(Photo by Casa Presidencial El Salvador via Wikimedia Commons/CC0 1.0 DEED)
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On February 4th, 2024, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was re-elected by citizens, conflicting with the Salvadoran Constitution that bans an officeholder from running. It was a landslide victory, with him winning and his party, Nuevas Ideas, winning 85% of the popular vote and 54 of 60 parliamentary seats. Bukele’s popularity comes from his tough stance on gang crime, which had made El Salvador the “[murder] capital of the world,” with 92 per 100,000 residents killed in 2015 alone. Under Bukele, this number has dropped dramatically to 2.4 per 100,000 residents in 2023.
However, his methods went hand in hand with democratic backsliding and suspension of civil rights, with roughly 1.7% of the Salvadoran population currently imprisoned in overflowing and under-resourced prisons. The United States has had significant influence over Salvadoran politics since its involvement in the country’s civil war in the 1980s. Additionally, the U.S. hosts 2.5 million Salvadorans of diverse legal status. As a result, they have a part in creating the problem Bukele received credit for solving.
The Salvadoran Civil War
El Salvador is the smallest country in Central America and part of the “Northern Triangle,” including Honduras and Guatemala. Since the early twentieth century, a small group of elites owned most of its farmland, and income inequality was widespread. Because of the unequal distribution of wealth, the country was a fertile ground for communist views among peasants and Indigenous peoples forced to work under miserable working conditions. The U.S. government was alarmed, and their Cold War concerns now made El Salvador a place of interest. In the 1960s, the Kennedy administration trained paramilitary groups that eventually formed into death squads. They also supplied the military-dominated government with intelligence and weapons.
In 1977, General Carlos Romero took power through electoral fraud, and Salvadorans were dissatisfied, leading organized protests against his regime. These protests met with military violence, and on February 15th, 1977, the military killed 200 protesters. The assassination of an influential archbishop, Oscar Romero, tipped the country into an all-out Civil War, with the U.S.-backed government fighting the Cuba- and Nicaragua-backed FMLN guerillas. From 1979 to 1992, the Carter and Reagan administrations gave El Salvador’s right-wing government four billion dollars in aid. As the Cold War was ending in the late 1980s, international interest in the Civil War diminished. In 1992, the U.N. brokered a peace deal, which finally ended the bloody conflict that left 75,000 civilians killed.
After the war, many people in El Salvador faced economic and social insecurity. The promised agricultural reforms were delayed, resulting in widespread poverty. In the post-war period, economic and social insecurity was widespread. The agricultural reforms promised during the peace deal were slow to materialize, leaving most of the population impoverished. With an estimated 360,000 weapons left over after the war, violence was more accessible, and crime boomed. Meanwhile, changes in U.S. immigration policies unintentionally contributed to the challenges faced by the war-affected country.
The Effects of U.S. Immigration Policy
The number of Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S. exploded during the Civil War. Between 1970 and 1974, “45,000 Salvadorans reported entering the United States,” whereas 334,000 did so between 1985 and 1990. Although many applied for asylum, only two percent received legal status.
As the inflow of Central American immigrants grew, so did anti-immigration sentiments in the U.S. In 1982, William Colby, the ex-director of the C.I.A., said that he considered them to be “a greater threat to the future of the United States than the Soviet Union.” In 1986, the U.S. passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which banned employing people without legal status. Although it clarified what it took to become a legal citizen, this process was time-consuming. A backlog in legal processing and the ban on the employment of undocumented workers caused many Salvadorans to turn to crime to make ends meet. In Los Angeles, this led to the creation of the two now biggest gangs in Central America: Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and Barrio 18. Competition between them increased violence in the city.
In 1996, the Clinton administration passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). This law expanded the categories of crime that allowed for imprisonment and deportation, leading to the mass deportation of gang members to El Salvador. Still recovering from the recent war, El Salvador was not strong enough to handle the influx of criminals. The national police force was starting to be re-established. Also, there were no reintegration policies for the returnees, who often had left the country at a young age. As a result, they turned to the gangs for a sense of community. Because there were so few measures in place to control crime, violence and theft boomed, and the uber-violent rivalry between Barrio 18 and MS-13 members escalated. Over the following decades, the country became a patchwork of territories, with the state scrambling for control and the civilian population suffering the consequences.
These policies continued throughout the 2000s. Bush had developed task forces aimed at combating and deporting suspected members of MS-13 and Barrio 18, later emphasized by Obama’s “Operation Community Shield.” During his time in office, Obama received the nickname “Deporter in Chief” for his strict immigration policies. Similar to previous administrations, he focused on the deportation of criminals, with 91 percent of deportees in 2015 sentenced previously for a crime.
Civilian Life and la Mano Dura Policies
The impact of gangs on civilian life in El Salvador was huge. In many places, the gangs were the de facto authority controlling people’s movements and activities. Anyone who failed to pay their dues or crossed into enemy territory risked being beaten up, kidnapped, or killed. Mainly due to gang violence, the Northern Triangle is still considered the most dangerous region in the world that is not an active war zone.
