El Salvador's War on MS-13: Nayib Bukele Goes Hard
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Yep. Go to Carvana.com to finance your car the convenient way. March 27, 2022. In the Central American state of El Salvador. A Sunday, the day of rest for this Catholic-majority nation of 6.3 million people.

But just as it's been for decades, there's no rest at all for those caught in the crosshairs of El Salvador's brutal, omnipresent street gangs. Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. And on this particular Sunday, they're not just hell-bent on money-making violence. This time, it's political.

See, the homicide rate in El Salvador had been dropping fast. And not just since the 2019 election of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, an enigmatic millennial strongman with a penchant as much for self-importance as hair gel. But Bukele had swept to power on a promise to slash El Salvador's homicide rate. And that is exactly what he's done. From almost 2,400 in 2019 to under half that in 2021.

Some folks have been sounding the alarm about Bukele's dictatorial tendencies, from stacking the judiciary and piling sovereign wealth into Bitcoin, to stuff a bit more on the nose, like calling himself "el dictador más cool del mundo mundial", the coolest dictator in the world. But most Salvadorans don't care. They're just happy they're not living under constant threat of extortion, violence or death.

But in recent months Bukele's relationship to the gangs has been exposed to something a little less combative than he's willing to admit. Reporters have unearthed evidence of meetings in 2021 in which Bukele offered major gang leaders amnesties, cushy prison conditions or even sex workers to back his leadership and keep the murder rates down. The uneasy pact is held until that November when 40 people were killed in three days.

Since then, Bukele had been pondering laws to restrict the right to gather, monitor communications and carry out arrests without a warrant. Moose's opponents have warned could send El Salvador back to the darkest days of its awful civil war. The threat, though, it clearly hasn't worked. By March 2022, the relationship between Bukele and the gangs has fallen apart and mobsters are looking to stamp their authority back on the streets in typically psychotic fashion.

On the 25th, MS-13 and Barrio 18 unleashed the worst wave of violence since the war. That day 14 Salvadorans are murdered. The following day all hell breaks loose. The gangs rampage across the nation. They kill vendors, bus passengers, market goers, men, women and children. Anybody they don't like the look of. Anybody who's in the way. By Sunday 27th the massacre is in full swing.

87 Salvadorans are dead in just 72 hours. Cops and security forces swarm major towns and cities and the deaths subside, but nobody expects to come to last. This is always the case, says one resident in the capital, San Salvador. Homicides rise and operations are strong and soldiers walk in. But in about 15 days they will leave and everything will return to normal. This time though, it's different.

Bukele pushes through his so-called state of exception, martial law of sorts, suspending riots, placing prisons on lockdown and sweeping up thousands of suspected gang members in massive police raids. The president takes to Twitter to address those already behind bars. Because of your actions, now your homeboys won't be able to see a ray of sunshine, he writes.

What comes next is one of the biggest police operations the world has ever seen, with mass incarceration more reminiscent of a sci-fi movie than a Central American democracy. And that's precisely the point, say Bukele's critics. El Salvador was barely a democracy to begin with. Now, they say, Bukele is just replacing the gangs with the brutal Mano Dura, or Iron Fist, of dictatorship. Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hi everyone and welcome to the weekly podcast that dips into the baggie of global organized crime with an annoyingly big key. I am your host Sean Williams. Pretty good. In Aotearoa. Thank you. Thank you. In New Zealand and I'm joined today by intrepid reporter Danny Gold in the United States. We are rats on the good ship journalism and it is sinking. AI is taking over and we are going to podcast until Peter Till takes that from us as well.

I have been having a lot of fun watching lots of bare-knuckle boxing in the last couple of weeks on YouTube, and I think it's making my friends and family nervous I'm having a breakdown. Any similar warning signs your end? I think you should actually get into doing bare-knuckle boxing, because CTE would go a long way to explaining some of your jokes and behavior in general. But I mean, look, my entire existence since I turned 35 is a warning sign. You know, whatever it was.

What can you do? Yeah, yeah, fair enough. I reckon it would probably be better to beat up a 14-year-old Kiwi kid down the local gym than to annihilate my family. But anyway, as always, like and subscribe on all the underworld socials. We put out a lot of shorts and pics and all kinds of stuff there. And do please hit the follow button on Spotify because podcast discovery is a complete nightmare. And it helps us leapfrog past Wanderers, True Crime, Cold Cases, Volume 254 or whatever.

Yeah. Also, we've got a ton of new listeners lately. Thank you all for joining us. I'm sorry I left you to listen to Sean's ramblings with our audio producer Dale last week, who I heard were spreading all sorts of nonsense and defiling my clean reputation. Just relaying the facts. Yeah. Make sure you go back through the archives. There's plenty of great stuff. Sign up for bonuses here or on patreon.com slash the underworld podcast.

Yeah, I think my latest one, it might be out today. Is it out today? I don't know. But I actually went up to a place called Hawke's Bay in New Zealand and spoke to this like life member of one of the gangs. Really interesting guy. Yeah, listen to that. I'm going to go up to a place called Hamilton next weekend as well and speak to some more gang members. So yeah, if you like that kind of stuff, sign up to the Patreon. It is solid AF.

Anyway, this week's episode might be a little bit controversial as my last one on Indian state hits was partly for the same reason, basically. And that is that both India and El Salvador are currently ruled by colourful strongmen who've built a pretty solid personality cult around them.

