Tears welled in Alex’s eyes and he pressed his head into his hands as he thought about more than a year of birthdays and holidays without his mother, who was swept up by El Salvador’s police as she walked to work in a clothing factory.
“I feel very alone,” the 10-year-old said last month as he sat next to his 8-year-old brother and their grandmother. “I’m scared, feeling like they could come and they could take away someone else in my family.”
Forty thousand children have seen one parent or both detained in President Nayib Bukele’s nearly two-year war on El Salvador’s gangs, according to the national social services agency.
The records were shared with The Associated Press by an official with the National Council on Children and Adolescents, who insisted on anonymity due to fear of government reprisal against those violating its tight control of information. The official said many more children have jailed parents but are not in the records.
This is a fucking complicated and ugly situation. It’ll take time to see if his efforts will be effective in the long term and what proportion of these arrests are innocents or targets of corrupt government elements.
That all said…
El Salvador was intensely dangerous and bordering on a failed state - it seems to be stabilizing under these actions.
There is a lot of grey here.
I would put abducting parents on their way to work and arresting them in a mass trial with no say to defend themselves categorically under the title of failed state.
I would also put allowing parents to murder other parents consequence free under the title of a failed state. But I agree that both are awful - that’s why I think this president is morally ambiguous.
Ideally we’d solve issues like this with international assistance - the UN would send in peacekeepers to stabilize the situation until the local government could normalize lawfulness… but that’s an extremely untrendy use for peacekeeping forces and has historically raised a lot of commotion when peacekeepers were killed.
The president who refers to himself as a dictator is morally ambiguous?
He’s bad - I think morally ambiguous was a poor choice of words.
The question is: are the people who live in El Salvador better or worse off than they were before.
From what I have read, it depends on who you ask. Like you say, it is so complicated and we could benefit from some local voices. I think? Maybe hard to say.
They had a homicide rating of 100/100.000. A 0.1% chance of getting murdered. Think about it.
Any society spinning out of control that way is doomed to collapse or turn to extreme measures to save itself. El Salvador chose the latter. Doesn’t mean it’s ok, but it seems to be the only viable alternative now.
1.7% of the country is now imprisoned or 1,087/100,000.
So they have a higher chance of being abducted off the street and thrown in
gaol without trial than they ever had of being murdered.Think about it.
That’s a crazy bad take as someone who’s been murdered is dead, but someone imprisoned is not necessarily innocent.
Without knowing how many of those 1087 are innocent the comparison is worthless.
Either El Salvador falls, or they commit to this crackdown. I’m not defending kangaroo courts of innocent people, but I can sympathise with why the country does it with the circumstances.
On one hand you have this on the other hand El Salvador turned from one of the most dangerous countries in the region to one of the safest.
They had a ramping gang problem and this president managed to reign the crime rings. But I don’t know what’s better to be honest. It is quite controversial but I don’t think that if he had decided to try it the lawful way it would have been successful either.
I am not defending him, I am just pointing out that if he tried to try those people they could have bought their way out, through corruption, skillful lawyer, etc. and then the end effect wouldn’t be anywhere close to what they have now.
I guess it boils down to what you consider worst. Gangs, or a tyrannical government who disappear people without due process. It is like releasing killer monkeys to take care of your radioactive crocodile problem.
I guess at least with the government at least it is a little more surgical. Gangs tend to not really care where their bullets go.
And really the question is more: do you want one tyrannical government or six competing tyrannical governments?
Except that in this case, at least they are not disappearing with no knowledge to others.
Responsibility and accountability still lay supreme. Better than in other conditions, where you got no idea who did what to whom.You’ll probably see people asking to have their food and education (alright, maybe they won’t ask for the education) funded by the govt. and if it’s unable to deliver, it will lose power.
Its not one of the safest countries when you risk being arrested just by walking to work.
The question you ask yourself is; are you, personally, willing to be caught up in the wide net cast, and have your own life destroyed, in favor of the supposed overall “reigned in” crime?
Police forces aren’t efficient, especially under bad, unstable, unethical leadership. You’re given a license to shoot everyone in the room because someone suspects the killer might be inside… They aren’t. Let’s say MAYBE 50% of the people they are rounding up would have ended up in jail for justified reasons, and that’s probably extremely generous - And if you disagree with my estimated numbers, I’ll just accuse you of being a secret communist and have Mr. McCarthy blacklist you.
Famously, Pablo Escobar took down an entire commercial flight to get one perceived enemy on the plane, and that person ended up not even being on the flight…
So are you cool being on that plane, and dying a horrible death, for the chance at what you perceive as the greater good happening I your wake? That’s the question you ask.
It’s really hard to pass judgement when the safety and stability of the society has improved so drastically in such a short time.
Of course innocents will have gotten caught up, but this isn’t a situation like in the US of police over-enforcing crime statues on certain minorities. The entire country was a puppet state of extremely violent gangs. People have fled by the tens of millions.
If the left wing politicians didn’t want a right winger seizing all this power, they could have done something too but they let themselves be corrupted by the gangs, so someone else had to do it.
What I haven’t heard more information on is why this guy in particular has been able to withstand all the gang influence and corruption during his rise to power, when other politicians who started off well-meaning could not.
Wow the commentors here are disgusting. Innocent people get locked up so kids dont have their parents anymore because a psychopath of a president randomly locks people up. And they argue “Well its safer now so its fine”. The comments are worse than on many reddit posts.
Gangbangers aren’t “innocent people.”
You assume that bad things only happen to bad people. This is called the just-world belief and it’s a major source of cognitive dissonance today. If they get locked up as innocent people, that would be injustice, therefore you assume they are gangbangers.
I don’t think being someones parent should make a difference if you see jail or not.
Having said that it will be interesting to see if, because their are less parental interaction, there might be more criminals in these children without parents.
Having said that it does seem like a lot of them were guilty and crime has massively decreased. So from a purely good of the state and reducing crime seems like a good thing.
How can we know if they’re guilty when they’re being put in group trials of hundreds at a time and denied due process or the chance to defend themselves?
We can’t.
I meant as a group. Individually there has to be innocents. But for crime to have gone down they must have caught a lot or at least scared the remainers.
Like I said from a state point of view it’s great. Individually, well there is some random chance involved wether things have got better or worse.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Forty thousand children have seen one parent or both detained in President Nayib Bukele’s nearly two-year war on El Salvador’s gangs, according to the national social services agency.
The records were shared with The Associated Press by an official with the National Council on Children and Adolescents, who insisted on anonymity due to fear of government reprisal against those violating its tight control of information.
When she was detained outside their home in June 2022 on vague charges of “illegal gathering”, the boy’s grandmother, María Concepción Ventura, was left struggling to feed Alex and his brother and pay the bills without her daughter’s salary.
Concerns were echoed by social workers, relatives, religious leaders and even Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa, who said in an interview that, “if the state doesn’t do something, these kids will become the criminals of the future.”
El Salvador’s Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs originated from marginalized migrant communities in Los Angeles in the 1980s, made up in part of vulnerable unaccompanied minors fleeing Central America’s military conflicts.
Once deported from the United States, the gangs began to prey upon youth in precarious situations in their own communities in El Salvador, eventually driving new waves of emigration as families fled their terror.
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