For episode 164, Dana El-Kurd is joined by Michael Paarlbeg, associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, to discuss the intersection between crime and authoritarian politics in Latin America. They particularly focus on the the state of emergency happening today in El Salvador, covering the rise of Nayib Bukele and the political implications of the “gang state” emerging in the country.
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Further readings referenced in this episode:
Transnational Gangs and Criminal Remittances (academic article, Comparative Migration Studies)
The Emerging Gang State in El Salvador (Global Americans)
Gang Membership in Central America: More Complex Than Meets the Eye (Migration Policy Institute)
How a Fake Gang Crisis in the US Fueled a Real One in Central America (Duke conference)
Gangs, Guns and Judas Priest (The Guardian)
Where to listen:
Wherever you get your podcasts. It is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Anchor, Breaker, Amazon Music, Audible, Stitcher, Radio Public, Pocket Casts, Castro and RSS. It is also on YouTube.
Credits:
- Host(s): Dana El-Kurd
- Guest(s): Michael Paarlberg
- Music: Rap and Revenge
- Sound editor: Liam Evans
- Episode designer: Elia J. Ayoub
- Team profile pics: Molly Crabapple
Transcript via Antidote Zine:
If you want to suspend civil liberties; if you want to replace half the judges in the country (which Bukele did); if you want to fire the attorney general and shut down a corruption investigation into procurement fraud in your own health ministry (which Bukele did); don’t do that by saying, “I want to be a dictator!” Do that by saying, “I’m fighting crime.”
Dana El Kurd: Today I’m joined by my friend and colleague Michael Paarlberg. He’s associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the department of political science. He studies Latin American politics, particularly issues of migration and diaspora, crime, corruption, and authoritarianism.
We’re talking today about the case of El Salvador and what’s been happening there with the Bukele regime. In my day job, I am a researcher of authoritarian politics, and I am interested and also greatly concerned about trends in authoritarian politics internationally—this conversation can teach us more about these trends.
Thank you for coming on the podcast, Michael.
Michael Paarlberg: Thanks for having me.
I should say, I’m not Latin American myself, or Central American or Salvadoran; I am Korean-American if that matters. My interest in the region comes from when I was kid: I lived in Panama. My father was in the foreign service, so I spent a lot of time there, learned the language, and have continued to research the region since I started my academic career.
I have a couple different buckets of research. I focus on diaspora communities and transnational politics—How is it that migrants and diaspora communities impact politics in their countries of origin? For example, how do Dominicans living in New York affect elections in the Dominican Republic? It’s largely (but not exclusively) about transnational voting and campaigning, and also the political impact of remittances. The cases I have used for my research are Mexico, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.
My second bucket of research is more focused on crime and insecurity, given that criminal insecurity is one of the main drivers of migration (though obviously not the only one). I’ve tended to focus on countries in which that is a driver of migration—El Salvador being one, but Colombia and Mexico being others. I have in the past focused a little bit on Chile, both its diaspora communities and the legacies of the Pinochet dictatorship there.
DK: We’ve been talking about what’s been happening in El Salvador, and I’m really interested in this intersection of crime and authoritarian politics. Do you want to tell the people about the Bukele regime and your particular story?
MP: El Salvador isn’t the only country I study, but I study it especially; I comment in the press in the US, as well as the press in El Salvador, about how I see political developments in the country and how I see the country moving in an authoritarian direction. I’m obviously not the only person who has pointed this out, and there are many Salvadoran journalists and members of the political opposition, and members of civil society, who have suffered a great deal of persecution and who have been forced out of the country, some of whom I know.
I’m just one academic who has my opinions, and yet, sad to say, because the US has an outsized impact on El Salvador and has played a very large and very unhelpful role in the country in the past, notably during the 1980-1992 civil war, opinions coming out of the US tend to make the news in El Salvador. So I tend to get interviewed in the press in El Salvador about my opinions; this has angered the government of El Salvador, and they have gone after me a little bit. I’ve been denounced by the vice president of the country; I’ve been denounced by a ruling party politician as an “agent of Soros” (which is funny because I don’t get any money from the Open Society foundation, unfortunately. I would welcome that money, but i don’t get it).
And they have hacked me. At one point, I had attempted logins on all of my emails and social media accounts, from San Salvador. And we know this is the government, because the government has a troll center; we know who runs it, the same people who ran [Nayib] Bukele’s campaign for president. These are people on the government payroll whose job is to create bots and harass people who are critical of the government on social media, and spy on them. We also know the Salvadoran government has Pegasus spyware they bought from the Israelis, so they are able to spy on their opponents and journalists.
