Building a big prison and dumping in a bunch of heavily tattooed men, without trial, to rot in there indefinitely only offer temporary relief. What’s going to happen to their children? Those children will shortly find their way to the tattoo shops?
El Salvador is not a success story. It is very possible that they had no choice but to get these tattooed folk off the street! The daily homicide figure was rising higher and higher. But they should be in a very sombre mood; they need to find a way, to solve the root cause of the problem. Why are so many, turning to gangs?
The ones they have locked up, is there a chance to rehabilitate? El Salvador also need to now find a way, very quickly, to return to normal processes of proving people guilty – giving them their day in court to defend themselves – before locking them up, if found guilty. Mass imprisonment without trial, just because of their tattoos and suspicion of their affiliation with gangs cannot possibly be normalised! Is it part of a wider plan to defang the gangs, clean up and then preempt? If not, they are heading down a very slippery slope.
As for the El Salvador President travelling the world in smiles, like he’s on a victory lap, he should be reminded that locking up hundreds of citizens of his country, without trial, may well have been a necessary emergency measure, which has helped reduce homicide in his country, but it is still not something to go around smiling about. He needs a long term solution. Does he think he can carry on building larger and larger prisons? Banging up a huge chunk of his male population comes with other longer term generational problems.
When you look at Haiti today, and Ecuador is also heading in the same direction, Guatemala, Honduras and several other parts of South America have had the same issues for decades, with violent gangs running amok. Poverty, low employment opportunity and a number of societal issues are to blame. There appears to be little to no effort aimed at fixing these wider issues. Mass incarceration is not a lasting solution. While it might well be the only immediate measure in a situation where daily killing have shot through the roof, as it was in El Salvador, it needs to be a very temporary measure that usher in a long term approach to getting people into jobs and out of gangs.
The notion of just rounding people up based on their tattoos and locking them up indefinitely, without trial many dying in such detention, leaving their children to fall into the same hopeless trap and right into gangs, is a vicious, unending cycle!
We are truly in hopeless times!
When you have a country (El Salvador) where people couldn’t come out on the streets because the gangs were recklessly murdering them, the population would be happy to see a President such as Bukele, come in an act. But it rarely ends well, if such action, is without nuance. Rodrigo Duterte is a recent example; the former Philippines President, now sat in a cell in The Hague. He was probably not without support, during the years he was in power, enacting his approach to dealing with supposed drug peddlers, while ignoring the real root of the problem: why are so many willing to buy the drugs?
It is the same for Bukele and El Salvador: why are so many turning to gangs? Can he lock them all up and is that going to solve the problem? The answer is quite obvious. He may be going around smiling today, but at some point, questions will be asked about the long list of tattooed Salvadorans who are not gang members but got locked up and lost their lives in his massive prisons. Bukele is of course much younger than Duterte and as such, may remain in power for much longer, but in order for him to avoid a similar ending, he needs to bring back judicial due process urgently. He had an emergency to deal with and for the sake of Salvadorans, he did what he had to do? Ok. But he now has to dismantle the gangs, create jobs, address poverty & other issues that make gang life attractive to the young men in his country, see if he can rehabilitate some of the ones he locked up, and find long term solutions. One would hope that he’s smart enough to understand this. Either way, travelling the world, all smiles, like he’s done something laudable, is indeed laughable! He has a country still to save!!
It is hard not to feel hopeless! When you look at the pictures of roomfuls of these heavily tattooed men in El Salvador prisons and the awful stories from victims of street violence, it is very difficult to argue against the actions of Bukele. When you then read stories from victims in other countries such as the US, where the same gangs and gang members have stretched, it is again, very difficult, to argue against the need for urgent action. What would the alternatives be?
But it is clear that longer term solutions – to address the causative factors – must follow the supposedly necessary emergency actions…
Knowledge can improve the world we live in 