The High Price of Safety in El Salvador

Megan K Stack

Noe del Cid watched his neighborhood come back to life from the seat of his wheelchair. This tight row of cinderblock houses with barred windows and corrugated metal roofs formed, for much of del Cid’s life, a precarious border zone between enemy gangs. Bullet scars are still visible, chipped into the walls of houses and staining the flesh of residents like del Cid, who was partially paralyzed in 2003 by a gunshot to the neck. In the two years since President Nayib Bukele unleashed his brutal crackdown on El Salvador’s gangs, most of the gangsters who once lorded over the neighborhood have been imprisoned, fled or gone into hiding, del Cid said.

“He took the action that we needed him to take. And not only that, he’s maintained it,” said del Cid, who at 38 is the president of the neighborhood’s community association. “It’s very admirable.” When I visited the neighborhood recently, the street teemed with life — thickets of overgrown vines and hibiscus, neighbors gossiping on their stoops, del Cid’s wife deftly frying enchiladas on a gas cooktop propped on a table by the street. His mother, who lives across the way, keeps the TV running — when Bukele comes on, she uses a megaphone to broadcast the president’s words to the neighbors. You never know what he will say — or do! He’s part mafia boss, part Willy Wonka — a mercurial leader with a showman’s instincts, dropping dead-eyed threats between grand declarations of benevolence.

Earlier this summer, thanks to a free ride on a bus sent by the government, del Cid and his neighbors joined the adoring crowd outside the National Palace to witness Bukele’s inauguration. This second term is both legally indefensible (El Salvador’s Constitution bans consecutive re-election) and, like the president himself, wildly popular (he won by a landslide). Bukele took the occasion to warn people not to complain about the “bitter medicine” coming their way. This is one of his favorite catchphrases — and he means it.

Since 2022, he has kept the country locked into a draconian “state of exception” that grants dizzying power to the police and the military, while stripping ordinary Salvadorans of basic legal protections. This state of affairs — extraordinary by name and intent — should only last a month at the longest, but Bukele’s government resets the clock each time it’s due to expire. Under the steely cover of this open-ended emergency, his war on gangs has played out — a tangle of unproven denunciations, forced disappearances, torture and child imprisonment.

Insofar as Bukele wanted to stop street violence and spread public safety, his anti-gang crusade has worked. But at what cost? Crime and punishment — not to mention the mass migration of those fleeing violence — have gained an intense political resonance around the world, and so the president’s project has become a kind of rhetorical Rorschach test for politicians and professors. Sitting far from El Salvador, they lambast it as a chilling spectacle of totalitarian oppression, or extol it as the triumphant liberation of ordinary people from crime. I seldom heard such hyperbolic reactions, though, from the Salvadorans directly and radically affected.

I mentioned to del Cid that many innocent people appeared to have been imprisoned along with the gangsters, expecting him to argue and justify. He’d tell me I was naïve, I figured, or insist that those people weren’t really blameless. But he didn’t. Like virtually all of the dozens of Salvadorans I interviewed, del Cid’s view of the crackdown was complicated. He readily agreed with my point. He himself, he said, knew completely innocent people — he was sure — who were taken away by the police, and never came back. Their families are having a terrible time, he added ruefully. The police and military seemed to have abused their power, he suggested, or perhaps the investigations just weren’t careful enough.

“The police took them because of some misunderstanding, or just because someone paid them to do it,” he said. “It’s very ugly.” But then he looked back out at his quiet street. It had been so bad here, and for so long. Children were forced to trek through dense forest to school rather than risk the street. The elderly woman a few doors down barely survived getting hit in the lower back by a ricocheting bullet. del Cid’s mother (the one who now broadcasts Bukele’s speeches) had made the painful choice to send his pretty, then-14-year-old sister to the United States because the gangsters were starting to stare at her.

He pivoted again. “In reality —” he said plainly. “Look—” Imagine you lived here, he said. Imagine the gangs can just come into your house, and they want to know where you’ve been, and what you’re doing. And they can beat you, or even kill you. “We’re starting to feel security,” he said. “And security is what people want.”

Anyone who doubts Bukele’s wizardry with publicity should consider this: El Salvador is a tiny country, roughly the size of New Jersey, in which nearly a third of the people live in poverty. Still, the president is one of the most watched, discussed and admired leaders on the planet. Almost all of the hoopla around Bukele boils down to two sets of data: crime statistics and domestic popularity.

The number of murders in El Salvador, which by 2015 was considered the world’s homicide capital, plunged by 70 percent in 2023, per government figures, making this one of the safest spots in the hemisphere. When it comes to imprisonment — a central motif of the president’s governance — El Salvador now boasts the world’s highest per capita incarceration rate.

The philosophical conundrum presented by Bukele is that his supporters are, in a sense, eager sponsors of their own oppression, having essentially swapped their rights for quiet streets. Notwithstanding the outrage of scandalized lawyers who pointed out that his candidacy was unconstitutional, he captured 85 percent of the votes when he won re-election earlier this year. His approval rating hangs above 90 percent.

This particular combination makes his rivals covet Bukele’s special sauce. The idea that a leader can strip away people’s rights and they will love him all the more for it — this must be unbearably tantalizing to a certain brand of politician. And let’s face it, the idea that a leader could quickly deliver a radical, tangible change in the daily life of most people, even if the methods are plainly bad? I admit it: That first part, at least, is attractive. Bukele’s style may be capricious, cruel, or clumsy — but it is definite.