I’m not within the top tier of targets of the government, I’m just one person. And I have to say, given that I’m not Salvadoran and I don’t have family there, I am freer to speak my mind than some people who may worry about reprisals to them or their families.
DK: People may not be familiar with the Bukele regime, so maybe you can give a brief background on his rise, and the politics of crime and corruption that dominates the discourse in El Salvador and led to somebody like Bukele.
MP: I was living in San Salvador when I was still in grad school, doing research for my dissertation. I was there in 2014, 2015, 2016; Bukele wasn’t president yet, he was the mayor—his political career started out as mayor of a smaller city, Nuevo Cuscatlán, and he later became mayor of San Salvador, the capital. I’ve been following his political career for a while; I lived across the street from his Yamaha dealership when I lived in San Salvador (he’s from a business background).
He has a very interesting background. His father was closely associated with the left, with the left-wing party FMLN. To take a step back, El Salvador suffered a pretty bad civil war from 1980 to 1992: there was the government, supported by the United States, and there were the FMLN rebels who were trying to overthrow the government. Some of them were Marxist-inspired, not all of them; they were supported by the Cubans and the Nicaraguans. Then there were paramilitaries who were on the right and allied with the government but were not themselves the government, known as ARENA, which became a nationalist political party.
As a result of the peace treaty that was signed in 1992 in Mexico City, the treaty of Chapultepec, these two irregular armies, the guerillas and the paramilitaries, converted themselves into political parties; they lay down their weapons. This is seen as a model for successful transitions of armed groups into democratic politics. Neither of those groups, and no other groups, have taken up arms since then to try to contest politics in an undemocratic way.
I still see this as a success, but the peace treaty has been denigrated by the current president, and he has denigrated the two parties that came out of the treaty, because the two parties “traded power,” so to speak. The right-wing party ARENA controlled the presidency for twenty years, and then the left-wing party controlled the presidency for ten years after that. So it was stable, but it was not seen as terribly effective. There was (and still is) a lot of corruption. This is also the period in which the gangs became powerful, and El Salvador sadly became known as the murder capital of the world. Murders hit their peak at the time I lived there, in 2015, and there was a lot of discontent with what was seen as a stagnant political system.
Nayib Bukele branded himself very effectively as an outsider. He comes from a business background, not a political background; he is also notably of Palestinian origin (and we can talk about this more). He is not from one of the so-called “Las Catorce [Familias],” the fourteen families who have historically controlled all of El Salvador. A lot of Central American countries have very well-established oligarchies that are based in the agricultural export sector. They would view someone like the Bukele family as nouveau riche upstarts, even though they are also very well-established and accepted.
But he did not come from this established business oligarchy even though he was rich and his father was rich. He did not come from these political parties even though he did ally himself with the leftwing party, and when he was mayor he was running with the FMLN. But even then he was never really loyal to that party. He never used, for example, the party’s color schemes; he always had his own agenda and his own logo and his own branding. He had several businesses, as I alluded to (he ran the Yamaha franchise in the country), but his main business was in publicity. He is a PR person, and we can see this in the way he uses social media very effectively to promote himself and to get around the media—he thinks that they are after him—to go directly to the voters and of course to smear and harass his political opponents.
He was mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, then mayor of San Salvador, and decided he was going to run for president. He was then still with the leftwing party, and he wouldn’t talk this up now, but he had leftwing sympathies at that time. He would talk very openly and admiringly about Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. Someone who went to high school with him says he was a big fan of Castro back in high school; he publicly eulogized Hugo Chávez when he died, talked about Che Guevara, things like that. Today he is very firmly on the right—the far right, the Trumpian right. He goes on Tucker Carlson’s show all the time; he spoke at CPAC.
It’s clear that the thing he admired about all these left-wing leaders was not really their socialism, it was their authoritarianism. He always saw himself as a strongman; he wanted to be the person completely in control, and he always chafed at the strictures of party discipline—and these two parties, ARENA and FMLN, were very well institutionalized. They had deep networks; they had a broad rank-and-file base; they had committees, which were neighborhood associations, throughout El Salvador and the diaspora; they had different constituent groups for farmers and for workers and for women. They were the classic mass parties that we hear about from the glory days of the party system in Europe that almost don’t exist anymore—but they did exist in El Salvador.