But also, because as I mentioned in the cold open, El Salvador's homicide rate has plummeted and its terrible street gangs, the Barrio 18 and MS-13, they've had their wings well and truly clipped by Anai Bukele's sweeping state of exception, which is still going strong today. I think it's been extended into 22 consecutive months.

And in case you're in El Salvador or you're a fan of Bukele and you're already typing out some angry YouTube comment about woke libs knowing nothing about living in constant fear, well, A, you're right, I don't. And B, listen to the show. Because while it's just easy to point at the homicide rates, there is way more to it besides...

And there's like a real rot at the heart of Bukele's government that should have anyone with a passing knowledge of Central America more than a little bit nervous. Yeah, see, I mean, it's actually tough for me because I, you know, I spent a fair amount of time there. I made three documentaries, one in 2015 when the homicide rate there was over 100, which is insane. I think I looked it up right before the show and it's 2.34 right now.

So, 100 is like six times what Chicago's is, you know, it's just brutal. And I spent a lot of time there with people who were, you know, living in constant fear because of the gang. So on the one hand, it's easy for me to recognize that Bukele has done some real worrying things. But on the other, if you're one of the people who had to live under the gangs for decades, like decades.

who had family members killed, and there's a lot of them, who got extorted every day, who lived just constantly, you know, afraid to go outside, and now you can walk the street safely. You know, I think we need to acknowledge that his actions, they look a lot different to them than it does to people like journalists in the West and NGOs in the West and things like that.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair if people want to, like, take to YouTube after this or whatever and say, like, I don't know, these two gringos don't know anything about living in constant fear of these. Well, one gringo. And you're really living in fear of the YouTube comments here. It's a little different. All right, lost the Mohicans over here. Yeah, I mean, of course, I don't know what it's like to live in El Salvador. I think I could say that. Fair? Yeah.

But there is way more going on beneath this like state of exception, which is basically martial law. I'm talking mass incarcerations, corruption, death squads, press freedom, state capture, all that tasty stuff. So yeah, if you just want to log on and type Viva Vucchella, audio gringos or something, you know, just save yourself some time. Stop it. Write it now. Yeah, there's some really interesting stuff going on here and I hope you guys enjoy it. Actually, if you want to write those comments, go ahead because that's engagement and, you know, we need that.

actually, yeah. So, you've done a bunch of work, some really, really great work in El Salvador, but I will just bore you with a little background on the 43rd president of El Salvador, Naib Armando Bukele-Oltes. Bukele is born in 1981 in San Salvador, the fifth child of Armando Bukele, an entrepreneur of Palestinian descent. Armando Bukele

Armando is raised a Christian but he converts to Islam in the 80s and he actually founds El Salvador's first mosque. Naib's mother is a Roman Catholic with Jewish heritage and he follows her into her faith. But in business Naib's father is the leader. At age 20 Naib drops out of university to join Armando's advertising agency.

In 1999, Naib founds his own agency and he runs political ads for the presidential campaigns of the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberación Nacional, or FMLN, El Salvador's biggest left-wing party, which came out of its grueling guerrilla conflict. More on that later. Bukele is hardly the Latin Don Draper, though, and he bounces between roles at a nightclub and as the head of a Yamaha dealership.

But in 2012, he shifts over to politics and he becomes the mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlan, a suburb of San Salvador. Here's the newspaper El País talking about those formative early days. Quote,

His audience was often left speechless, captivated as they watched the young mayor. So we've got this kind of nepo baby, bit prodigious guy hopping between professions. He's looking for the right fit, unlike both of us who landed in the wrong place at the wrong time. And suddenly he's in charge of this small but historic place, the first capital city of El Salvador. He's got a purported $2 million budget and he's keen to make his mark.

So first thing he does is start a youth scholarship fund, donating his own two grand salary to the cause. He also sets up a radio station encouraging young people to stay on in education. And he builds a massive highway. This is good stuff. Only Bukele pays for it with the help of a company owned by Venezuela's state oil company. More on that later too.

For now, though, buoyed by its successes in Nuevo Cascatlan, Bukele sets his sights a few miles away at the mayorship of San Salvador, the country's bustling capital, its metro area home to around a third of El Salvador's population.

He's only 33 years old at this point, and he swaps suits and ties for unbuttoned shirts and trainers with a trademark Vantablack beard and slick back hair. Apparently this is cool, but yeah, what do I know? I was 29 then and still prancing around in women's drainpipe jeans and tattered denim shirts like I was in the fucking Libertines or something. What are women's drainpipes? I just don't understand English culture, though the Libertines do...

Skinny jeans, basically. But I used to get girls' jeans to make them even more skinny, which is, I think we can both agree that is cool as. Never. In 2015, yeah, in 2015, Bukele wins the Merrill race on an FMNL ticket with populist phrases like, tenemos que cambiar la historia, or we must change history. And he employs family members in key positions. Almost from day one, Bukele takes aims at the gangs.

He builds or renovates a bunch of market plazas and vendor spots to get locals selling in the streets again without fear of getting terrorized by goons associated with MS-13 or Barrio 18.

