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.