He didn’t want to have to rise through the ranks the way a lot of people did. He was kicked out of the FMLN for sexual harassment (it’s probably true). Also he was looking for an excuse to leave. And he ran for president with a right-wing party—not the main right-wing party, but a smaller right-wing party called GANA. He won, overwhelmingly, in a three-way race, in the first round, which is to say he got over fifty percent, which says something. That’s hard to do.
I was there when he was running; I observed the elections in 2019. And he really didn’t say anything about his platform, he just said, The other two parties are corrupt, vote for me. In a country where there have been a lot of bad corruption scandals, where pretty much every president prior to him has been found to have embezzled money, including really horrible things like when Taiwan sent a bunch of relief money for victims of an earthquake and the president then just rerouted it (he said he didn’t intend to keep it for himself, but anyway). That was a president on the right; a president on the left also stole a bunch of money. So saying The other two parties are corrupt, vote for me is very compelling, and a lot of people voted for him. And his popularity has only grown since he came into office.
DK: And it coincides with this rise in crime, as well—so it’s like, I’m going to come in and clean up this unaccountable two-party system.
Let’s shift a little bit before we return to the crime angle; let’s talk about how the US views El Salvador, and how the US frames what’s happening in El Salvador and their own policies towards El Salvador.
MP: The US’s interest in Central America, and Latin America as a whole, has declined since the Cold War era. For most of the Cold War, the US’s primary worry about Central America was that it would be a beachhead for Soviet or Cuban influence, so the US financed and trained the Salvadoran military in its war against the Salvadoran guerillas, and this resulted in some horrific things. The famous massacre at El Mozote was carried out by the Atlácatl Battalion—not by the paramilitaries, but by the actual Salvadoran military, which was trained by the US.
So the US has a very checkered past in El Salvador. That said, there are many Salvadorans who live in the US because they were fleeing the violence of the civil war; pretty much everyone in El Salvador has an uncle or an aunt who lives in the US, or they themselves lived in the US. There is actually a lot of positive sentiment towards the US; at the very least there is a great deal of cultural affinity. Salvadorans are very much aware of what’s going on in the US, and it’s very common for people from the Salvadoran diaspora to go back and forth, and run for office, and have a great deal of influence.
So there’s the US government, but then there’s the US as a whole, and oftentimes it’s through the diaspora that the US has influence. The other main way that there’s influence from the US is through remittances. El Salvador, like many smaller countries in the region, is extremely dependent on remittances—twenty-five percent of its GDP comes from remittances; that’s far more than foreign direct investment, for example, or humanitarian aid or anything like that. Which is to say: the real vector of power and influence is Salvadoran-Americans, not the US government.
But the US government today sees El Salvador, just like the rest of the region, sadly, through two lenses: drugs and migration. They just see the whole region as a source of unwanted drugs and unwanted migration, and are happy to do whatever they can to shut that down. In terms of drugs: I’ve written a whole book chapter about the cocaine trade in El Salvador, and it is not a major exporter of drugs. If anything it is somewhat of a transit point, but it’s not really a major issue. The main issue is migration.
Successive US governments, on the left and the right, have made deals with whoever happens to be in power to do what they can to clamp down on migration. Under Trump, this started out being very quid-pro-quo: We will look the other way; we will send military and financial aid as long as you stop migration from other countries through your country. Biden originally started taking a “root causes of migration” approach, which is a more holistic approach, understanding the push factors behind migration such as criminal insecurity and corruption—and climate change, which is a major driver of migration in Central America to the US. But more recently the Biden administration has basically been copying the Trump administration in everything they’ve done; it’s been an enforcement-only approach as well as this opportunistic cutting-deals-with-whoever-they-can.
This is not just El Salvador—they cut a deal, for example, to resume deportation flights to Venezuela, which used to be unthinkable because Venezuela is this enemy socialist country. But as political tides are shifting, and Florida is no longer a swing state but a solidly Republican state, administrations are seeing the southwest as a more swingy area and we see US foreign policy towards Latin America being driven less by fear of communism (whatever that means to them) to a fear of migration, and therefore a willingness to work with anyone who will agree to stop migration, accept deportations, and play ball with the US.
DK: There is a particular angle of gangs, though, that there has been a lot of focus on, both during the Trump administration and now, as you said, with Biden and his rhetoric and policies around executive orders. Could you explain a little bit more about who the gangs are? Why is the US interested and concerned about these gangs? And how has the US played a role in the rise of these gangs in El Salvador?