He backs this up with a Rudy Giuliani-style plan to put streetlights on every corner and CCTV all over the city. The vendors thing in the markets is actually big because the gangs actually earn the majority of their income in El Salvador by extorting literally everyone from bus drivers to pupusa sellers. So markets were a huge target for them and trying to take away that level of income from them is an effective thing to do. Yeah, I think this is all really...

good stuff so far. I mean, yeah, like he's doing, he's doing cool stuff. He's making the streets safer. There's also whispers though. At this time, he's done a sweetheart deal with gangs to go soft on them. If they stay off his shiny new turf.

And that he's behind a plan to undermine two of El Salvador's biggest newspapers by creating fake mirror sites at their homepage, something known as the Troll Center case. Yeah, I think Neil Brandvold, who I had on talking about what happened in El Salvador, maybe like six months ago, maybe it was him or someone else was always telling me about like Bukele just having like a huge presence online, all sorts of people on his side, like troll farms basically on Facebook. And this is like 2015, 2016, I want to say. Maybe 2016, 2017, but he was...

really known for that sort of, you know, just online fighting. Tomfoolery. But like not him. Yeah, people like backing him up. But the rumors that of making a deal with the gangs is something that I feel like has dogged everyone in El Salvador in any position of power for like a decade or two. Yeah, yeah, for sure. There have been like so many stalled kind of abortive attempts to get on the gang's side in some way in the dark. Yeah, and as we're going to learn, and as you know, they have not worked very well at all.

all. So yeah, Bukele is making some pretty, you know, shifty dealings at the time. He's kind of pissing off the press and maybe doing some backroom deals with people who he shouldn't. But I mean, that beard, the hair gel and all those CCTV cameras, like how could you not love him? I mean, despite the cronyism, the dubious financial backing and the press scandals, Bukele is still the darling of media and think tankers all over the world.

And he speaks at tons of these wonky events about how he's helping turn San Salvador around from its gang misery. And, you know, to some extent, he's right. But there is plenty of misery still for the city's residents themselves. I mean, Danny's episode on MS-13 has already gone into the gang's history. So head back to that one if you want a big comprehensive rundown of all the terrible shit they've been up to since the 1980s. And that's when they emerged from the Salvadoran expat groups in Los Angeles.

And why are there Salvadoran expats in the States? Well, that's because war. A very bad one. I think it's really important at this point to give a quick rundown of El Salvador's insane history because it's so deeply woven into what's happening right now. Under Spanish rule, the territory had been cleaved into plantations of various luxury commodities like cocoa, indigo and coffee.

El Salvador wins independence in 1841, but control of the plantations stays in the hands of a rich white oligarchy, who basically relegate the 95% of the population who are indigenous or mestizo to serfdom. These so-called 14 families then rule via military dictatorship all the way up until 1932, and that's when left-wing peasants revolt.

But later that year, the family strike back with a colossal revenge called La Matanza, the slaughter. 30,000 are killed, particularly indigenous people who are marked for death by their traditional dress. The thing is, the war never really ends. The military keeps the country in a vice-like grip until 1979, and that's when a cadre of officers lead a coup and install their own junta.

Right-wing death squads then go on a rampage against the Hunter, bombing state buildings, newspapers, kidnapping and murdering civilians, all of that bad stuff. The leader of this anti-Hunter Hunter is a fascist named Roberto de Aubisson, aka Blowtorch Bob, whose psychopath men spark all-out civil war when they assassinate an archbishop in 1980. Do not do that. We've heard plenty of stories about doing that in this show.

Snipers attacked the Archbishop's funeral, probably don't do that either, killing 42 people. You'd think that would be a big no-no in a Catholic country, and yeah, it is, but later that year leftists formed the FMLN, that party, and fight the fascists in a war that leaves 75,000 people dead. Oh, and guess which side our countries were on? Yeah, the fascists. Love that Cold War.

The FMLN is for many people a revered force, intertwined with Catholic liberation theology and the gatekeeper for Salvadoran leftism. You know, there have been reports or studies done and there were like 95% or 90% of civilians killed during the war were killed by the right wing and like 5 or 10% were killed by the FMLN.

So it was kind of just, they were definitely more popular in the mountains. Yeah, and actually, people can actually have a look at the notes on the Patreon that will come out at some point soon, because I did a bunch of research into this. It's like really fascinating. I didn't know a huge amount about it, but that was a real grubby, horrible conflict. In 1984, El Salvador elects its first civilian leaders in 50 years.

But thanks in part to Western intelligence agents, he is toppled by a right-winger in 1989 and the newly installed Arena Party escalates this conflict. On November 16, 1989, members of the Aclacatl Brigade, a paramilitary group, storms the campus of the University of Central America in South Salvador, drags six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter from their beds and murders them.

This killing shocks the world, finally, and by 1992 peace accords end the war, beginning a UN-appointed Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

But really, by this point the people of El Salvador are so damaged by the war's indiscriminate bloodletting and thousands more have fled north to the US that the country is a complete basket case. Salvadorans abroad are poor and they stick together, forming gangs including MS-13, which sometimes also includes refugees from other wars in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

It's hardly surprising that a group of deeply traumatized men with almost no familial ties in the U.S. and access to heavy weaponry would do pretty well on the black market. And

And soon, many of them drift back home to cause chaos there. That's not entirely accurate, right? 18th Street had been there for a while. And it had other sorts of Guatemalans, Hondurans, Mexicans even in there. So Salvadorans ended up joining that. MS-13 was formed organically by Salvadorans there when they were getting picked on by other black and Latino gangs. And they rose up there. But they kind of started out as like

Just like headbangers. They were into like heavy metal and like drew, you know, devil signs and smoked weed and got into fights. And then they slowly grew and grew into worse and worse elements. But it really got started back in El Salvador because the U.S. started deporting some of them when they were arrested for crimes.

deported them back to El Salvador, which is this country that had, you know, maybe small groups of gangs, but nothing really violent or national or even international like that. So when these gangs who, you know, were fully immersed in LA's gang culture and in prison gangs and all that got sent back to El Salvador, the country was just basically had a vacuum of power, didn't know what to do. And they sort of took advantage of the chaos and started forming up and really just taking over the country.

