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gang violence
Support the Human Rights Defenders Opposing Bukele’s State of Exception
Since the Salvadorian leader began his war on gangs, easily 25,000 (and likely many more) innocent people have been arrested and held under inhumane conditions, including extreme overcrowding.
Dec 10, 2024
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had a huge (though controversial) electoral victory in February 2024. But a small, stubborn legal movement is challenging his popular, indiscriminate war against gangs.
Even as the reduction of gang violence brings relief to many Salvadorans, many low-income people see their law-abiding neighbors being swept up arbitrarily in Bukele’s war. Understandably, they fear the so-called security forces.
During a November 2024 tour in the United States, attorneys Ingrid Escobar and Óscar Rosales of Socorro Jurídico Humanitario (SJH or Humanitarian Legal Aid ) were clear: They do not oppose the legal arrest and incarceration of gang members. But they’re resisting a suspension of constitutional rights that’s proven to be capricious in practice, cruel, dangerous, and deadly.
Institutionalizing Brutality
MS-13 killed 87 people during the last weekend of March 2022. At Bukele’s direction, the Legislative Assembly implemented Article 29, resulting in an extraordinary emergency measure called a “state of exception.” With it, “the rights to freedom of association and assembly, and privacy in communications, as well as some due process protections” were temporarily suspended. “Temporarily” has become long-term.
Of the 83,000 who have been detained during Bukele’s war against gangs, SJH estimates that only 40% are actually gang members, another 30% have collaborated with gangs (often unwillingly and sometimes under threat of death), and the remaining 30% (most of them also charged with collaboration) are actually innocent of any gang affiliation at all.
The denial of the presumption of innocence and a lack of access to legal representation and family are harrowing for detainees, as well as their loved ones.
So, easily 25,000 (and likely many more) innocent people have been arrested and held under inhumane conditions, including extreme overcrowding. Some released prisoners report 150 detainees sharing a single toilet, multiple people sharing a single bed, and those who can’t access a bed sleeping on floors with excrement.
In mid-November, Bukele stated that 8,000 state-of-exception prisoners had been released. But, according to Escobar, hundreds of release orders have been ignored. Former detainee Melvin Ortiz had received 24 such orders but was only released after his case was taken to the United Nations.
SJH claims there were at least 330 deaths in detention between April 27, 2022 and the end of October 2024. About half were due to violence, 40% to medical neglect, and 10% to terminal illness. Notably, 94% of those 330 decedents did not belong to gangs.
Considering the cumulative institutional brutality, these deaths aren’t surprising. Some released prisoners report “welcome beatings” by prison guards upon incarceration, extreme malnutrition, dehydration (prisoners receive four ounces of water to drink daily), torture, and a lack of medications or medical care.
There is psychological trauma, too. The denial of the presumption of innocence and a lack of access to legal representation and family are harrowing for detainees, as well as their loved ones.
Arbitrary and Political Arrests
One government official told Leslie Schuld, director of Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad: “We are throwing out nets to capture gang members and then we will release the innocent people caught in the nets.” But statistics from the past 32 months show that, once imprisoned, it’s easier to become entangled in those metaphorical nets than be released.
In practice, anyone—but it’s usually people in low-income neighborhoods—can be arrested under the state of exception. SJH reports that police and military personnel arrest arbitrarily to fulfill quotas. Allegations against persons can be made anonymously—which has proven handy for unscrupulous people with grudges, unwelcome competitors, or even romantic rivals. People are arrested for their tattoos (one young man was detained for having a rose tattoo honoring his mother, Rosa), for haircuts or clothing deemed suspicious, for having an old criminal record, or for having been deported from the United States.
“The fear we have is that we’ll be the next ones he arrests despite never having broken the law.”
Sandra Leticia Hernández fits several of these categories. After serving a sentence in Ilopango prison, she returned to Isla El Espíritu Santo where she lived with her lesbian life partner. Business competitors resented her thriving motorcycle-taxi service as well as her sexual orientation. Sandra was arrested first—and then her partner, Eidi Roxana Claros de Zaldaña, was detained when she made inquiries about her. Sandra was released eventually, while Eidi remains incarcerated.
Young Salvadorans are deeply affected by state-of-exception injustices. Human Rights Watch has observed that many children in low-income barrios are doubly traumatized: once preyed upon by gangs, they are now targeted by the police and state security forces. Over 3,000 children have been arrested; detainees as young as 12 years old can receive prison sentences of up to 10 years.
Additionally, both SJH and Columbia University’s Center for Mexico and Central America claim that, in El Salvador, “an estimated 100,000 children and adolescents had been effectively orphaned” after their parents disappeared into detention. SJH reports that many of these children lack basic necessities and some of them experience one or more of the following: depression, weight loss, eating disorders, nightmares, hyperactivity, aggressiveness, and fear and anger toward the military and police.
