El Salvador has been popping up in my news feed for a while now, and I have kept one eye on what has been going on there.

The reason is simple: in what amounts to the blink of an eye the country has gone from the most dangerous in the world to one of the safest in North America. You are now safer in El Salvador than in the United States.

Most of the decline in the murder rate can be attributed to the policies of El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele.

El Salvador used to be murder capitol of the world. Now it's the 2nd to safest country in the Western Hemisphere.

How did President Nayib Bukele do it?

He cracked down on crime and jailed more than 65,000 gang members.

El Salvador now has the world's highest incarceration rate… pic.twitter.com/wjSyB7FPqo

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 18, 2024

It’s no secret how Bukele accomplished this goal: through massive incarceration and a relaxing of civil liberties protections. And by relaxing, I mean relaxing them. You can get arrested and incarcerated for having gang tattoos.

The people of El Salvador love it, for obvious reasons. Bukele is up for reelection this year–El Salvador has a law preventing two consecutive terms being served by a president, but the judges he appointed ruled that he could run–and there is zero chance he will not win. And while the circumstances under which Bukele is running are a bit dodgy, there is no question that the enthusiasm for his leadership is genuine.

SAN SALVADOR, Jan 16 (Reuters) – El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele holds a large lead ahead of his bid next month to win reelection as president, a poll showed on Tuesday, as one Latin America’s most popular leaders rides a wave of support for his hardline security policies.

The poll gives Bukele a 71% lead over his nearest rivals from El Salvador’s once-dominant political parties, who both poll below 3% in the survey by Francisco Gavidia University.

The 42-year-old Bitcoin enthusiast and former mayor of the capital stepped down temporarily as president last November to seek a second five-year term.

He was legally allowed to mount a reelection campaign only after Supreme Court judges declared that Bukele’s human right to run outweighed the constitution’s ban on serving consecutive terms as president.
Lawmakers from Bukele’s New Ideas Party, which dominates the current Congress, appointed the judges who ruled that he could run.

Bukele is not your classic autocrat–it is difficult to put him in any particular ideological box. He uses what are clearly authoritarian tools to, ironically, expand freedom for the average person. Under the old regime the only people who had any kind of real freedom were gang members who terrorized the populace; under the current regime average people have wildly more freedom and safety, but at the expense of formal protections for civil liberties.

Dating back to March 2022, Bukele invoked emergency powers as part of an unprecedented anti-gang push that has seen police arrest more than 75,000 suspected gang members. The powers suspend rights to due process, including mounting a legal defense, which critics argue amount to a creeping authoritarianism in the Central American nation of almost 7 million.

Bukele has delivered on the promise — the country's prison population has more than tripled in only a few years.

El Salvador's incarceration rate has hit 1.6K per 100,000, or 1.6% of the population.

— Latinometrics 📊 (@LatamData) January 18, 2024

This brings me to my real point: formal rules-based protections only work to preserve liberties if the baseline conditions are generally good to begin with. You need to have a functioning society already in order to institute formal civil liberties protections in the first place.

This drop comes despite an overall record high of migrant apprehension.

So, a firm hand against crime improves safety in the short run, and Latin Americans are paying attention.

— Latinometrics 📊 (@LatamData) January 18, 2024

Hobbes and Locke both grappled with this problem, and each of them distinguished between what they called a “State of Nature” and a civil society. The State of Nature is one in which there are no protections at all–we can agree to work together, but nobody is safe. The strong can dominate the weak, and the vicious can terrorize the virtuous.

Hobbes’s solution was the Leviathan, an absolute monarch who imposed order. That is government.

Locke, too, saw the State of Nature as a state of war, but envisioned its replacement with a social contract that could protect liberties while ensuring order. The American Constitutional system is largely inspired by Locke.

In a real sense both Locke and Hobbes are right, practically speaking. The proper role of government should be to ensure the liberty of everybody, but in order to do so it must first ensure a basic level of safety. Not perfect safety, but safe enough. Failing that you need a Bukele.

Americans instinctively understand this tension. Old Westerns, movies like Dirty Harry and The Equalizer, and similar tales are expressions of our instinctive understanding that while civil liberties are good, you need civilization first. If civilization breaks down then “freedom” is only a word, not an achievable reality.

Megan McArdle, one of my favorite columnists and a libertarian-leaning thinker captured this tension well in a column last year:

The reason a quasi-police state looks so good to Salvadorans is that so many of them were already living under a police state, except that it was run by gangs such as MS-13. Want to have a business? Pay hefty extortion. Want to own a vehicle? You owe the gang a monthly fee. Want to play soccer on the local field? Sorry, that’s gang turf. Want to have relatives visit you at home? First get permission from the local boss for them to enter his territory. Reject the wrong suitor? He might kill you. He also might kill you just because he can.

Residents of gang territory had no recourse, because anyone testifying against a gang member risked death. Bukele’s erosion of due process reversed the power dynamic: Now, you don’t have to testify, you just make an anonymous phone call. This required Bukele to take undemocratic shortcuts, undermining the independent judiciary and centralizing immense powers in himself. It put a lot of innocent people in jail, many in horrific conditions.

Along with mass imprisonment, it also made it impossible for the gangs to keep control of their victims. As a result, soccer pitches are reportedly now overrun with kids rather than thugs, people can go where they want, and commerce is resuming in areas that used to be no-go zones.

I’d like to tell you that such trade-offs don’t exist. But it’s hard to maintain the rule of law when gangs kill witnesses. It’s also hard to fight root causes such as poverty when as much as 80 percent of your territory is controlled by gangs, because gang rule is a cause of poverty as well as a result: Gangs depress economic activity by reducing labor mobility, keeping people off the street, and bleeding business profits through theft and extortion.

The moral foundations for freedom are derived from, as Jefferson put it, “Nature and Nature’s God,” but the functional liberties we have in society are derived from living in a civilization that values and protects them. We call them civil liberties because they derive from civilization. We may have natural rights, but the ability to exercise those rights derives from having a functional (and hopefully good) government.

Criminal justice reformers have been actively undermining the functionality of our civilization. Assuming their good intent–and for many there is good intent–there is little question that the results they get are not what we would call desirable. We may, in principle, like the idea of allowing people the freedom to use drugs–it is none of my business, right?–but the reality of living in a society with zombies walking the streets indicates that the government has a role in ensuring that defending one person’s rights doesn’t destroy everything.

Where do you draw the line? It is a gray zone, unfortunately. Only prudence can guide us because, ultimately, there are two competing goods: liberty vs. order. Order exists to preserve liberty, but it also circumscribes it.

As McArdle points out, the best way to avoid making people choose between liberty and order is to keep crime in check:

Like many social phenomena, crime is prone to tipping points. When it is low, criminals stand out and are more likely to be apprehended. As it rises, police and courts get overwhelmed, and criminals are less likely to be punished — so they commit more crimes. The best way to keep people from trading civil liberties for civic safety is to not let crime get out of control in the first place.