WILL EL SALVADOR’S CRIME CRACKDOWN INSPIRE COPYCATS?

It is hardly surprising that governments — and voters — across Latin America and the Caribbean are eager to embrace iron-fist policies against crime. They will probably one day rue the choice, though.

The region is awash in violence. In 2022, Honduras suffered 35 homicides for every 100,000 people, according to the latest report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. The homicide rate in Jamaica soared above 53 per 100,000; in Ecuador it hit 27; in Mexico, 26; and in Colombia, 25. The world average is less than six. Anything higher than 10 counts as “endemic violence,” according to the World Health Organization.

Organized crime accounted for at least half of these deaths. When the government of Nayib Bukele managed to slash the homicide rate in El Salvador to 7.8, from 106.8 in 2015, by declaring a state of emergency and imprisoning anyone who looked like a gang member — due process and human rights be damned — rulers around the region sensed an opportunity. President Xiomara Castro in Honduras declared a state of emergency in 2022; Ecuador did so last year. Even Chile, comparatively free from crime, passed a “legitimate defense” law to make it easier for police officers to kill bad guys. In Argentina, incoming President Javier Milei’s public security minister met last month to “share experiences” with her counterpart from El Salvador.

Salvadoran voters are loving it, by the way, encouraging Bukele to flout a constitutional ban on reelection and run again for the presidency. He is the top-ranked president since the start of Latin America’s democratic transition, according to Latinobarómetro, a regional public opinion survey.

Yet the hard-line strategy rarely ends well. Civil rights suspended to fight crime are rarely restored. Human rights abuses become normalized. Security forces conclude there is no such thing as the illegitimate use of force. And as the people of Honduras are seeing, the harsh tactics often fail to work. As the U.N. report notes, states of emergency and repressive measures can reduce lethal violence by gangs. But they can also increase it.

The appeal of Bukele’s policies is not surprising. Less violent approaches, such as President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” plan and President Andrés Manuel

López Obrador’s offer of “hugs not bullets” to gang members, have roundly failed to check the violence in Colombia and Mexico. But Latin American leaders might want to consider the following:

Organized crime does not always lead to a lot of deaths. The homicide rate is relatively low in the countries along the Balkan heroin-trafficking route in southeastern Europe. Japan has an extremely low rate despite the pervasive presence of the Yakuza.

Lethal violence is mostly driven by conflict among rival crime groups over markets and resources. It tends to decline, the U.N. report notes, where a dominant organization can impose order. This also means that disrupting criminal organizations can raise the level of violence by splintering gangs, opening space for inter-factional conflict.

This helps explain the soaring number of homicides in Jamaica, where the number of gangs reportedly doubled between 2010 and 2019. The fragmentation of drug cartels is also largely responsible for the paroxysm of violence over the past decade in Mexico.

Consider Mexico’s war on crime. Research by a Mexican expert on organized crime, an Italian computational criminologist and a mathematician who used to develop models for Mexico City’s police underscores how little the bloody quasi-military campaigns from 2006 to 2018 did to stem criminal cartels’ growth.

Mexico’s roughly 150 crime organizations swelled by some 60,000 members in the 10 years after 2012, to a staggering 175,000 in 2022. The cops were trying: Gangs lost 110,000 members over the decade. About 1 in 5 were imprisoned. One in 6 were killed. But the cartels recruited 170,000 new people — and the violence persisted. Looking into the future, the researchers estimated that even if the incarceration rate were to double, deaths in 2027 would still be 8 percent higher than in 2022. And cartel membership would grow by another 10,000.

There are better strategies, the research suggests: Curbing gang recruitment by half — say, by offering jobs for young men or simply informing them of gang members’ stratospheric death rate, which is 95 times that of the average Mexican citizen — would trim deaths to 90 per week in 2027, from 120 last year, and cull cartels’ membership by 20,000.

Bukele is riding high on his way to victory in next month’s election. He is unlikely to reconsider the scorched-earth tactics that have given him a 90 percent approval rating. Yet he will soon have to deal with uncomfortable questions.

The roughly 100,000 imprisoned Salvadorans — about 1.6 percent of the country’s population — are mostly young men. How many more will he stash away? More than 2 percent of the working-age population has been removed from the labor market. Will they remain locked up until middle age, past the peak age for crime? Or will they be released after a few years in prisons that double as criminal training and recruitment centers?

Bukele’s success also raises a critical question for Latin Americans tempted by his hard-line tactics: How much democratic rule are they willing to give up? The challenge is to come up with viable alternatives that do not require giving up civil liberties, accountability and justice to beat violent crime.

The appeal of Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele’s mass lockup is no surprise. Less violent approaches — such as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s offer of “hugs not bullets” to gang members — have failed to check violence.