Finally, troublesome critics of corporations and the government—such as union members denouncing corruption, social activists, and human-rights defenders—are targeted. That includes the SJH. At a press conference, Escobar talked about the scrutiny they’re under: “These [investigatory] actions include surveillance and monitoring of our homes, workplaces, and the facilities of the Humanitarian Legal Aid. We have confirmed [this] through license plates on vehicles that are used solely for police purposes.”
Thirsting for Justice
But SJH isn’t deterred. In addition to providing full legal accompaniment to 100 innocent clients, SJH is rendering habeas corpus services to another 2,600. And because many of its clients were sole breadwinners, SJH provides material support to their families. So far, SJH has secured the release of 50 innocents, after taking some of their cases to international courts.
Escobar declares on her X page: “Tengo sed, sed de #Justicia.” She is thirsty for justice—but it’s risky. Elsewhere she’s acknowledged, “The fear we have is that we’ll be the next ones he arrests despite never having broken the law.”
SJH has a loud collective voice that carries far. It regularly denounces the Bukele administration’s violations of human rights in national and international settings. Surely these defenders of El Salvador’s hard-won but vulnerable democratic rights deserve our moral, political, and monetary support.
Please call senators and representatives through the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.Ask that U.S. aid for the Salvadoran armed forces be withheld until all innocents have been released and the prisons investigated independently.
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Support the Work of Haitian Feminists Amid Crises and Beyond
It’s necessary that the international community, especially the United States, works according to the needs emphasized by grassroots women’s organizations and civil society.
Dec 07, 2024
The recent waves of gang violence in Haiti, that have plagued the island since February 2024, have plunged it into another major humanitarian crisis. As reported by the United Nations Human Rights Council, the violence has been centered in Port-au-Prince and other areas in the Ouest and Artibonite Departments, but the reduced access to food, healthcare services, and general economic strain due to gang violence are being felt across the departments. With increasing armed violence events, 700,000 internally displaced people, almost 5 million people facing acute food insecurity, and only 28% of functioning healthcare services available, daily life and public safety continue to erode at a rapid pace. This is especially true for women and girls.
Lack of access to the formal economy, enduring threats of public violence, and lack of adequate protections from natural disasters make it exceedingly difficult for women and girls to safely navigate city and nation-wide emergencies. Such emergencies exacerbate the other substandard conditions of education, health, legal protections against gender-based violence, and political participation of Haitian women and girls. Historically, the Haitian women’s movement and feminist activists have provided essential educational resources, legal support services, and platforms for women’s stories to be heard and this political advocacy continues during the present violence.
Haitian women’s feminist groups developed the Policy Framework for an Effective and Equitable Transition. This document highlights the legal rights of Haitian women and girls established in the Haitian Constitution, the oppression Haitian women and girls endure in private and public life as well as recommendations on how the Presidential Transitional Council (TPC) should amend proposed harmful policies already set to be put in place. This Policy Framework is part of the rich legacy of political action taken by Haitian women and feminists since the emancipation of the island from French colonial rule. Haitian feminist activists and civil society leaders have time and time again shown up for their community on the ground during natural disasters and fighting against normalized gendered violence and discrimination. In this moment, they are pushing forward this Policy Framework to display the link between a successful democracy and gender equality.
The United States and other Western countries have a clear responsibility to materially support a locally-led stabilization of Haiti that effectively addresses the needs of all Haitian citizens.
Gang violence in Haiti isn’t a new phenomenon. Throughout the country’s history, the Haitian government relied on armed gangs to assert their authority and maintain power because there was no strong military or police presence. However, the type of armed brutality evident today is a result of the rapidly decaying relationship between Haitian politicians and armed gangs following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Moreover, the armed power of these gangs, which has continued to overpower the Haitian National Police and the MSS mission, is primarily sustained by U.S. weapons sales into the country. The transitional government’s attempts to regain control and establish a stable democracy are failing to address the needs of Haitian women, expressly in this current crisis.
On the Transitional Presidential Council, its Haitian women’s groups have reported that of the nine members only one is a woman and she is one of two members who are unable to vote. In the newly established commission on criminal reform, the same pattern emerges—one woman to eight male members. The intention to restrict women in positions of political authority is cemented by the fact that during the search for an interim prime minister, there were no women invited to interview.
These patterns are dangerous because they directly undermine standards of gender equality established explicitly in the Haitian Constitution, where women are assured to hold at least 30% of political positions. Moreover, the few women that are granted access to political positions in the new government are not representatives of the women’s movement, which threatens to conceal the most pressing issues of Haitian women and girls and thus fail to adequately protect them. This is concerning because It’s been reported that women’s representation as leaders in peace processes is vital in developing sustainable peace agreements and post-conflict stability that create more just futures for the entirety of civil society.