MP: A lot of my research has to do with the gangs of El Salvador; it’s a little complicated to say where they are from. We’re thinking about the famous gangs: MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) and Eighteenth Street (Barrio 18). These gangs are described as Central American gangs, Salvadoran gangs, and at this point they primarily exist there. But they are not from there; they are originally from the United States. Eighteenth Street refers to an actual street in Los Angeles, in the Pico-Union neighborhood where they started. These are gangs that were founded in the diaspora by Salvadorans and other Central Americans in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a lot of people were fleeing the violence of the civil war. To this day, the largest Central American community in the US is in southern California, around Los Angeles.
There’s a lot of myth and folklore about these gangs. It’s a little difficult to pin down exactly what happened, because a lot of this is presented by the gangs themselves. But the story goes that a lot of these families who were fleeing the violence settled in southern California; they didn’t have a lot of money, they lived in poor neighborhoods, and these were neighborhoods that had a gang presence already—and this tended to be Chicano gangs, Mexican-American. And despite the shared language, they did not like the newcomers, the people from Central America—they picked on them. So according to the gang members themselves, they formed their own gangs out of self-defense, to protect themselves from the Chicano gangs.
They formed what was originally called the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, which says something about how serious they were: they were a bunch of juvenile delinquents who liked to hang out and smoke pot, and they were really into heavy metal. They really loved Judas Priest, and they got a lot of their look from the early eighties stoner metal scene. For example, at that time they distinguished themselves from other gang members by having longer hair and wearing skinny jeans and jean jackets, something that was not popular in the southern California gangland community. Even their hand signs—they got their “devil’s horns” hand signs from Judas Priest, basically.
Eighteenth Street was an existing gang that goes back to the 1960s, but they were the only Chicano gang that accepted non-Chicano Central American members, and they quickly became dominated by them. These two gangs coexisted, and then according to the folklore, someone stole someone else’s girlfriend, and there was a fight at a party, and since then the gangs have been rivals.
DK: And international policy was never the same again.
MP: Yeah. And they have kill-on-sight orders. It’s silly, but obviously it has deadly consequences.
They were street gangs, yes, but they were initially just a bunch of teenagers doing dumb stuff—nothing particularly scary or violent. The first transformation of them was in 1984: Los Angeles got the summer Olympics, and they decided they were going to “clean up the streets,” so they sent out the LAPD to arrest every Black and Brown person they could find, especially teenagers, and they threw a bunch of these juvenile delinquents in jail. That’s what transformed these gangs from street gangs into prison gangs.
There’s a whole culture of prison gangs in southern California that is unique, in which you pay tribute to larger prison gangs. So the Stoners dropped the Stoners moniker, and added “13” as a tribute to a prison gang called the Mexican Mafia. They became scarier, basically: they became better organized as a result of this transformation. But even then they were still a gang that was confined to California, and mostly to the penal system, until the second transformation in 1996.
That was when president Clinton signed two laws that made it much easier to deport people—this really inaugurated our current period of mass deportations. If you are in the country without authorization, you are always deportable, but the US government will prioritize certain people for deportation; they will tend to prioritize people who have committed crimes. If you commit a crime and go to jail in the US, after you serve your sentence and get out, you can be deported. The new law, which was called IRA [Immigrant Responsibility Act], lowered the bar for what was considered a deportable offense.
You previously couldn’t be deported for a DUI, for example. I work on a lot of asylum cases as an expert witness in immigration court; some of the cases I see are people who committed “public scandal.” I don’t even know what that is—but these crimes are not gang-related. They’re not violent, necessarily. These are people who may or may not be gang members, but they’re being deported at a very high rate. So starting in the late nineties, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras started receiving hundreds of flights of mostly young men who, yes, were born in those countries, but had lived most of their lives in the United States.
A lot of them didn’t even speak the language. They certainly were not socialized into this context; they dressed funny, they spoke funny, they liked strange music. They didn’t have jobs waiting for them in these countries, and they had a stigma attached to them: everyone was told, These people are criminals. And no one made a distinction that this is someone who drove drunk; they think they are all hardcore gang members. Some of them were—most of them were not. To this day, the vast majority of people who are deported, who are criminal deportees, are not gang members.