Yeah, yeah. That's I mean, what you're saying there is that people who like loud music and have lots of tattoos are to be feared or worried about. I mean, those are red flags. Who do we know? I don't know. Do we know anyone like that? But yeah, I mean, these street gangs, right? The MS-13 and Barrio de Siocho, yeah, 18th Street Gang, they're not...

as powerful as the Mexican cartels or the Italian mafia. They're like, they're so volatile that the big cartels use them sparingly to ship gear up and down Central America. But in El Salvador, they are a menace. Like you said, they really are into shaking people down. That's their moneymaker.

MS-13 is thought to have up to 50,000 members. Barrio 18 is reckoned to have 22,000. That's according to Insight Crime. I mean, that is a crazy number of gangsters on the books in such a small country. And yeah, beside the drugs, they make their money from auto theft, property, money laundering, just terrorizing local people into extortion. I mean, they shake down everyone from Coca-Cola vendors to bus drivers, and they get millions of dollars each year from this.

Politicians are often in their pockets or they're cowed into letting them run amok. Cabinet and military leaders with ties to the drug cartels down south often let them do whatever they want. Small kids are employed as lookouts and initiations often include torture, rape and murder. I mean, these are pretty depraved groups. Successive governments have tried facing down the gangs, of course.

In 2003, President Francisco Flores implements what he calls the Mano Dura, or Iron Fist, and that empowers cops and the military to arrest and random search suspected gang leaders. His successor ups the ante to something called Super Mano Dura, by allowing authorities to reach into gangs' financial dealings.

But these are ineffective, and prison overcrowding just leads to a hardening of both of the main gangs behind bars. In 2012, President Mauricio Funes instead brokers a deal with the gang leaders, alongside the Catholic Church, to transfer mobsters to lower security prisons in the christening of Amsterdam's so-called peace zones. But again, the gangs have friends in higher places than the Salvador presidency, basically, and the deal is soon punctured by a spate of killings.

By 2015, when Bukele takes office as mayor of San Salvador, El Salvador has registered 6,657 homicides. Yeah, that was the first year that I went to El Salvador to make a documentary. It was really something else. I think the first night, you need to film murder scenes for the doc, it's like a

Sounds weird to say, but it's like a traditional scene that you get for a doc like that. And the first night we didn't even have to look far. We were just driving around coming back from somewhere else. And we were able to find that, you know, like you would just go, you would go tag along with the guys who work at the morgue and you'd be sitting there for like half an hour, an hour before you got a call to go out there into the city. I mean, think about it. 6,657. I think you're about to mention it's 6.3 million people in the entire country, right?

New York City in its worst year in 1990, right? There's a city of 8 million, 9 million people, 8 and a half million maybe. And its worst year I think had like 2,200, right? So New York City's worst year ever when it was like the bloodiest crack wars, all that was- And that's bad. That's really bad. Yeah, yeah. 2,200. Horrific. I mean, you're talking five or six murders a day in the city.

El Salvador is smaller and had three times as many murders. Yeah, I mean, I think 2015, right? So I guess there's plenty of wars kicking off in the Middle East. ISIS is on the run. And the 103 homicides per 100,000 people that year that El Salvador registers, that is like

higher than most countries that are at war. Like, it's by far the worst in the world. The next worst is Venezuela with 90 per 100,000. Below that is Honduras with 57. So like, El Salvador is not even close. I mean, to put that in context, that year, the US rate, it's 2015, right? It's 4.9. And that's not even that great. The UK is just one. So yeah, this is...

fully awful the murder rate is appalling and El Salvador's people live in near constant fear I mean we did that episode with Jason Motlack a few weeks ago about the guy in Haiti who sent his boys to school on the bus they both got killed in a single day I mean so sad but

That was happening in El Salvador every single day, I mean every few hours during this period. So as Bukele's star rises though, this homicide rate drops significantly. In fact, by 2019, when he runs to become the country's president, it has dropped to just a third of what it was. Still sky high by most standards of course, but not the war zone it has been.

And this is key. The rate was already plummeting before Bukele came to power. And most experts agree it had pretty much nothing to do with him at that time. Yeah, I mean, again, I kind of disagree. At that time, yeah, maybe. The highest year ever was, like we said, 100. It usually averaged in those years, I think, 70, 80. And it was down to, what, like the low 40s at that point? Yeah.

