How is El Salvador doing better than the United States?

As part of the Northern Triangle, El Salvador has long been one of the largest sources of illegal migration to the United States. I don’t know if our alleged “Border Czar” Kamala Harris ever figured it out, but there have definitely been some “root causes” of migration in that country. The fact was that, particularly since the country’s civil war in the eighties through the early nineties, El Salvador was simply not a safe place to be. They had among the highest murder rates in the world and armed gangs ruled the streets. This is where MS-13 originated. People left there because they were fleeing for their lives. But today, in a shockingly short period of time, illegal migration from the country has plummeted, as has the murder rate. So how did they do it? Last year, President Nayib Bukele went to war with the gangs, and the government is winning in a big way. As the Wall Street Journal describes it, the country that had the highest murder rate now has the highest incarceration rate. And the people of El Salvador are rewarding their president with some of the highest approval ratings ever seen. (Subscription required)

El Salvador, long whipsawed by gang violence that made it one of the world’s most dangerous countries, turned things around by jailing huge swaths of its population. The country once known for having the world’s highest murder rate now has the world’s highest incarceration rate—about double that of the U.S.

Since March 2022, President Nayib Bukele’s government has implemented a campaign to arrest en masse suspected members of the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs that have long terrorized the impoverished Central American nation, blocking economic growth and stoking U.S.-bound migration. 

The strategy has helped lower homicides by 92% compared with 2015, giving Bukele the support of nine of every 10 Salvadorans, polls show. The number of Salvadorans illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped by 44%.

So why should Americans care about this story? Because it impacts us directly and there are both parallels and contrasts between the evolution of law enforcement in El Salvador and America. Look at some of those figures in the excerpt above. The number of illegal aliens coming across our southern border from El Salvador has dropped by almost 50% in a single year and it’s not because of Joe Biden’s open border policies. It’s because fewer people are fleeing. The homicide rate in El Salvador has plunged by 92%. That’s almost inconceivable.

Social justice activists in the United States and elsewhere are horrified by how Bukele is managing the situation. And to be fair, there are probably some legitimate complaints. Bukele is locking up gang members by the thousands and reportedly sweeping up some “associates” of theirs who may or may not be actual gang members in the process. Not a lot of time is wasted on trials or other niceties.

But the fact is that it’s working. Perhaps an intolerable situation is being handled in a way that more sensitive Westerners would find intolerable, but it is once again safe for the law-abiding to walk the streets in much of the country. Other regional leaders are taking notice of all of this. The former mayor of one city in Ecuador, which is being plagued by the same sort of gang violence, is urging her country’s leaders to just copy what Bukele is doing. She said, “The solutions are out there, for those who have the guts to implement them.”

As for Bukele, he responded to allegations of human rights abuses against the incarcerated gang members in a blunt fashion. “Yes, they’ll have human rights. But the human rights of honest people are more important.”

Imagine that. Look… I’m not suggesting that we completely throw out due process in the United States and “just copy” Bukele. That sort of power in the wrong hands can lead to a disaster. In fact, we’re already experiencing some abuse of politically motivated law enforcement power against political opponents under the Biden administration and we don’t need more of it.

But at the granular level, out on the streets, too much of the nation has adopted a “justice reform” mantra that prefers to put most criminals back out on the streets immediately and to “empty the jails.” We’re already paying a hefty price for those decisions. It’s not as bad in most of our larger American cities today as it was in El Salvador a couple of years ago. But we do seem to be headed in that direction. We should allow El Salvador to serve as an example of just how quickly and badly a society can falter when the government surrenders control to the mobs.