One of the most popular politicians in Latin America, has been making some big waves lately Nai Bukele, Nayi Bukele. And lately what Bokela has been receiving the most attention for is his tough approach on crime in El salvadorminalis.
I'm going to take the opportunity to send a message to the criminals. There are rumors out there that they want to start taking revenge on honest citizens. Do that and there will be no meal time in the prisons.
Bukele has put in place, effectively a state of emergency called a state of exception in El Salvador, which suspends certain civil liberties in the country and makes it easier to arrest people.
The freedom to meet with whoever you want on the streets, the freedom to know why you're getting detained. It also increases the amount of time you can be detained.
That's my colleague Marcelo roche Brun, one of Bloomberg's bureau chiefs in Latin America, and he says these kinds of security measures put in place under Bukele have resulted in a massive increase in the number of people being imprisoned in the country and what.
This has resulted in is an unprecedented wave of detentions. But Salvare is a small country, but its prison population has more than tripled in the past twenty two months.
Since these security measures have gone into effect. The country's homicide rate has dropped by eighty four percent from what it was in twenty eighteen, the year before Bukeley became president up until now, but human rights advocates are raising the alarm about the conditions in the prisons where all these newly arrested people are being sent and some Salvadorians
think the plan has gone too far. Today, on the show, how Al Salvador's success in fighting crime has come at the expense of civil rights and how Bukele's security strategy could impact his reelection campaign and inspire other leaders across the region to follow suit. I'm your host, Sarah Holder, and this is big take from Bloomberg News. Bukele came onto the national scene after serving as mayor in a
small town and in the nation's capital. When he ran for president in his late thirties, he ran outside of the two party system.
He's a politician who has built an identity really around this notion that he's different from the establishment.
That's Marcello again.
He won with more than fifty percent of the votes, and he was you know, he was young. He was thirty seven years old when he was elected. He was running on an anti corruption platform.
Bukele took office in twenty nineteen, and he briefly gained some notoriety a couple years later. In twenty twenty one, when he adopted bitcoin as legal tender in the country. President Naya Bukele announced that El Salvador would be the first country to make bitcoin an official currency.
Having gone to Elsalvather, I can say that bitcoin is definitely not whitely used does a coin.
But things took a turn in twenty twenty two.
El Saloposi men Masco school, but changed everything was what happened in March twenty twenty two.
In a span of two days, dozens of people were killed by gangs. Al Salvador went through its single most violent day since its civil war ended thirty years ago.
When sixty two people were killed over a span of twenty four hours.
Before this incident, gangs had been a regular part of daily life for people in Al Salvador.
People had grown used to being extorted by gangs in Al Salvador on a monthly basis or on a weekly basis with recurring demands for payments, with demands for paying a bonus on Christmas to gang leaders.
And previous governments had tried different ways of dealing with them.
The relationship between political power and gangs in Ol Salvador dates back for years and governments have tried different measures. One of them was called manadura, which is translated into iron fist. Another one was like super and manaaludas were like super iron fists. And it comes and goes, and negotiations have been long standing between gangs and so one thing that occasionally happens is our truces between El Salvathers gangs, the two main ones being MS thirteen and Barrio Disiocho.
But after the high profile deaths in March twenty twenty two, Bukele doubled down.
That is what triggered the idea that Bukele had to do something much more drastic than what any other government had done before. The way Bukell reacted as president was he demanded this state of exception. So in the case of Il Salvador, it suspends the freedom to gather and meat for whatever reason. It suspends the privacy of communications between peoples. Your communications can be either be read or heard by authorities without a warrant.
The State of exception was approved by Congress shortly after the twenty twenty two massacre, and it led to a ma wave of arrests. One of the people who was arrested that year was a twenty two year old woman named Carlo Michelle. Marcello spoke to her father. Alfredo lives in the outskirts of San Salvador. He's sixty years old. He owns a small photo studio in the commercial part of town, and he told Marcelo what he knew about the day Carlo was arrested. He says Carlo was accompanying
a friend to the bank. Carlo waited for her outside, and when Carlo's friend came out to meet her, she was gone. He says. The security guard had seen her get arrested, and the friend called Alfredo and his wife to let them know. They had no idea why she'd been arrested, but when Alfredo called their local police precinct, they told him it was just going to be a
fifteen day investigation and then Carlo would be free. That was nineteen months ago Investigalo Carla is still being held and Alfredo says the only thing he's been told is that she was arrested for not carrying an ID. And Marcello says the situation Alfredo's daughter is in is not uncommon because under the state of exception, not only were certain civil liberties suspended, like the ability to gather in public at certain times, it.
Also suspends the right of being informed for the reason for an arrest and of having a lawyer if you wish. It also extends the amount of time that you can be detained without any kind of judge involvement.
So, without any clear legal path to get his daughter out of prison, Alfredo started looking online for answers.
He started on Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups, and it became clear Welfredo that this was not just an isolated incident, that it was not just his daughter who had been detained, and he started connecting with other parents who were looking for their missing children.
Alfredo has started a small NGO for family members who have had someone be abruptly arrested under the current security measures.
It's called movir and they say they don't represent any person whose children have been detained, that they make sure to ask for older facts of the case to ensure that they are not defending somebody who may have been detained for belonging to a gang, but only defending people who have been detained innocently.