But some of them were, and those people reconstituted their gangs in these countries. And the ones who were not were easy prey for these gangs. They were easy prey for extortion—to this day we know that these gangs target people who are known to have family members in the US, because they receive remittances from the US; they can extort them and steal their money. But they were also targets for recruitment, because they come to this country and don’t know anyone, and don’t have a job; they get into crime. So it’s opportunistic.
And these countries did not have the resources to deal with this influx of thousands of young men with no jobs and criminal backgrounds, so they took a “mano dura” (“iron fist”) policing approach. This was in part out of necessity—to give an illustration, the entire budget of the country of El Salvador is not that much bigger than the budget of Montgomery county, Maryland. Think about the numbers of people and the social problems that already exist in a poor country, and then add to that a lot of people who just don’t have any services or social ties waiting for them; it’s understandable, even though it’s completely counterproductive, to take this lock-them-all-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach.
Just like in the US, this only effectively relocated the gangs to the prison system there, which they quickly took over, and gave them a base of operations. It actually protected the top leaders, who live very well in the prisons, and allowed them to cause chaos out in the streets, directing from the prisons. Subsequent governments, on the left and the right, have tried versions of mano dura policing; when they don’t work they rebrand them; they call them “super mano dura” and so forth.
The current government of Bukele has instituted a state of exception, a general suspension of civil liberties. It is the harshest version of mano dura that has happened. For now, it has been popular. I will say that this is not the first time this has happened, and there is a whole side to this that is never seen: the secret negotiations with the gangs. Whenever a government cracks down publicly, they also privately make deals with top gang members, and the Bukele government has been documented doing this. Past governments have been documented doing this as well. This carrot-and-stick approach can be effective—but only up to a certain point.
DK: So to sum up, racist deportation policies create a gang problem in a country where, in the aftermath of a political settlement following a very long civil war, there’s not a lot of state capacity.
But you mentioned this state of exception; let’s get into that. How has fighting these gangs, whether with Bukele’s state of exception or previous iterations, facilitated authoritarian control? And how has the Bukele regime in particular used this to bolster their own position?
MP: The Bukele government’s state of exception, which has been going on for two years now, is a general suspension of civil liberties in which pretty much anyone in the country is arrestable—but especially if you’re a young man from a poor neighborhood, that makes you highly subject to arrest , whether or not you’re a gang member. Officially, nearly everyone who is being arrested is being arrested under a term called “agrupación ilícita” which means “illicit membership,” as in membership in a gang. Gangs are officially designated as terrorist organizations, so you are officially a terrorist if you are arrested, and this means you have no right to an attorney, you have no right to see family members, you have no right to a speedy trial. All of these things are supposedly rights under the law, but they are all suspended.
As of now, in the last two years, at last count about 77,000 people have been arrested. The police have arrest quotas; this has been revealed by the head of the police union, who complained about this. The police are required to arrest as many people as possible. A lot of times, this is if they have tattoos, or if they look a certain way, or if your neighbor doesn’t like you and wants to get you in trouble. There are a lot of neighbors settling scores by accusing people of gang membership, and they disappear into the system. We don’t know what happens to most of them.
Of those, about 7,000 people have since been released, also completely arbitrarily. No one is ever told what their charges are or what the evidence is. But some of them are quietly released. What we know about what goes on in the prisons now is based entirely on their testimony. And it’s very scattershot—it’s not like a random sample. So we don’t really know how bad or how widespread things are, but based on the stories we’ve documented a couple hundred people who have been killed. It’s almost certainly much higher than that. That’s just the number of people whose stories have been documented. And the killings in the prisons have been under circumstances we can describe as torture: beatings, strangulations, as well as starvation, malnutrition.
Some of this has been institutionalized in the sense that the government doesn’t provide people with enough food because there are too many prisoners. If you have family members who are willing to bring you food, then you can eat, but if not, you don’t eat.
There’s also the policy of mixing gangs. The gangs used to be segregated by gang, because they have these kill-on-sight orders. For a long time there was one prison, famously, which was the MS-13 prison and another prison that was the Eighteenth Street prison. President Bukele, when he came into office, because of the severe unpopularity of the gangs, said, I’m going to mix the gangs—implicitly so they can kill each other. And this was a popular policy. A lot of Salvadorans thought, Great, let them kill each other.
