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Bukele is far and away the most popular politician in Latin America. There's he doesn't have any competitors in that. And that's despite the fact that he's a self-declared dictator who's taken control of his country. It's kind of amazing. But what he's also done is reduce El Salvador's murder rate from over 50 per 100,000 before he took office to about that of Canada, a famously friendly country. This is a tiny little previously murderous place in Central America. So that's incredibly impressive. It's just that the way he has done it is to lock up 2% of the adult population to make it clear to grandmas looking out their window that if they call an anonymous hotline that the young man that they're complaining about outside who is
probably extorting their daughter or their grandchildren will be whisked away and thrown into a maximum-security prison in the middle of nowhere in El Salvador. That's been incredibly effective. The problem is that the business model of extortionists in El Salvador, those gangs that are gone now, is a totally different business model than the business model of the cocaine smugglers and producers in the Andes. Well, that's the big question. Can this approach, whatever you think of it, be replicated? Robert, you were there not so long ago.
Do you think this model is exportable? Absolutely not if you mean can the other places in Latin America reduce their murder rate the way El Salvador did? Absolutely yes if you mean can they make a big show of being really tough and undermine their own democracy? So what happened in El Salvador, and it's a it's an extraordinary case study of how you can dismantle a democracy while remaining popular. But the starting point was that the extortion gangs ruled most neighborhoods. This wasn't a small thing. They were taking roughly 16% of GDP by one estimate.
Everywhere you went, these guys were in charge. And uh Bukele's insight was that if you completely throw away the rule of law, if you say we will simply arrest anyone we feel like, You know, an anonymous tip-off, a tattoo, anything like that, we will arrest them. We will throw them in prison, we will throw away the key, we will never give them a proper trial. They had a trial started for nearly 500 people simultaneously in front of one judge in April. So, these guys they're never going to be released. And that's the point. He's changed the balance of fear in the neighborhood, so people are no longer afraid of the gangs. The gangs are afraid of the people who might snitch on them. And this is really popular.
Salvadorans really like it. The difficulty of course is that he's given himself the power to lock up anyone he wants, and that's not just gang members, that's journalists, that's dissidents. And you've moved very rapidly as using security as an excuse. He said, you know, if Parliament is standing in my way, well, in the interests of national security I will have to march soldiers into Parliament to make them do what I want. If the Supreme Court is standing in my way, I'll have to get rid of them. And so, he's basically going to be president for life. And his model, you know, only the bad bits are exportable.
Even if you don't think it can be completely replicated, isn't there something that could be more successful in a tougher approach of the sort that Abulado is pushing? No. I think that when you take a tough approach on extortion gangs, you know, all their interactions with the people they're dealing with the people who are having money extorted from don't like that. They're very happy to call in the cops. Cocaine is different. The farmers who are growing cocaine want to grow cocaine because the drug gangs pay them much better than anyone else does.
You know, the government will say, "Oh, well, you know, if you start growing pineapples, we'll build a road sometime to your village." Well, well, they get you know, the farmers want the money now. The people who are buying cocaine want to buy cocaine. The profits from the cocaine trade, which is based simply on the fact that it's illegal, are absolutely astronomical. So, if you go in and you bomb a bunch of drug dealers or you, you know, kill a gang boss, you create a vacancy. You create a vacancy for an incredibly profit profitable job and someone will take that. Now, I've been out with the kind of you know, on the helicopters with the Colombian military over the jungles and they do this great sort of security
theater mostly for the benefit of the United States and they say, "Look, we've got these big helicopters, machine guns, we drop special forces down onto the mountainside to guard the workers who are uprooting the coca bushes and isn't that really impressive?" And so, you say to them, "Okay, you say that you've uprooted 100,000 hectares of coca this year. But, you know, how many hectares were replanted?" And they say, "Oh, well, actually slightly more than 100,000 were replanted and they did it with, you know, better seeds so that the cocaine harvest went up." It is absolutely like former president of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, said, "It's like trying to ride a stationary bicycle." And the
Americans are always saying, you know, "As a condition of getting our aid, you have to keep pedaling on that bicycle." But just to be very clear, you make a very powerful argument that it is not going to work alone. I'm wondering whether it is part of getting tougher is part of a strategy or whether it sounds as though you think it doesn't even from your perspective doesn't have to I think getting tough on the drug gangs leads to more violence. It means that there will be gang warfare between the gangs over the turf. So, let me disagree slightly with Robert here. The coda to what he said is that during the crackdown, the most recent American aligned crackdown in Colombia, which happened during the Bush years,
coca cultivation, the hectares that Robert talked about devoted to cocaine, multiplied fivefold over the course of about 10 years. So, that was that didn't obviously didn't work. Um but what also doesn't work is what the previous left-wing government of Gustavo Petro has been doing Pastrana, where they just try to negotiate with all of the gangs at the same time. Not that the gangs have just expanded. They say, "Yeah, we'll talk to you and we'll keep doing what we do." I think that you have to have a forceful approach to the gangs when you are trying to drive them back. You also have to be realistic. You're not going to end this business. The only way to end this business is to legalize cocaine. Um but
if you want to make any progress at all, you have to do real police work. You can't drop bombs on gangsters in the jungle and expect that to make any difference. One thing Robert didn't mention is all that does is create a supply problem and drive the price up. It's really basic economics, the reason why that doesn't work. And so if but if you want to deal with the problem, make it somewhat better, you have to use force, you have to have the threat of force, real force against the gangsters, and then you have to deploy the police to unpick their money laundering networks, to figure out what how they actually do their business, and try and take them down that way. Simply bombing them in the jungle is stupid.