If you're looking at where it is right now, they had less than 200 murders last year total. The murder rate's around like two or three. So it's kind of like, you can say what you want about him, but it's impossible to deny how much the stuff that he's done has caused the murder rate to drop.

yeah yeah i think also it's important to note like the extortion and all that shaking down that's still going on like the murder rate might be going down but the gangs are still really really powerful right in this period oh you're talking about 2019 but not not now yeah okay sorry yeah no not now no no they're on their ass now but yeah back then they're still like sort of sky high in a power so bukele's cult of personality grows through his eagerness to paint fellow politicians as corrupt

or working for the gangs, or worse. I mean, you know, not untrue in many cases. He calls one lawmaker a traidora, or traitor, and another one a bruja, which anyone who loved Juan Sebastian Verón will know means witch.

Having already kind of bluffed and threatened to ditch the FMLN, in 2017 the party expels Bukele for defaming female party members. I mean, fine. You might think being jettisoned from the FMLN, this sacred cow of Salvadoran politics, might puncture Bukele's ambitions somewhat. No, none of it.

That year he founds his own party, Nuevas Ideas, New Ideas, before switching to the right-wing Ghana party for a 2019 presidential run. Bukele goes hard on social media. The guy is like a top poster and he doesn't bother with debates at all. No debates, no problem. In February 2019, Bukele wins the vote and he's inaugurated at San Salvador's National Palace that June.

Gangs at this point, they still control an estimated 80% of the country's territory. That is mad. And he's come to power promising to smash them once and for all. And to be fair to Bukele, not that you'd expect him to, he doesn't just sit around styling his hair and buying aviators all day just like Danny does.

Later that month, he launches what he calls a seven-step plan against gang violence, beginning with the preparation of police and special forces for raids and mass arrests. He also stations officers in places known to be major gang extortion hotspots. Then he opens a youth program, similar to the one he'd done before. Stage three is a leveling up of law enforcement, weaponry, vehicles and tech.

Stage four actually begins two years later, so there's a bit of a gap. That involves security forces patrolling gang-controlled areas, boots on the ground, basically. People can see Bukele's plan in action.

Stage five, called extraction, is essentially besieging gang-held cities and smoking out their gangsters and chucking them all in jail. Six, Bukele calls this stage integration, and it's combating gang crime at source, a.k.a. jump-starting employment and anti-poverty drives. Good stuff. And seven, Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box? No.

It is, well, we don't actually know what stage seven is. But Kelly hasn't told us yet. But he's been busy elsewhere. Take this. In 2020, he gets 40 members of the military to invade. Yes, that's right. Invade the Legislative Assembly to scare members of Congress into approving a massive loan from Washington to bulk out the seven stage plan against the gangs.

He clears out swaths of the judiciary, which he claims the gangs have corrupted, but which opposition leaders claim is just basically a judicial coup to pack the Supreme Court in his favour. Then Bukele embarks on a period of, quote, extreme gerrymandering. Not my words, the words of Washington analysts. Basically, he redraws El Salvador's map to wipe out around 70% of its elected positions. I guess...

That's like if you've got Atlanta and Georgia or Phoenix and Arizona and Biden just goes, you know what, get rid of all these rinky-dink rural counties and just have them all vote in the city. I mean, anyway, folks call these new congressmen, quote, button pushers because they're so keen to approve anything the president does without question. I mean, now we're starting to sound like a proper Central American regime, Cold War style, constitutional dictatorship, here we come. And the thing is, sure, some people in El Salvador care about this.

journalists, opposition politicians, NGO, you know, like the woke brigade, those guys. But Bukele's popularity is just soaring higher than Danny's pulse when he's writing angry comments below Drake's music videos on YouTube. Oh, yeah, this is like the shtick that you guys started last episode. It's good stuff. Good stuff. Real topical, real funny. Yeah, I think we've already established that my cultural references stopped in about 2008. So, yeah, this is about as good as it gets.

Anyway, this is all because of that falling homicide rate. Like I said, it is falling through the floor. It's 44% down on 2019, which itself was way, way down on the previous year. In fact, the 2020 rate of 21 might still be high, but it's now less than half that of Venezuela, already half of Honduras, and well below Colombia, Belize, even Mexico.

I mean, you know what's better than a superman odoura? That's right. Superman odoura al estilo Bukele deal. I don't know if it's all just because of the murder rate, though. I think that's obviously like the biggest decider because that, you know, now the economy is doing much better. People are able to walk in the streets in their neighborhoods. They're under their control. But Bukele also has like, you know, the sort of Trump populist rhetoric that I think appeals to certain. I mean, there it looks like it's appealing to a lot of people here. It appeals to certain people. But he's like,

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And they were like – so one of the American politicians was saying how concerned he was about the painting moving. And Bukele answered back. He was like, we moved it like down a different corridor in the airport. Who do you think you are telling us how to run our country? Something along those lines, which I think for a country like El Salvador that's been through a lot and I think has put down a lot, people like having this brash president who doesn't take crap from people even if it's an American politician. Yeah, I mean he's like –

he's epically good on Twitter. Like he, he really knows how to, how to push out the zingers. So, I mean, I guess like, yeah, he's just a, he's just a proper tough guy. And that, that speaks. I mean,

People hadn't really seen the effect of the state during all these different plans from previous presidents. Now they can see boots on the ground. They can see the gangs retreating into the shadows. They can actually see it with their eyes how the gangs are being pushed aside and they like it. I mean, it's fair enough.

But yeah, this big spiky stick that Bukele has been wielding in public, it might actually be a particularly long carrot instead, right? Because in 2020, Central American newspaper El Faro publishes an explosive series of exposés about a series of clandestine meetings held between the Bukele administration and leaders of the gangs behind bars. The result? A truce.