I don’t want to minimize how bad the gangs are. I’ve spent time in gang neighborhoods. Everyone has to pay extortion to these gangs or they will kill you. If you have a young son, that son is subject to be recruited by the gang, he doesn’t really have a choice. If you have a young daughter, that daughter will be someone’s girlfriend in the gang, whether she likes it or not. They really established themselves as the de facto authority in the neighborhood, and they ruled through terror, and would go to great lengths to terrorize people.
Again, this is not a rich country. These are poor people who are being extorted and victimized by these gangs. These are especially street vendors, bus drivers—when I was there, the gangs were at war over who could extort which bus lines, and they would do things like kill everyone on the bus in order to scare the bus line owners into paying their extortion payments. So these gangs are hated for good reason. For a lot of people, they’re not sorry that 77,000 people are being locked up.
That said, the people being locked up are not all gang members. According to one estimate by a former inspector general of the police, only thirty percent of those arrested are gang members—so seventy percent of them are not. But even with that degree of false positives, a lot of people are happy because the streets are safer. However the gangs have not disappeared; they’ve just been relocated to prisons just like they were in previous mano dura regimes. There is also evidence that they are still extorting people in some parts of the country. But the overall level of street activity has declined, particularly the extortion rackets, and this is something people are very happy about.
I can talk at length about the ways that this doesn’t reflect reality, but just as an example, as the murder rate has gone down, the disappearance rate has gone up proportionally. This started happening before the state of exception; the murder rate has been dropping since 2015, so Bukele cannot take total credit for this. It just reached a peak in that era and tends to spike at different moments. Oftentimes the gangs know they can deploy violence strategically to get concessions from the government. What sparked the state of exception was that the government had been giving secret payments to MS-13 as part of a gang pact, but suspended those payments and MS-13 retaliated against the government by killing eighty-seven people in one weekend and dropping their bodies in the street. This was a tactic to pressure the government back to the negotiating table; instead the government decided they would take a gloves-off approach and arrest everyone.
But there have also been a number of discoveries of mass graves, throughout the country. One was not that far from the president’s house. There were a number of these incidents, and a lot of disappearances. There were slogans going around social media like Twitter from El Salvador; the hashtag was El Salvador es una fosa clandestina, or El Salvador is a clandestine grave, talking about the number of disappearances that were happening. So it seems pretty clear to me that for a long time part of this pact with the gangs was the government telling the gangs: You do a better job of hiding the bodies and we’re not going to try too hard to find them—no body, no crime, the murder rate doesn’t go up.
There’s also evidence from the Guacamaya leaks (a Wikileaks for Latin America that leaked a lot of police emails) that the murder rate is twice as high as it is; the government is hiding about half of the murders. So there’s a lot of fudging the numbers, because homicide rates are a very sensitive political issue, and politicians get elected or not elected on the basis of the homicide rate. But it is clear that the gangs’ activities have been interrupted, because you can’t really run an extortion racket when a neighborhood is under military occupation, which is essentially what the government did. They flooded the streets with soldiers and cops.
But I question the effectiveness of this long-term. First of all, you can’t run an occupation indefinitely—
DK: Israel can.
MP: I’m talking to the wrong person here! But even if this were something that could be maintained permanently, it’s not getting to the root of the problem. You can’t fight this purely with an enforcement-only approach, because you’re not really fighting a criminal organization. These gangs are very loosely organized. They operate on a franchise model. They have a juvenile membership; their average age is about fifteen. They are not cartels. They are certainly not “enemy combatants.” They don’t have a capital that you can capture or anything like that.
The thing I point out in my research is: you’re not fighting a criminal organization, you’re fighting a youth subculture, and it’s really hard to eradicate that without looking at broader social problems. And no Salvadoran government has really looked at that, possibly because they don’t really have the resources to do the social services required for that.
The other thing I point out is they’re not looking at the effects of gang and criminal corruption throughout society. Just as an example: there are so many stories of police corruption. I have worked on immigration cases in which someone is being extorted by a police officer, and the police officer will show them their MS-13 tattoo. The gangs have infiltrated the police; they have infiltrated local government. People know this. Yet there have not been mass arrests of police officers who are either themselves gang members or taking bribes from gangs.
El Salvador has a phenomenon of so-called “narco-mayors.” There are a number of mayors throughout the country who are known to be drug traffickers or tied to cartels in the country. I did a lot of research in San Miguel, which is the top migrant-sending region to the US, and not coincidentally a very corrupt area, an area with both a lot of MS-13 presence as well as political corruption. The longtime mayor who runs that town ran a death squad during the civil war; he notoriously told a newspaper that he has a collection of children’s skulls in his house (then he tried to sue that newspaper, claiming he’d been misquoted).
