How El Salvador's State of Emergency Has Impacted the Crime Rate - The New York Times - 0 views
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Between January and the end of October, 463 people were killed in El Salvador, a 50 percent drop compared with the same period last year,
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The emerging picture underscores a fundamental tension: In a country traumatized by chronic gang warfare, the crackdown has brought a respite from the violence, outweighing fears of democratic backsliding and giving an increasingly autocratic leader leverage to carry out his policies.
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Extortion, a key revenue stream for gangs, has also appeared to have plunged. According to the country’s security minister, extortion cases have fallen by 80 percent since the state of emergency began. The figure is difficult to verify independently, but several business leaders interviewed by The New York Times said extortion had gone down significantly.
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While a lack of transparency by the Bukele government makes it hard to assess the credibility of official crime data, experts say there is little doubt that there has been a notable reduction in violence since the start of the emergency decree.
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“This crackdown has been unprecedented,” said Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst at the International Crisis Group, an independent research organization. “Without a doubt this has weakened the gangs.”
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“Similar policies of mass incarceration and an iron fist in El Salvador and the rest of the region have shown that in the long term they don’t achieve sustainable results and bring back surges of violence,”
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Mr. Bukele’s approval ratings, according to polls, have remained above 80 percent, suggesting that many Salvadorans crave greater safety, even if it means a more repressive system.
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“They were so desperate because of the levels of violence and the control of the gangs,” said José Miguel Cruz, an expert on El Salvador’s gang violence at Florida International University, “that they will accept that sort of deal with the devil.”
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even if there is less violence in El Salvador, such a dip is likely to be temporary without addressing the root causes, including grinding poverty and corruption, some analysts warn.
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And indiscriminately imprisoning young men who may have done nothing wrong alongside gang members could result in a large population of disaffected youth who might make easier recruits for gangs.
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Since March, the Legislative Assembly, controlled by Mr. Bukele’s party, has approved legislation allowing judges to imprison children as young as 12, limiting freedom of expression, expanding the use of pretrial detention and permitting prosecutors and judges to try people in absentia.
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The state of emergency has been used as a blunt instrument, according to the Human Rights Watch report, with police commanders establishing a quota system requiring officers to arrest a certain number of people every day.
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The prison system is at a breaking point, with close to 100,000 people behind bars as of November, more than three times the capacity of the country’s penal system
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The crackdown has swept up not just gang members, but also children, women and the physically and mentally disabled. Some residents in poor neighborhoods who once feared gang members, say they are more fearful of the Salvadoran police.
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Ms. Solórzano’s younger brother Adrián, 30, was arrested in April and accused of terrorism. “It was a shock when the police arrived and said that they had to take him away,” she said, adding that her brother had done nothing wrong.
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Then on July 5, representatives from a funeral home came to the family’s home and gave them the news: Adrián was dead, strangled to death while in custody. It was unclear how he was killed or by whom.