If the gangs tone down their violence and, according to US sources, agree to provide political support to his party, Nueva Cideas, Bukele promises them a bunch of goodies. Some of these guys are just straight up giving cash, others cell phones. Some are allowed visits by sex workers. In one case, an official is even caught on tape saying he's freed an MS-13 kingpin and escorted him across the border to Guatemala.

This is right as COVID is sweeping the world too, and according to Alfaro, Bukele is even able to get the gangs to support his tough pandemic lockdowns, which were a success, basically. I mean, these things are working. We're into 2021 now, when you actually did your show on MS13, which is bonkers, but Bukele is just getting started.

Late that year, he fires dozens of judges and appoints over 150 replacements, shockingly, all of them very big fans of his seven-step plan, congressional overhaul and the COVID lockdowns.

He also tears up a rule forbidding presidents to run for two terms, which, uh, oh, that doesn't sound good. But the hair gel, the suit and sneakers combo. Oh, and Bitcoin, of course. And in 2021, El Salvador becomes the first country on Earth to establish Bitcoin as legal tender because, of course, the world's coolest dictator is also a crypto bro.

Bukele even sketches out plans for a tax-free crypto haven powered by geothermal energy from a volcano. And he calls this utopia...

Bitcoin city. Okay, I guess you can't buy class. Bukele says he'll build this Shangri-La by issuing a $10 billion bond that'll be invested half in Bitcoin and half in building infrastructure. And look, I'm not going to get into Bitcoin too much. People like Bitcoin. I don't like Bitcoin. Bukele says El Salvador's holding of it is worth almost half a billion dollars. That is not actually a huge amount of money.

I mean, who doesn't want to live in a smart city carved into the side of a volcano? Let's just leave the crypto bit there. The point is, Bukele is cooking. A Human Rights Watch official warns that, quote, democracy in El Salvador is on the edge of the abyss. But Salvadorans, in the main, they're just happy not to be hunted down daily by thugs.

I mean, turkeys will actually vote for Christmas when Bernard Manning's bearing down on them with a kitchen knife and a stiffy. Sorry, sorry. I should translate that joke for our American listeners. Turkeys will even vote for Thanksgiving when the Tyson Foods guy is bearing down on them with a kitchen knife and a boner. Got it? I don't. That's actually probably worse than the first one, which I didn't understand at all. You know, sometimes when I see these things written down, I start crying in my mind, and that was one of those moments.

The gangs haven't just disappeared, of course. I mean, they are still about. They're keeping their heads down because there are cops and paramilitaries everywhere. And they've had directives from the leadership behind bars that they're going to be in deep shit if they go all Escobar on the state. They are still extorting, though. They're picking on small fry, the cabbies, the street vendors and bus operators. They can still make hundreds of thousands, if not millions each month for squeezing poor locals out of their hard earned colognes.

And while they might not be killing in large numbers, they're still all over the streets with collaborators, lookouts and informants making sure residents live by their laws, not the laws of the land. They're just intimidating at this point. And Bukele's fragile peace, the one he's brokered with cell phones and prostitutes and cash and furtive drives across the border, this is all going to come down crashingly bad in typically Salvadoran style. Because now we're up to spring 2022, where I began the episode.

The gang truce is already teetering when an MS-13 leader is arrested while travelling in a government vehicle. This reportedly sends the gangs over the edge, and 72 hours later, almost 100 Salvadorans are dead and the truce is as over as JNCO jeans.

Bukele ditches the carrot and he goes full stick. He announces a 30-day so-called state of exception, martial law essentially, that suspends a bunch of constitutional rights to go after and lock up as many gangsters as possible. Unsurprisingly, the legislators Bukele has gerrymandered into office, they back the plan. Bukele then takes to Twitter.

Don't think they're going to be set free, he writes. We are going to ration the same food we are giving now to inmates. And if the international community is worried about their little angels, they should come and bring them food, because I'm not going to take budget money away from the schools to feed these terrorists. Finally, Bukele adds, going on a bit, I guess he's got a verified account, they're not about to go out to the patio. A message to the gangs, because of your actions, your homeboys will not even see one ray of sunlight.

I mean, this guy is not bluffing. 30 days pass, and Bukele gets another month-long extension. In the first two months, Salvadoran authorities arrest over 33,000 people, which is a third of the entire prison population of the UK, which has over 10 times the population of El Salvador.

Here's Insight Crime with a description of the state of exception. Quote, "...the emergency laws deprive Salvadorans of basic constitutional rights, including the right to legal defense and the freedom of movement, while loosening rules on making arrests and allowing the state to intercept civilian communications. The state of emergency has also suspended constitutional rights to defense, meaning detainees can be held indefinitely on vague charges without the need for an arrest warrant or evidence to back up criminal allegations."

Under the emergency laws, detainees also lose the right to a court hearing within 72 hours of arrest and lawyers and civil society organisations have said they cannot speak to those detained. Uncorporated raw intelligence, rumours and information sourced from social media profiles have formed the basis of arrests.

I mean, kids as young as 12 can now be tried for gang-related crime, and at least half those arrested are now for, quote, unlawful association. Basically, any displays of gang ties or association with anybody in the gangs. The state even picks up young folks their intel suggests will soon try to enter the gangs, so-called chequeos. Basically, if you know somebody in MS-13 or Barrio 18, you're basically going to get picked up by the feds.