Anyway, everyone knows he’s tied to the Perrones drug cartel; he’s not arrested. His nephew is the consul-general of El Salvador to Long Island, New York, and is an admitted member of MS-13; he’s not arrested. And then there are people within the Bukele cabinet who are connected to other cartels—the Texis cartel, which is a money-laundering ring connected to a former president—and coyote networks, and people who are basically gang lawyers.
I pick on the Bukele government because they are the current government in power, but I will point out: all of the corrupt members of his cabinet came from other governments. He has absorbed the worst actors from the left and the right, who all have ties to criminal organizations or are just engaged in what you might call “normal” political corruption like procurement fraud. A lot of them have businesses and they sell, like, air conditioners to the government at a great markup.
So this is a president who got into office saying, Vote for me, these other parties are corrupt—and he was right. That is a compelling argument. But then he ends up hiring all the corrupt people from those previous governments, and then he cracks down on fifteen-year-olds who may or may not be up to no good, while leaving the people who are profiting from these crimes in positions of power.
DK: You said the gangs have been disrupted to a certain degree, but the way you describe the corruption at high levels, of high-ranking gang members or those associated with gangs being incorporated into this regimes or being mayors—would it be safe to say that the gangs work hand-in-hand with the Bukele regime, to some degree, in creating these dynamics?
MP: Yeah. To some degree. In other countries, notably Honduras, a lot of people use the term narcostate. The former president of Honduras was recently convicted of drug trafficking in US court. His brother was a known drug trafficker who notoriously wrote his name on all the packages of cocaine he was transporting. So these are not criminal masterminds—the former president was not actually involved in the trafficking business, but it was proven that he financed his campaign with drug proceeds. Anyway, that regime is very much connected to the gangs, MS-13, and drug trafficking in general.
With the Bukele government, it’s not that obvious. I have written an article in which I talk about a “gang state” rather than a narcostate or a cartel state. The gangs are not as sophisticated as cartels or mafias. They have some degree of political agency, but they’re still largely subject to the state. The fact that they became transnationalized was not by their own plans to branch out from the US to Central America, it was because they were deported there.
They are learning. One example I give—and this is an important one, I think—is that previously they knew they could use violence to extract concessions from the government, but they would do so for dumb reasons, I hate to say: so the leaders could get rights to visitation from prostitutes in prison, or so they could get PlayStations or knives or food. But recently the Salvadoran government has been blocking all extradition requests from the US for MS-13 leaders who are wanted in the US for drug trafficking. So it seems pretty clear that part of the secret deals that are still going on between the government and the gangs is: We’ll protect you from extradition to the US as long as you play ball with us. And that shows that the demands from the gang leaders are becoming more political and more sophisticated.
The gangs know they can deploy some pressure to get something out of the government, but they are still dependent on it. And I think the government has interests in not eradicating crime but managing it. This is not unique to El Salvador; famously, Mexico, especially during the authoritarian era, made a peaceful coexistence with the Guadalajara cartel. But if there is going to be an interest between the government at organized crime, it’s going to be at a higher level than gangs. Extorting bus drivers and pupusa vendors is small potatoes. The government doesn’t care about that.
What are the uses of organized crime for the government? It’s primarily money laundering. The government already has ties to money laundering networks through the cousin of the former president, Tony Saca (another Palestinian-Salvadoran), and also through the Venezuelan government, oddly enough. The government of El Salvador now is something we would classify as far right, but they have opportunistic ties through Bukele’s left-wing allies, former communists of the FMLN: through a subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, PDVSA, they have a company called Alba in El Salvador that effectively acts as a money-laundering arm which well-connected politicians can access for their own ends.
The gangs are learning that they need to play ball with the government, and if they are able to prove useful to the government for higher levels of criminal activity, they will find a peaceful coexistence. That’s not to say that the gangs will continue to operate the way they have. They may come out of the state of exception, whenever it ends, with different names; they may be fragmented, or subsumed into larger criminal organizations. But they haven’t disappeared, and I don’t think they will be eliminated, because it’s not in the interests of any government to completely eliminate something that has established networks in the country and internationally.
DK: We’ve been talking the whole time about how the diaspora figures into this, but I want to dig into that a little more. Bukele speaks at CPAC; there are all these images that the Salvadoran government puts out in the media for consumption in the US. Where does the Salvadoran diaspora stand on what’s happening? Here in the United States, are they accepting Bukele’s far-right line?
