The old saying goes, “Those who choose security over freedom deserve neither.”
And yet… you have a situation like this one:
The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.
When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.
Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.
And how did he do this?
In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.
Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.
But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.
They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.
If this makes one think, “That sounds like the foul MS-13 gang”, then one would be correct.
I have often thought about doing this right here in the U.S. of A., as whole areas of the country have become terrorized by gangs like MS-13. And as the gang members proudly wear their clan tattoo, why not just arrest them as self-confessed criminals?
Because that’s wrong — basically, it’s un-Constitutional, and on more than one level. And here’s how it was done in El Salvador:
Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.
The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.
Believe me, there’s a lot to be said in support about measures like those of Nayib Bukele. After all:
Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.
Okay, maybe that worked in El Salvador, which started off being a shithole country, and just dug itself a deeper one over decades of corruption and your standard Third-World degeneracy. Desperate measures were called for.
But the U.S. has never been a shithole country, in no small part because of the protections that our Constitution affords everybody — and not just non-gang members, either.
I am profoundly disturbed by the tone of articles such as the one I’ve linked to and quoted from in this post. Of course I can see the benefits of actions like that of Bukele.
But I can also see how that kind of thing can be turned around and used against, oh, people like MAGA supporters or, for that matter, gun owners.
And to quote a wise man (not a politician, but a playwright), who saw where this could lead:
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
— Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons
The real conundrum is whether we are, in fact, still residing under the rule of law and the constitution or we are in existential war. We have divisions worth of military age males invading our country. We clearly have abrogated the rule of law in many jurisdictions. We have judges asserting the 2nd amendment does not apply in their states and prosecutors refusing to charge felonies. We have gangs and cartels and various political shock troops running wild in way too many places in our formerly lovely constitutional republic. More’s fine rhetoric was worth precisely nothing in keeping his head off the block against the naked power of the state. As far as I can see, the devil’s already turned ’round on us and all the laws are flat or being flattened.
Do those who openly declare themselves to be our enemies and treasonous to our country deserve the protections of our constitutional, civil society? What if granting them those protections is tantamount to civilizational suicide? Society can be destroyed by enemies within. Bukele said no. He identified the enemy and acted … the balls on that guy! Those gang members put on their tattoo uniforms and confessed their treason against their civilization.
Oh, oh, but what if it’s the bad guys that take Bukele’s approach? Well, if you wonder about that, perhaps you weren’t paying attention for the entire 20th century, or in present day South Africa, for just one example. The problem is not that the bad guys will try to kill us, their enemies, of course they will. The problem is that we fail to identify the bad guys as our enemies and neutralize them first.
sounds like the Patriot Act or the getting rid of the fillibuster and such. It sounds like a good idea until its provisions are abused. Do the ends justify the means? Rarely.
Do the ends justify the means? Sure they do. What else justifies the means? One of the things Buckley taught us, besides simpering snark, was that the correct question is … do the ends justify ANY means? Are we currently tailoring our means to our ends, which I (we) take to be preservation of a free, civilized society? Not hardly, we aren’t. Not even close.
Next folks will be saying violence never solved anything, when in fact it’s practically the only thing that has “solved” anything in recorded history and probably before that.
Sorry, I’ll shut up now.
Unless they are YOUR ends.
oh violence has solved lots of things. violence liberated most of Europe, a large portion of the population of the Southern United States, parts of Asia etc. Violence also stops crime when used in enough quantity.
As an emergency measure, such an action may be justified, but we are not there yet
We actually do a reasonably good job of arresting and convicting criminals. We just keep letting them out way too soon. In the 80s and 90s we drove crime way down and then 10 years ago all the lefty states and cities just decided never mind. We can fix this, it just requires a modicum of collective will power.
I dunno what to do about it either. On the face of it I’m happy to see criminals/communists burned at the stake.
But I’m old enough to know that the tools you give your friends will eventually be used by your foes. IIRC they had Vigilance committees which informally cleaned up the streets of San Francisco and other places back in the day. Eventually they started to abuse the role of protector, to enforcer. At least with these “unofficial” committees there is some law & order that eventually kept them in check.
Looking back farther in history you have the Athenian League which turned into the Athenian Empire (more or less).
Look here at RICO. We were all (or most of us) cheering when it took down mobsters. Then they started using it against abortion clinic protesters.
As a child of the 80’s I wanted a big powerful state (I shudder to admit this) to take down the Soviet Union, then the SU was gone and the big powerful state, needed a target, and we the citizenry were it.
You can train, feed, produce a large guard dog to protect you from the wolves. But eventually the guard dog becomes a greater threat than the wolves, but the wolves are still out there so which do you choose?