Writes Inside Crime again, quote, this is paradoxically the most troubling and the most effective aspect of this crackdown. Yeah, that's a great quote, huh? It really just kind of captures the conflicting aspects of all this. Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of the crux of all of this, right? Because guess what? I mean, if you get the gangsters off the streets, gang crime goes down a lot.

extortion plummets as does that already falling murder rate which drops almost 60% again by the end of 2022 I think you mentioned this El Salvador actually has the lowest homicide rate in the region

In fact, it's worked so well, the state of exemption has never ended. Bukele has extended it 22 times since the bloodshed in March 2022, sweeping up almost 80,000 suspected gangsters, shaving their heads and confining them in a giant mega prison built in 2023 called Sekot.

or the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. It's around 20 miles away from San Salvador. Built in a single year, it has capacity for 40,000 inmates and it's the largest prison in Latin America.

Nobody has been released from it yet. Inmates eat with their hands and sleep in cells in dozens of other men on four-story bunk beds. Yeah, I mean, look, all the prisons there have been bad, like really bad. I mean, this one seems like, you know, Alcatraz type of deal, but like they're all really bad. The ones in the villages were worse because they were kind of just like holding cells and

And they'd be like, you know, 20 yards by 20 yards. And there'd be like hundreds of people stacked in there on top of each other. Those are the ones, if you've seen like the famous photos of prisoners in El Salvador, that's usually what they're, what they're of. But, uh, yeah, gnarly, gnarly stuff. It's not Norway for sure. Yeah. This reminds me of some of the stuff I'd done in drug war in the Philippines as well. A few years ago. Yeah. Like over a hundred guys in like a provincial police station jail cell. It's like absolutely insane. Uh,

pretty bad and like yeah i guess it's like not so much the conditions in this place it's just the scale of it is is unbelievable and people should check out i think there's a bbc video of it uh where they got access to it and it's like it is like something out of a of a sci-fi movie i mean there is no ventilation only two toilets to each cell which is like hundreds of guys and they're using it in front of each other so uh imagine that smell after a breakfast of frijoles

Jesus. Naturally, international prison guidelines have been thrown out the window. Well, I mean, there isn't a window, but yeah. Critics have called it a, quote, black hole of human rights. I mean, guess how many shits the prison director gives? Here are the psychopaths, the terrorists, the murderers who had our country in mourning, he tells the visiting BBC crew. Pretty well rehearsed, I would imagine that line.

Salvador in prison is already running at 150% capacity today and some say Secot is just a place Bukele can throw undesirables instead of giving them the death penalty.

But there is growing proof he's doing that off the books as well. Amnesty International has reported 327 cases of enforced disappearances since the state of exception was inaugurated. Yeah, I mean, that's been a thing too for a while, right? The sort of extrajudicial killings, the bodies never turn up. That's nothing new. Yeah, the police do not have a good record in El Salvador going back a long, long time.

Quote, reducing gang violence by replacing it with state violence cannot be a success, says Amnesty's America's Director. If this course is not corrected, the instrumentalization of the criminal process and the establishment of a policy of torture in the prison system could persist.

Which is, you know, that's what Amnesty has to say. It's not what I'm saying, it's what Amnesty is saying. But Kelly has gone after the media too because, you know, how are you supposed to be a cool dictator without shitting on the press? Reporters are threatened frequently and they're barred for covering events. El Salvador now ranks 115th in the World Press Freedom Index.

Bukele has sort of yeah but gnawed it by telling delegates in the American CPAC conference this year that, quote, to enjoy that membership of the press, you must do your duty as a reporter, report the facts and not be a puppet of those who finance them. Cue a lot of cheers, I would imagine. El Faro launched a legal campaign against the government. Then it relocated to Costa Rica when it was revealed Pegasus spyware had been installed on its reporters' phones. Does Bukele care? Nah.

His lawmakers have responded by approving a new law allowing digital spying and levying sentences of 10 to 15 years for news media that reproduce messages from gangs. Basically, he goes after anyone by saying they associate with the gangs, which again, historically kind of is the case.

Funnily enough, this seems to extend to reporting on alleged corruption among Bukele's own rank and file. Take his chief of staff, who's accused of involvement in a massive money laundering scheme channeling money from Venezuela's state oil firm into Nueva Sedeas. Or...

the former security and justice minister, who's given his own construction firm a bunch of lucrative contracts whose costs have just happened to then balloon. One former Bekele security advisor who had leaked info to reporters about stake ties to the drug trade has actually turned up dead.

his body showing signs of torture. One source has told the New Yorker that Bukele is building a quote, cyberpunk banana republic, which that's brilliant. Adding that quote, I worry that when they want to act, we'll already be in another Nicaragua. And if you don't know about Daniel Ortega and Nicaragua, just say that is pretty bad. Pretty, pretty, pretty bad.

However, Bukele's popularity is still sky high. This February, he won his second newly legal term with almost 85% of the vote. Not only that, he's super popular too across like the rest of Latin America. Yeah, he's like...

He just kind of oozes that machismo, right, that's so popular in the region. I mean, he announces his win before the ballots have even been cast, and he toasts the victory by saying that El Salvador is now the, quote, first time there is a one-party state in a fully democratic system, which is a tiny red flag. His VP adds, even more ominously, that, quote, we are not dismantling democracy. We are eliminating it, replacing it with something new, which...