To combat the gang problem, the Salvadoran government adopted mano dura (iron fist) policies in 2003. These policies involved the mass incarceration of gang members, often based solely on their tattoos and socio-economic class. However, gang members started organizing themselves from prison, aggravating the problem. Between July 2003 and August 2004, there were 19,275 arrests, but the prosecution had to release almost all due to lack of evidence. During this time, the murder rate continued to rise, delaying these policies from taking place. After a failed truce between Barrio 18 and MS-13 a decade later, however, violence exploded, reintroducing the mano dura policies.
The harmful environment in El Salvador drove many people to migrate to the U.S. By 2008, 1.1 million Salvadorans had moved to the country. The U.S. government saw it as beneficial to address the root causes of emigration in El Salvador. They funded foreign aid initiatives that could boost the country’s economy and strengthen its political institutions. This assistance also included providing financial support and training to the military and police forces in El Salvador. However, these forces were associated with unlawful executions and lacked control measures that protected human rights.
The International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) opened in San Salvador in 2005. The academy, jointly managed by the U.S. State Department and the Salvadoran Ministry of Government, was quietly launched, sparking controversy. Critics argue that the ILEA resembles the infamous “School of Americas” (SOA) – a U.S.-operated military training facility that closed down due to accusations of training dictators, assassins, and individuals involved in the assassination of Archbishop Romero. Like the SOA, the ILEA in El Salvador lacks clear steps and civilian oversight. It also allows military staff to participate and protects American instructors from prosecution.
Bukele’s Election
Increased gang violence in El Salvador also paved the way for Nayib Bukele’s political success. The party that had been in power since 2009, the FMLN, was involved in scandal after scandal, and people had become disillusioned. In 2017, Nayib Bukele, 37, founded Nuevas Ideas, and in 2019, the ex-mayor of San Salvador won the presidential elections by promising to squash corruption and end gang violence. His policies to fight the latter problem were particularly effective. Since his election, murder rates have dropped dramatically.
However, the U.S. Treasury charged in December 2021 that Bukele “bought” support from the gangs and that it “provided financial incentives to Salvadoran gangs MS-13 and 18th Street Gang (Barrio 18) to ensure that incidents of gang violence and the number of confirmed homicides remained low.” The Treasury also asserted that Bukele motivated gangs to support him politically, which ultimately led to Nuevas Ideas winning in the legislative elections and gaining control over Congress.
The truce between the gangs and the government ended in 2022, causing a rise in violence and the declaration of a “state of exception.” Under this state, President Bukele gained more executive power to combat gang violence. Initially meant to last 30 days, the state of exception is still ongoing. This policy “temporarily loosens arrest rules and suspends basic rights,” allowing Bukele to control the media and stop political conflict in the name of public security.
Through Bukele’s heavy-handed policies, El Salvador has also become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Almost 2% of the adult population is imprisoned in overflowing prisons now, and the arrests are often done randomly or based on profiling, without enough — or any — evidence of gang involvement. Police are given daily quotas and arrest people at random. In effect, these policies have resulted in a police state where state violence replaces gang violence.
Despite suspending human rights and experiencing a decline in democracy, Bukele remains very popular among the general population. He easily won the elections in February, even though the Salvadoran Constitution does not allow presidents a second term. He won because “most Salvadorans say their top issue is security. And that has been Bukele’s greatest achievement.”
U.S. Relationship With Bukele
The U.S. got involved in Salvadoran politics since the Cold War. The Civil War, in which the U.S. played a significant role, led to many civilians fleeing to the U.S. These refugees formed gangs that are still a major issue today. Immigration policies, which aimed to reduce the number of Salvadorans crossing the border, worsened the problem of organized crime.
Although Trump initially was on good terms with Bukele, his “America First” policies strained their relationship. In 2019, the Trump administration signed “Asylum Cooperation Agreements” (ACAs) with all Northern Triangle countries to limit “access to asylum in the United States.” These agreements allowed the U.S. to deport migrants at the Mexico-U.S. border back to Northern Triangle countries. Despite increased gang violence throughout the region, the U.S. sent them back to the dangerous situations they fled from. El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras signed these agreements because Trump froze aid to the region for “their failure to stem the outflow of northbound migrants.”
Bukele and Biden’s differing views on liberal values have also led to a tense relationship between their administrations. However, the growing involvement of China is pushing the two states together. Whereas Biden criticizes Bukele’s deals with gangs and has expressed concerns over human rights violations, China shows no such doubt. The U.S. needs to maintain good relations with its Southern neighbours to curb immigration and China’s ambition to establish a port off the coast of El Salvador.
President Bukele’s popularity has risen due to the instability caused by the gangs. However, his strategies to combat them often involve suspending human rights. Despite his authoritarian tactics conflicting with American liberal values, China’s growing influence in the region is likely to complicate the relationship between the U.S. and El Salvador further.
Edited by Gustavo Villela
