The so-called “Bukele model” – in reference to Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador since 2019, and who has become a reference for hard-line policies – constitutes one of the most discussed recent criminal phenomena at a global level. Its results in reducing violence have been widely disseminated although, at the same time, it has received strong criticism for its implications in terms of human rights and democratic guarantees.
The model thus generates intense adhesions and rejections, causing the debate to remain in that dichotomy more than is desirable. Those who support him usually accept his dangerous excesses; Those who reject it often avoid a delicate question: what alternative is offered to those who have been living for decades under violence that the State has not known how to contain?
Before Bukele: violence and institutional failure
For decades, El Salvador recorded extraordinarily high levels of violence, placing it among the countries with the highest homicide rates in the world. This violence – continuous and structural – was linked to the control of the territory exercised by the gangs (maras), known internationally for the use of visible tattoos on the face, as well as on other parts of the body.
The gangs not only committed homicides: they imposed a regime of domination based on extortion, threats and constant fear, conditioning the daily life of the population.
In El Salvador, it was (is) normal to have friends or relatives murdered, to live in houses protected by concertina, to encounter armed security personnel at the entrance of a pharmacy or a restaurant and to have to periodically pay an amount of money to the neighborhood gang to live there or have a business.
In this scenario, also marked by high levels of poverty and corruption, state responses prior to Bukele failed to reverse the problem. Despite the political alternation between left-wing and right-wing governments, the strategies implemented – including intensive police and military operations – failed to dismantle criminal structures and, in many cases, generated additional negative effects, such as abuses and deterioration of institutional trust.
It is in this context of chronic violence and social exhaustion where the strategy promoted by the president of El Salvador must be placed.
Lights and shadows of the model
Starting in 2019, and especially after the emergency regime of 2022 – which implied a prolonged suspension of constitutional guarantees and an extraordinary expansion of the state’s punitive power – the Salvadoran State deployed a policy of intensive criminal control based on mass arrests, widespread incarceration and the tightening of the penitentiary system.
This policy has led El Salvador to register the highest incarceration rate in the world, with figures that exceed 1,600 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. To size the figure: Cuba, second in the rankinghas half; Spain, around 116.
The results of the strategy, however, have been overwhelming, at least in terms of security. Official figures indicate a drastic reduction in homicides, accompanied by a decrease in other crimes, such as extortion. Furthermore, security perception indicators confirm this change: a large part of the population claims to feel safe in their daily lives, something unthinkable in previous years.
These results help explain why the model has received significant support within El Salvador and also outside of it, especially in Latin America, where some sectors of the population perceive it as a possible response to violence in their own countries.
Thus, political actors from Costa Rica, Argentina, Chile or Guatemala have already proposed measures inspired by it. Now, this support coexists with growing sectors of the population that question this strategy due to its costs in rights and guarantees.
Along these lines, Bukele and his model have been the subject of severe criticism. Organizations and academics have denounced arbitrary arrests, imprisonment of innocent people and serious limitations to due process within the framework of the emergency regime. The reliability of official statistics has also been questioned, pointing out changes in the criteria for counting homicides that could overstate the reduction in violence.
Added to this are concerns about the great institutional and democratic deterioration derived from the concentration of power and Bukele’s “authoritarian drift” – which includes the persecution and imprisonment of journalists and activists – as well as doubts about the sustainability of a strategy based on mass incarceration in a context of persistent poverty.
Beyond all or nothing: the uncomfortable void of alternatives
The discussion on the case of El Salvador is usually presented in an all-or-nothing logic: the model is accepted due to its security results or rejected due to its high costs. However, both positions are, in some ways, insufficient.
The problem with the first is more visible: it minimizes its very serious implications, explained above. The problem with the second – which often goes unnoticed – is that it avoids an uncomfortable issue: there are no alternatives that, to date, have proven to be effective in quickly reducing extreme levels of violence in countries with the characteristics of El Salvador and part of the Latin American region.
Preventive approaches – education, reintegration, community policing… – have broad empirical support, but their application requires time and presents important limits in scenarios where criminal structures exercise consolidated control over the territory and daily life, and where each day of waiting translates into deaths.
Ignoring this problem contributes, paradoxically, to reinforcing the attractiveness of models like the Salvadoran one. A relevant part of its support is not explained by its legitimacy, but by the perception that it is the only option that has offered visible results. Recognizing this reality is not equivalent to legitimizing the model; It is the starting point to combat it.
The real demand for a heavy hand
From contexts far from violence, it is easier to reject illegitimate strategies, because doing so does not imply continuing to live under threat. But for those who suffer this reality on a daily basis, urgency drastically reduces the margin of choice: surviving today is prioritized over the guarantees that should protect tomorrow.
Understanding this logic – without validating it – is essential to understand why certain sectors of the population formulate tough demands in these situations and why leaders with extreme and illegitimate proposals achieve a base of real support.
In this sense, if we want to prevent punitive exceptionalism from being consolidated as the only politically credible option, it is not enough to denounce its costs: it is essential to build realistic and operational alternatives that, in addition to being normatively desirable, are also effective in contexts of structural violence. Otherwise, the risk is its expansion to other countries, with unacceptable democratic costs and no guarantee of results.
Marta Martí Barrachina, Collaborating Professor in Criminology, UOC – Open University of Catalonia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.