I guess it's kind of a tropical East Germany, but...

Yeah, Bukele isn't letting up with all of this. He's vowed to keep hammering the gangs and filling prisons with anybody associated with them, or maybe not. His legislature has approved mass trials of up to 900 people at a time, and the VP has said that he wants accumulative sentences in the hundreds of years for anybody who's been in the gangs. Last month, Bukele even announced he was investigating his entire executive branch for corruption live on TV because, of course, quote,

Somebody once asked me, are you afraid of death? I said, of course, nobody wants to die. I don't want to die. But I know that I'll die one day like everybody else. Death is the one thing we can't escape. A hundred years from now, none of us here will be alive. It's likely that nobody here knows their grandfather's father's name.

But if there is one thing I fear, it is leaving a bad legacy. There are some presidents, some in prison, some on the run, but most are remembered as criminals. That's not how I want to be remembered. So I don't steal, because I don't want to be remembered as a criminal or corrupt.

I mean, there's a theory the U.S. isn't going too hard against him because they see him as a useful anti-communist bulwark against China's incursions into Latin America, which I guess holds a grim mirror to the atrocities carried out in the 80s in the name of beating the Reds. Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that entirely because he's kind of playing both, right? He's involved with the Chinese and the U.S. as well. And it's kind of like not to, you know,

downplay what's going on, but it doesn't seem that serious in that regard. But also I think the reason, well, you know, he's still fighting with the U.S. about other stuff, right? Like about the painting with the U.S. congressman or senator or whatever it was. But I think one thing that would explain it better, in my opinion, is that migrants coming from El Salvador has dropped tremendously since Bukele cracked down on the gangs and the streets just got safer. Right?

Right. People are staying because the economy is working better now. And a lot of people who are fleeing, I don't even like calling them migrants. They were practically refugees. They were fleeing violence. They were fleeing the violence of the gangs. That's who, you know, I did a bunch of stories in that in the second half of, you know, 2015, 2016, 2017, 20, all that. There are a lot of Salvadorans that were leaving and coming to the U.S. So since his crackdown has started, you know,

It's way down. I don't know the percentage, but I know it's significant. And that's like a top one or two issue in America right now for the upcoming elections, right? It's like that and inflation are the two biggest issues. So like, I would assume that has a lot more to do with it. You know, China, I think is also on everyone's mind.

I think also what he's done really sort of cutely is he's played on the partisanship in the US. So a lot of the stuff you'll see hammering him comes from like quite overtly democratic stuff. Yeah. And then he's been, I mean, one of the quotes that I gave a while back was like, that was at a CPAC conference. He's really like,

tying his wagon to the Republican horse. I mean, this is like, it is a lot of stuff that would fall into the more Republican side of the debate, right? Like the immigration. I guess that's kind of a bipartisan thing, but he's really tried to sort of position himself as being a sort of friend to Republicans. And I think the guy that he was shitting on on Twitter, wasn't that a Democratic senator or something from Massachusetts? I think so. Yeah, the people that are piping up about him

tend to be on the blue team and I think he's like going for the red team a bit but yeah I mean I'm not judging anybody who's lived under the constant threat of the gangs or even just lived off a few bucks a day in some Salvadoran village with like no future I can see why everyone has turned out to vote for Bukele I mean he must be an incredibly exciting thing to have after so many disappointing leaders and

But Bukele is also 100% turning into a constitutional dictator. I mean, he actually wants people to stop calling him the world's coolest dictator this year. Now he's a, quote, philosopher king. And maybe the gangs are finished, but, you know, that would be great. But now you've got the world's highest incarceration rate by a mile in a country sandwiched between the world's biggest drug producers, distributors and consumers.

and a prison system already buckling and which must be costing an absolute fortune, not to mention all the powers and policemen everywhere. As a chief of the US Institute of Police said recently, quote, a clash between Bukele's ends and methods seem inevitable. And that...

Should worry anybody. Look, buddy, I got my own problems to worry about. Okay. Well, we can worry about that when it comes to it. But also one thing I wanted to point out, which is I think says a lot about El Salvador's leaders, as you just mentioned, have mostly been ineffective. I think before Bukele, three out of the four before Bukele were convicted of corruption, like massive, massive levels of corruption. Yeah.

One, I think, fled. I don't remember exactly. I should have looked it up when I knew we were doing these episodes. But it's three out of four, I believe, were convicted of corruption. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, your show gets into it from 2021 quite a bit, but their relationship to the major cartels in the region as well, right? They're like... You know, the MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang, they're not...

they're not really moving big shipments for the cartels. But the politicians in El Salvador are kind of working alongside the bigger dudes, right? So it's like that's where the big corruption and the allowing of transshipment and stuff like that is happening. It's in that elite class. And so those are not good politicians. So yeah, I mean, just another reason that people should be on Bukele's side, really. I mean, he's...

doing stuff finally i don't know man i don't know uh i should probably stop talking now yeah tune in uh patreon.com slash underworld the underworld podcast sign up on spotify or itunes for more bonuses next week i believe i'm doing an episode on a insane biker gang war oh yeah from our friends up north that it's a it's a barn burner i believe is what they what they say anyway next time sign up do things

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