to set fire to a bus with people inside simply as a form of revenge. That event was outrageous, 17 people died. And they did it with the logic of getting revenge on the State. I think that underlines an important difference. I mean, it’s not that in other countries there are no such things, but in El Salvador, it became so generalized and normalized that I think that explains to a large extent the monster created in El Salvador».

-So applying extreme “iron fist” policies, with long prison sentences for a young, mistreated population, is the worst possible public policy.

-Exactly. And today when Bukele says that in jail the gang members are not going to eat, that they’ll suffer, he’s basically speaking their language, that is what they have always lived through. There is nothing new there. I think what does make a difference is the possibility of them changing course, changing their lives completely.

-I would like to go back to the violence/democracy curve you explained. If we have violent actors like the gangs or extremely powerful actors like the narcos, what possibilities do you see for a liberal democracy to consolidate as a solution to these security problems?

-That is the most important question and I don’t have an answer. Part of my work has been trying to find that answer. All I can say now is that any moderately effective solution is going to take time, because you have to start working on all the root causes that we have talked about. That’s something that, obviously, people, politicians, policy makers, don’t like to hear, but I have no other way to articulate it. To see changes, we need to do generational work, and start first by focusing on young people and children, assuring them of what they are systematically denied. But beyond just investing in that, you have to cover the other areas, you have to provide justice. And that comes with its own challenges because you have to deal with the institutions. It’s a massive effort, it is not easy… Beyond that, I don’t know what else to say.

BOX

ORTEGA AND THE NARCO-STATE

– What is your view of what is happening in Nicaragua? For a long time, it was said that Nicaragua had managed to control criminal violence better than other countries in the region because of the state built by the Sandinistas, which was criticized for its lack of democracy. What happened there that this ability to control crime turned into what some call a narco-state, a criminal, patrimonialist state, managed by the Ortega family?

-I think part of the explanation for Nicaragua’s success in controlling crime for many years has to do with the experience of the Sandinista revolution, and more precisely with the way in which the revolution gave rise, for a period, to institutions that were more efficient in responding to security problems. However, the same revolution created the conditions so that many years later at the hand of Ortega, power was abused and the narco-state that we see today was created. An important element, which has not been talked about much, is that part of the success of the Nicaraguan peace stems from the revolution and the Sandinistas’ understanding that no group should challenge the state. And the most effective measure to achieve this was to disarm the population. As we know, not having weapons in the hands of the population helps to control violence, because you don’t have people killing each other as easily, as happens in the north of Central America. When the gangs in the north and especially in El Salvador take the leap towards organizing, it becomes easy for them to acquire weapons. And once they have them, they can effectively assert their power. In Nicaragua, although many gangs wanted to replicate what happened in El Salvador, they could not, unless they negotiated certain things with the state, with the institutions. The Sandinistas were always very clear that they could not allow these groups to arm themselves. And that now becomes an advantage because Ortega has no one to challenge him. I assure you, more than one group opposing, Ortega was dying to have access to weapons, but they didn’t have it, because they were disarmed a long time ago.

«The Sandinista revolution did help a lot to consolidate state power and as long as there was a basic agreement among the elites to share power on the basis of regular elections, everything was able to continue relatively peacefully. That changed when Ortega decided to stay in power. So he rebuilt networks, which came from the revolution, to consolidate his position.»

– How do you see the crime situation in southern Central America? What are your concerns in that area?

-I am obviously concerned about the penetration of organized crime with access to weapons and power that surpasses the states. I think there is not yet the capacity to respond to these groups in a consistent manner. I have to take a closer look, but my concern is that Costa Rica’s institutions are not ready to deal with the firepower and criminal groups that are now infiltrating.

-Are the groups operating there coming from the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador)?

-No, they are more associated with Colombia and their ultimate aim is to connect with Mexicans. Also with those from Ecuador and Venezuela.