After the break, we go inside one of El Salvador's newest prisons and we hear about how the so called Bukele plan is spreading across Latin America. Hey, we're back. Before the break, we were talking about the thousands of new arrests under El Salvador's state of Exception, and all of these new arrests have created a problem for the country's prison system, which has quickly become overcrowded in the summer.
After the deaths. In twenty twenty two, Bukele began building a mega prison called the Seacot.
It is one of the biggest prisons in the world and it has a capacity for forty thousand people. And we visited this prison, which is indeed brand new.
In video footage of the prison, some of it published by the government, rows and rows of shirtless men kneel on the ground, their heads are bowed.
It is currently only holding twelve thousand inmates. That means that the remaining would be eighty eight thousand. Prisoners in Ol Salvador are being held in the old jails, in the same jails that were already crowded before the state of Exception, and those prisons are much harder to get into.
And what's happening inside those prisons has become a source of concern in the country.
Human rights organizations in Al Salvador say they have heard thousands of claims of abuse in these prisons. In particular, Cristosile, one of the human rights organizations most active in Al Salvador, has documented two hundred and fifteen deaths so far in during the state of Exception. We asked the government about these numbers. We as their security minister Gustavo Bietoro directly how many people have actually died in prisons in An Salvador, and he wouldn't say.
In Carcels Alredor del Mundo semu prisoners PTA. He said that prisoners die for many reasons in every part of the world.
Look at okay Una.
Na.
He said.
They try to avoid having prison personnel be responsible for any deaths and that giving a number would play into the interests of NGOs. For Salvadorians, this state of exception has been complicated. On one hand, there are accusations that the government has gone too far and arrest people who are not guilty of any crime, and there are reports of widespread abuse and deaths inside the prisons. On the other hand, the country's homicide rate is lower than it's
been in decades. We ask Marcelo how people are holding these conflicting realities in their minds.
It's different to talk about gangs while living surrounded by gang activity than to talk about them from the outside. Right, this idea that you have a state of exception which suspends civil liberties, which is true, is one thing on paper, and it's another thing on the ground. You're suspending right
of assembly, the right to go out. But people in territories controlled by gangs will tell you that they don't have that freedom to begin with, So whether the government suspends it or not does not impact necessarily the freedom that they have. That is why we see in different countries in Latin America these attitudes where people feel that the government should be able to encroach more on civil rights in the name of security, and they point to
Al Salvador as sort of a successful example. There are many caveats to that, but a very important one is how long can that go on for? How long is it healthy to give the government so much power. It has been extended for a long time, and it does make a lot of people wonder if this is sort of the new reality, the new normal. We're talking about twenty two months and counting.
And while the people of El Salvador grapple with this tension, Bukela's moves are being watched closely by other leaders around the region.
One of the things that we've seen in Latin America recently is rising gang violence throughout the region, and the one nation buckling that trend is El Salvador. So that has led to Bukel's profile rising in the region. A couple of examples that we've seen very recently, for example, is Ecuador, where gangs have been terrorizing the country lately.
Just this year, they took over a TV station and President Daniel Levo of Ecuador has all but declared a war with gangs, and one of the things that he has said is that he needs to build new prisons and that the prisons that he's going to build are going to be very similar to what Bukele has built in ot Salvadora is Buna Castile, Peru were and based mayors in Lima the Capitol. Mayors of different neighborhoods of the capitol have been demanding that the president adopted Bukell style measures.
These measures are often referred to as the Bukele Plan, and Bukell himself seems to be aware of its popularity.
At one point, Bukele even tweeted a poll asking if the Bukela Plan should be implemented in Peru, and more than ninety percent of the people answering this poll said yes.
As for Bukele, he's up for re election, so the.
Election is on Sunday on Sunday, February fourth, and the polls indicate that Bukel is going to win by a landslide and just absolutely crush his competition. Depending on how you measure the voting, it could be as high as Bukelly obtaining seventy percent of votes while his rivals don't even scratch five percent. He's really one of the most popular politicians in the world right now, and at the same time, Salvadorians are very happy with the state of
their democracy. There's this organization in Latin America Latino Vero Metro, that measures the health of democracies across the region. Usually it asks people what they think of their democracy, and the single country where its citizens are most satisfied with their democracy right now is in El Salvador.
But Marcello notes that when you look at other indicators, the state of El Salvador's democracy can look very different.
When you look at other indicators, such as the Economists, for example, famously has a democracy index, and the democracy index in Al Salvador has been falling since Bukell became president, and in fact, Al Salva under the Economy's ranking ranks
among the weakest democracies in the region. So you have this thing right where outside of servers say that the democracy in El Salvador is very weak, but you also have a majority of citizens of El Salvador who say that they're very satisfied with the state of their democracy. So there is definitely a paradox there.
Thanks for listening to Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by Adrian Atapia and Jilda de Carley. It was edited by Caitlin Kenney and Brendan Walsh. It was mixed by Blake Maples. It was fact checked by Tiffany Troy. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and Jilda Di Carley. We get editorial direction from Elizabeth Ponso Nicole Beamster. Borr is our executive producer. Sage Bauman is our head of podcasts. Special Thanks to Marcelo
Russa Brun for his reporting. Thanks for tuning in. We'll be back tomorrow.
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