States of Exception and Bukele’s 'Mano Dura' Approach to Tackling Crime
Spotlight on security issues in Latin America. By Prof Nicolas Forsans
Security is a major issue in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), where the region has some of the highest rates of homicide in the world. To combat it, an increasing number of governments are resorting to extraordinary measures, suspending civil rights in an effort to regain control. With states of exception on the rise, from El Salvador’s relentless ‘mano dura’ crackdown to new declarations in Ecuador, Honduras, and Chile, these policies promise public safety but risk eroding the region's democratic foundations. Can such drastic measures genuinely reduce crime and ensure stability? And, more importantly, do they bring lasting peace—or simply serve as tools of control?
In this article, we explore the growing prevalence of these policies, their effectiveness, why Bukele’s approach worked where it failed elsewhere, and the heavy price often paid in the process.
States of Exception as “tools of control”
Crime rates in Latin America, including homicides and femicides, are among the highest in the world. The causes of violence and its perpetrators – which include state agents – are complex, as both organised crime and gangs are structures that have become sophisticated and strengthened over time.
According to InsightCrime, at least 117,492 people were murdered in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2023, putting the median homicide rate around 20 per 100,000 people. But thbey add that homicide data in many countries are missing or unreliable, so the actual number is likely higher.
Homicide Rate in Latin America by Country, per 100,000 population, 2023 (Source: InsightCrime) Governments in northern Central America, characterized by fragile institutions and lack of compliance with international human rights standards, have failed to provide effective and sustainable responses to crime and violence. They have instead reverted to the use of ‘states of emergency’, or ‘states of exception’, a measure that has gained popularity in Latin America.
The governments of Ecuador, Honduras (now in a state of emergency for 20 months), and El Salvador have all extended their existing states of emergency earlier this month (in El Salvador, for the 31st time since 2022) while others in Chile, Peru and Haiti have also implemented similar measures this year.
“States of exception” typically suspend civil rights such as the inviolability of the home, freedom of movement, and freedom of assembly, while militarizing the police to tackle criminality and militarizing law enforcement.
In addition, at least 30 others were declared in Latin America and the Caribbean between April 2020 and April 2023, according to a June 2023 report from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. States of exception inherently “expand the power of the executive at the expense of democratic checks and balances, a power that often tends to persist well after the initial emergency has passed”.
This is a worrying feature in a region increasingly characterised by “democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation where sitting elected executives tend to become elected autocrats”.
Number of states of exception declared in Latin America & the Caribbean, April 2020-April 2023 (Source: CSIS)
Few countries have successfully reduced crime rates through these measures, and InsightCrime points to their ineffectiveness - “they bring immediate operational, political, and media benefits, but few promised results”. Instead, they have generated serious concerns about human rights violations. They are tools for “silencing the opposition and pleasing citizens”.
“States of exception serve the primary purpose of, in emergency situations, the maintenance and preservation of constitutional order. They should not, instead, undermine it or permit security forces and other agents and officials of the State to act arbitrarily and at their discretion”
WOLA.
After two years of emergency rule in El Salvador, Amnesty International reported 327 cases of enforced disappearances, more than 78,000 arbitrary detentions and 102,000 people deprived of their freedom.
While the crackdown has made El Salvador the safest country in Latin America and the Caribbean, “reducing gang violence by replacing it with state violence cannot be a success”, Amnesty International adds.
A state of exception was decreed by Rafael Noboa last year and has now been extended again until December 2, 2024. My piece below reviews the country’s approach to security since the turn of the century:
Bukele’s ‘mano dura’ approach to Crime
Following a massive security campaign, the government of President Nayib Bukele mobilised thousands of security agents and targeted criminal gangs. In 2015, with 106.8 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, El Salvador was one of the most violent countries on the planet. By 2023, it became the safest, with a homicide rate of 2.4 per 100,000 people in 2023.
According to investigations by the Salvadoran Attorney General’s Office and the US task force Vulcan, in 2020 the Bukele administration sealed a pact with the MS13 and Barrio 18 gangs to reduce violence and homicides and gain electoral and governance benefits in a country where gangs control large portions of territory.
That pact somewhat unravelled in March 2022 and generated a violent response from the gangs that caused at least 87 deaths in the space of a single weekend.
And so Bukele declared war on crime and gangs. On 26 March 2022, he established a “state of emergency” suspending a host of constitutional rights and brought in the army. In the two weeks that followed, authorities conducted more than 8,500 arrests. The state of emergency permits arrest without warrants, often carried out via anonymous tips and at police and military discretion.
The crackdown delivered on Bukele’s promise — by early 2023, the maras—powerful gangs that once controlled significant parts of the counrtry, extorted large portions of the population and turned El Salvador into one of the world's most violent countries— had virtually disappeared.
Today, El Salvador is the country with the highest incarceration rate (close to 2 percent of the population, see figure below) and the lowest homicide rate in the world (at 1.6 per 100,000 people).
Source: ICPR, World Prison Brief The construction of ‘mega prisons’ facilitated those incarcerations. The prison, which the government claims can house up to 40,000 inmates, has become “a mainstay of Bukele’s propaganda videos touting the state of exception” (NACLA). The FT claims the jail gave inmates less space than livestock, with just 0.6 sq metres of cell space each.
Given the apparent success of Bukele’s approach to crime and gang violence, politicians around the region have made promises to bring Bukele-style mano dura policies to their home countries. And Bukele became Latin America’s most admired personality.
Democratic Backsliding in Latin America
Across the region there is greater demand for law and order, and voters feel increasingly indifferent to the type of regime that governs them — as long it improves their life. Security issues regularly top voters’ concerns in the region, as most governments have failed to mount a response against organised crime that is both effective and respectful of democratic principles. While Colombia and Chile face significant security challenges, both leftist presidents rejected El Salvador’s approach.
