It's kind of weird that sexual violence didn't decrease more? You'd expect locking up 2% of the country, disproportionately violent young men, to have a big effect on sexual violence even if it wasn't part of their day jobs in the gangs.
Sadly, El Salvador is still a low-human-capital country. Average I.Q. data has not been reliably compiled, but judging from neighboring nations, it's probably around the high 70s to the mid 80s. Such men are notorious for violence and bad behavior in every society ever surveyed.
My own maternal grandfather was from El Salvador. I look like an ordinary white Gringo, but in fact I’m a quarter Salvadoran. My grandfather was a hoyty toyty very affluent Salvadoran. You have heard of the “catorce”, the 14 families who had almost all the land and wealth in El Salvador. Well, extend that to quince and that would be my grandfather’s clan. He was assistant ambassador from El Salvador to the United Nations back in the late 60s and early 70s. His name was Doctor Felipe Vega-Gomez. He had the typical contempt for poor peasants that the aristocrats had and, as for Indios, they are subhuman.
Back in the day El Salvador was a miserable place with the “death squads” killing and beating up the darker skinned more Indian peasants who worked on the coffee plantations. Then the gangs came along and turned El Salvador into the murder capital of the world.
I certainly HOPE that El Salvador’s future can be brighter than its past.
The crucial next step for Bukele and El Salvador is to strike against white collar crime and corruption in a similar manner to their blue collar crime and gang crackdown. Reducing blue collar crime increases security for labor, hence the increase in domestic investment. For foreign investment, however, the state must reduce white collar crime/corruption.
An illustrative example of Bukele’s approach to white collar crime is the food wholesale crisis of 2024. Bukele personally accused food wholesalers of price gouging and threatened them in a manner explicitly similar to the gang crackdown in 2019. The strongman-reminiscent rhetoric made me nervous, but I am unsure to what extent his food inflation investigation was lawful versus populist in nature.
Bukele and El Salvador can realize their potential by addressing corruption with the same vigor as street crime.
I'm surprised by the stark utilitarianism. Depriving an innocent person of all of their freedoms is a serious wrong that shouldn't be dismissed just because it coincided with improving material conditions. It's not clear to me how much the suspensions of due process were necessary for the crackdown to work, but even if so I'm not sure it's worth the tradeoff. Salvadoran voters disagree, but you can't expect voters to have a principled view on any sort of right.
What about depriving many innocent people of their life, as it would have happened in the counterfactual?
If the trolley problem was: you pull the lever, few innocent people go to jail for few months, you don't pull and many innocent people are killed, would you not pull?
It's kind of weird that sexual violence didn't decrease more? You'd expect locking up 2% of the country, disproportionately violent young men, to have a big effect on sexual violence even if it wasn't part of their day jobs in the gangs.
Sadly, El Salvador is still a low-human-capital country. Average I.Q. data has not been reliably compiled, but judging from neighboring nations, it's probably around the high 70s to the mid 80s. Such men are notorious for violence and bad behavior in every society ever surveyed.
God bless El Salvador, if God can.
My own maternal grandfather was from El Salvador. I look like an ordinary white Gringo, but in fact I’m a quarter Salvadoran. My grandfather was a hoyty toyty very affluent Salvadoran. You have heard of the “catorce”, the 14 families who had almost all the land and wealth in El Salvador. Well, extend that to quince and that would be my grandfather’s clan. He was assistant ambassador from El Salvador to the United Nations back in the late 60s and early 70s. His name was Doctor Felipe Vega-Gomez. He had the typical contempt for poor peasants that the aristocrats had and, as for Indios, they are subhuman.
Back in the day El Salvador was a miserable place with the “death squads” killing and beating up the darker skinned more Indian peasants who worked on the coffee plantations. Then the gangs came along and turned El Salvador into the murder capital of the world.
I certainly HOPE that El Salvador’s future can be brighter than its past.
The crucial next step for Bukele and El Salvador is to strike against white collar crime and corruption in a similar manner to their blue collar crime and gang crackdown. Reducing blue collar crime increases security for labor, hence the increase in domestic investment. For foreign investment, however, the state must reduce white collar crime/corruption.
An illustrative example of Bukele’s approach to white collar crime is the food wholesale crisis of 2024. Bukele personally accused food wholesalers of price gouging and threatened them in a manner explicitly similar to the gang crackdown in 2019. The strongman-reminiscent rhetoric made me nervous, but I am unsure to what extent his food inflation investigation was lawful versus populist in nature.
Bukele and El Salvador can realize their potential by addressing corruption with the same vigor as street crime.
I'm surprised by the stark utilitarianism. Depriving an innocent person of all of their freedoms is a serious wrong that shouldn't be dismissed just because it coincided with improving material conditions. It's not clear to me how much the suspensions of due process were necessary for the crackdown to work, but even if so I'm not sure it's worth the tradeoff. Salvadoran voters disagree, but you can't expect voters to have a principled view on any sort of right.
What about depriving many innocent people of their life, as it would have happened in the counterfactual?
If the trolley problem was: you pull the lever, few innocent people go to jail for few months, you don't pull and many innocent people are killed, would you not pull?