Now that’s a crackdown on gangs

Nayib Bukele just won re-election as President off El Salvador with 85% of the vote!

How?

He cracked down on gangs. Around 75,000 people got jailed – that is more than 1% of the population. Not all of them got trials, so this is no model for civil liberties. They built a new 40,000 capacity prison in seven months!

But El Salvador has gone from the highest murder rate in the world to a 95% drop in murders. Outwards migrations has halved as it has become safer. That is a drop of over 5,000 murders a year. El Salvador now has a lower murder rate than some US cities. It used to be over 6,000 and in 2023 it looks to have dropped to 154 homicides.

The WSJ reported:

But more than 60% of Salvadorans said they didn’t care if their government was democratic as long as it solved their day-to-day problems, according to a survey by Chile-based regional pollster Latinobarometro in 2021. 

I’m a big fan of democracy, but democratic governments have to actually perform their core roles well, the most critical being keep the country safe. If you fail at that, you fail.