A recent study by FLACSO Chile entitled “Mano Dura y erosión democrática en América Latina” has found that, in the four countries studied (Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador y Uruguay) two-thirds of those surveyed expressed “a feeling of fear, a feeling of institutional orphanhood” and they believe organised crime to be more sophisticated than the State itself. They also revealed a “nostalgia among the population for discipline and the recognition of authority, associated with severe punishments”.
Illegal migration and drug trafficking are two factors often cited as “responsible for the security situation” in the four countries studied.
In Ecuador, large-scale drug trafficking represents a different type of crime than previously known in the country - it was previously associated with Colombia and Mexico (El Pais).
In Chile, which has also witnessed a sharp increase in violence, the presence of criminal gangs and the increase in homicides with firearms tend to be associated in the eyes of those surveyed “with illegal migration of Venezuelans”. In Costa Rica, to “illegal migration of Nicaraguans”.
Politicians are often blamed for the deterioration of the security situation, as are democratic values such as the protection of human rights and due judicial process which, those surveyed argue, “limit the actions they consider necessary to confront crime”.
Gang Response to Crackdowns
Repressive anti-crime policies are nothing new in Latin America. In Mexico, President Felipe Calderón famously declared war on the country's drug cartels in late 2006. In the early 2000s the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras implemented ‘mano dura’ policies to address rising insecurity.
Two academics have tried to shed some light on Bukele’s apparent success in cracking down on violence when similar crackdowns had failed elsewehere. History shows that when the state declares unconditional war on crime, criminal groups have at least two powerful incentives to "fight fire with fire":
self-defense and persuading the state to backtrack —leading to more, rather than less, violence. In Mexico, the authors note that “cartel-related homicides multiplied by a factor of eight after President Felipe Calderón declared a "battle with no quarter" against drug-trafficking groups”;
Mano dura policies tend to trigger counterproductive changes in the organisational structure of criminal groups. In El Salvador, the maras were at first “loose constellations of small, scattered, and relatively nonviolent cliques” until the mid-2000s when governments implemented ‘mano dura’ policies. These crackdowns brought clique leaders physically together in loosely supervised prisons, and they evolved into powerful and cohesive national organisations.
The crackdown in El Salvador succeeded “not only because of its intensity, but also because of the (unintended) consequences of the pact between the gangs and the Bukele government”.
One would have expected the maras to respond with more violence, but the army found little resistance. Three years of negotiations between the government and the gangs had driven a wedge between gang leaders, who had long operated from behind bars, and their rank-and-file members in the streets. They explain: “while leaders reaped the immediate benefits of the pact (like better prison conditions, protection from extradition, and, in some cases, early release), it was the rank and file who had to refrain from using violence—a costly sacrifice that made it harder for them to carry out extortions, protect gang turf, and resist arrest. To enforce the pact and avoid losing control over the rank and file, the gangs' top brass, known as ‘ranflas’, centralised control, leaving their organizations without capable lieutenants who could lead in their absence”.
By undermining the maras' ability to coordinate a response and dissuading gang members from fighting back, the pact provided an opportunity to “cripple the gangs with very little resistance by embracing a sudden, unconditional crackdown”.
A crackdown incompatible with democratic checks and balances
But the result is that El Salvador has become a country "without gangs and without democracy”, and that’s because the human cost of cracking down has been huge.
Tens of thousands are yet to face trial (Infobae).
A crackdown of the scope and intensity of Bukele's is incompatible with democratic checks and balances - Bukele succeeded because he had already captured or undermined all institutions of horizontal accountability.
Similar efforts to emulate Bukele’s model in Ecuador and Honduras are likely to fail because the conditions generated by Bukele's gang pact —critical for the crackdown's success— are all context-specific and unlikely to be easily replicated elsewhere.
Is There a Real-World Alternative to Bukele’s ‘mano dura’ on Crime?
El barrio La Perseverancia, en Bogotá, el 25 de septiembre de 2024 That’s the question asked in Americas Quarterly by the former deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas Division. While acknowledging that no model is “flawless or automatically replicable”, the AQ piece cites the cases of Guatemala, São Paulo, Brazil, and Bogotá in Colombia as possible alternatives, where the writer claims a combination of “effective investigation and punishment with social policies aimed at social inclusion has brought tangible results without compromising the rule of law”.
Although Bogotanos would not brand their city as an example of best practice given the feelings of insecurity that have prevailed for a long time in the Colombian city, this article in El Pais explains how the traditional, working-class neighbourhood of La Perseverancia in Bogotá seems to have turned a corner.
“Of the 25 of us who were in ‘la banda de la Primera’, six or seven of us remain. Most of us went to work and the rest are dead. You learn that the path of crime only has three destinations: a prison, a hospital or the cemetery”.
Alexander Rivera in El Pais, 21/10/2024
In La Perseverancia neighbourhood, community tourism has promoted change for good.
Our view
Ample evidence suggests that delinquency and organised crime feed off deprivation, a lack of opportunities, poverty, and the absence of social mobility.
Government neglect and poverty have fed the ranks of armed gangs with young, jobless people who see few options for themselves outside of organised crime and deep inequalities in access to basic services, education, health and work have been shown to be a breeding ground for organised crime organisations. See, for example, this recent discussion of the link between inequality and crime.
Failures in security policies in the region and weak institutions have pushed the conversation towards heavy handed approaches to crime and violence, and demands for the ‘Bukele model’, with concerns for human rights abuses pushed to the periphery of the conversation.
While a hard stance approach to crime might bring crime down in the short term, history has shown that public investment and a focus on rehabilitation could be more effective policies longer term.
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