MP: Basically, yes. Bukele is very popular. He is, according to public opinion polls, the most popular leader in Latin America, which is why a lot of countries are looking to him as a model, talking about We want a Bukele in our country. I point out that a lot of times they don’t know what that means. They only see the public side of it. They see the crackdowns; they don’t see the secret deals in the background which are very much part of the whole package.
But in terms of the diaspora: Bukele is a publicist by background, and he knows how to use social media and the power of images to get his point across. A lot of this is a play not to domestic audiences but to foreign audiences, the international media, and especially to the Salvadoran diaspora. Because, as I pointed out, twenty-five percent of GDP comes from remittances from the diaspora, the diaspora has a very strong voice in the country.
The diaspora’s reputation, like many diasporas, is that they are stuck in time a little bit. A lot of them came over in the eighties—though obviously people have been coming over since then (I see this with the Korean community as well: a lot of Koreatowns look like Korea in the 1970s, because that’s when people came over). So a lot of them have memories of the civil conflict; they have memories of what we might call the “peak” period of gang activity, 2015 and before. They support this crackdown because they remember what it was like, and what it was like is the reason they left.
But as an example of the power of images: the Salvadoran government has been releasing photos from the prisons, of hundreds of men in their underwear, shackled, being forced to duck-walk places, or being lined up in rows. Very dehumanizing images. And these are not photos being taken secretly; these are photos being taken by the government to publicize this because they are proud of it. A lot of the men in these photos have tattoos all over their bodies including their faces, a very “scary” image—something the gangs were known for, for a long time, was tattooing their faces, because if you do that there’s no way you will ever enter regular society again. It brands you forever as a gang member.
The gangs have actually not been doing that for over ten years. When I was in San Miguel, which is an MS-13 stronghold, you never saw people with face tattoos on the streets. The gangs figured out (belatedly) that if you have a giant MS on your face, it’s hard to extort people or go undercover, so they started telling people not to get the tattoos. But people who left ten, twenty years ago remember that image. So the pictures are not of people who Bukele recently arrested; those would be young men who would not have tattoos. Rather these are middle-aged men who previous governments had arrested twenty years ago. But this is the image that the diaspora remembers; this is what scares them, and this is what leads them to believe that he’s doing the right thing.
DK: I’m not a Latin American politics expert, I study the Middle East, but a lot of what you’ve been talking about reminds me of the smuggling gangs in North Africa and their push-and-pull with the state, or of Duterte in the Philippines. But broadly speaking, what do you think should be learned from the El Salvador case in terms of how we should understand crime and authoritarianism, in other parts of Latin America but also more broadly, globally?
MP: These are depressing trends, but one lesson is that crime is a very potent issue. If you are an aspiring authoritarian leader, that should be the issue you focus on the most to scare people, regardless of whether it is true or not. The crime rate is still high in El Salvador, but it’s been declining since 2015—still the argument is that crime is out of control.
It took a while for Bukele to latch onto this issue. For a while, if you remember, his big issue was Bitcoin. But making Bitcoin legal tender was a failure. No one was using Bitcoin; no one was using the wallet app that the government used to encourage people to send remittances. I always suspected the real purpose of that was money laundering. But he latched onto the crime issue after failing in a few of his other PR campaigns, and realized This is something I can really use. And it worked.
So I would say that if you want to suspend civil liberties, if you want to replace half the judges in the country (which he did), if you want to fire the attorney general and shut down a corruption investigation into procurement fraud in your own health ministry (which he did), don’t do that by saying, I want to be a dictator! Do that by saying, I’m fighting crime. If anyone is asking inconvenient questions about your government, such as the media, such as the head of the transparency office, and you want to exile them (which he did), say it’s because these people are corrupt and they are in bed with the gangs (which they were not).
And if you also want to distract from the actual criminal ties of people within your own government, arresting a whole bunch of fifteen-year-olds and then showing pictures of scary-looking people with face tattoos is a good way to distract from the greater crimes of public corruption that have never been eradicated in El Salvador—or most countries, for that matter.
DK: And if you really want longevity, connect your whole thing to CPAC and racist right-wingers in other parts of the world, and really go for the gold.
Well, on that depressing note, thank you so much for being with us today, and explaining some of these dynamics.
MP: Thank you for having me.
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