It’s necessary that the international community, especially the United States, works according to the needs emphasized by grassroots women’s organizations and civil society. Prior international efforts meant to ease hardship in Haiti have worked to only make it worse. Decades of violent U.S. occupation, the unjust imposition of international debt from France, careless and corrupt U.N. peacekeeper missions, the destabilization of rice productions and the resulting economic fragility, along with current arms sales from the U.S., have helped create the Haiti we see today.
Because of this history, the United States and other Western countries have a clear responsibility to materially support a locally-led stabilization of Haiti that effectively addresses the needs of all Haitian citizens. Supporting Haitian feminist’s efforts such as the Policy Framework is the first step to respecting the lived experiences of people at the center of conflict and in remedying this historic violence.
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America’s Ultimate Don Could Unleash a 21st Century Gangocracy
What’s happening in Haiti today could prefigure the future of the United States, too, if Donald Trump wins in November and continues to undermine the rule of law.
Apr 19, 2024
Haiti has descended into chaos. It’s had no president or parliament—and no elections either—for eight long years. Its unelected prime minister Ariel Henry resigned recently when gang violence at the airport in Port-au-Prince made it impossible for him to return to the country after a trip to Guyana.
Haiti is the poorest country in the region, its riches leached out by colonial overlords, American occupying forces, corporate predators, and home-grown autocrats. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also suffered an almost biblical succession of plagues in recent years. A coup deposed its first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, not once but twice—in 1991 and again in 2004. An earthquake in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands, leaving 1.5 million Haitians homeless, out of a population of less than 10 million. In the wake of that earthquake, nearly a million people contracted cholera, the worst outbreak in history, courtesy of a contingent of United Nations peacekeepers. To round out the catastrophes, in 2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall, pushing Haiti back even further.
And now the country has been overrun by gangs that emerged as practically the only groups capable of providing services, however meager, to Haiti’s long-suffering population. People have become the country’s largest export. Anyone who has money, connections, or sufficient courage has fled, even if those who somehow made it to the United States were all too often deported back into the maelstrom. Haiti doesn’t have the three things that might prevent the sort of vacuum into which gangs so eagerly rush: robust democratic governance, a strong civil society, and a sufficiently uncorrupt constabulary. As a result, it’s returned to what political theorist Thomas Hobbes once called a “war of all against all” in which violence and the urge for power prevail, as fist takes precedence over gavel—the perfect environment for gangs to flourish.
In place of the biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S. might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald Trump to go up in similar flames.
Political scientists often label places like Haiti “failed states.” With the breakdown of order, everything from political institutions to border controls disintegrates. In a comparable fashion, clans contested for power in Somalia in the 1990s and paramilitaries battled each other in the Democratic Republic of Congo during its repeated wars, while rebels and jihadis targeted the Syrian government beginning in 2011. In the end, such diverse groups seem to boil down to one thing: guys with guns.
In Haiti, the gangocracy is organized along the classic lines of criminal enterprises like the gangs that ruled New York City in the mid-19th century (immortalized in the film The Gangs of New York) or the Chinese tongs that warred over San Franciscan turf in the years after the Civil War (featured in the current Netflix series Warrior). The two major Haitian gangs in the capital city Port-au-Prince, GPep and the G9 Family, have similarly hierarchical structures, roots in particular neighborhoods, and flamboyant leaders like the former police officer and current G9 head Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier.
But gangs aren’t simply criminal syndicates. The Haitian gangs have close connections to political parties and align themselves with business interests (or run businesses of their own). Sometimes such gangs even begin as anti-gangs, neighborhood self-defense groups meant to help locals survive in an era of lawlessness.
Their mischaracterization resembles the overly narrow understanding of “terrorists.” Hamas, for instance, is on the U.S. terrorism list, but it’s not just a bunch of guys with guns and a predilection for violence. It’s also been a political party, a government, and a service organization that provided food, healthcare, and other necessities to underserved communities in Gaza.
Don’t make the mistake of associating gangs like Haiti’s with a “primitive” stage of political development or only with countries on the geopolitical margins. What’s happening there today could prefigure the future of the United States, too. In place of the biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S. might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald Trump to go up in similar flames.
Gangs R U.S.
Today, Americans associate “gangs” with the Crips and Bloods, who developed a murderous rivalry in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s or, more recently, Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, a gang of young Salvadoran transplants to Los Angeles initially focused on protecting its members from other gangs.
But shouldn’t we be more catholic in our definitions? After all, what are right-wing paramilitary forces, from the Three Percenters to the Proud Boys, if not gangs? They have their rituals, worldviews, indifference to the rule of law, even their own “Barbecues.” The gangs associated with far-right ideology and white supremacy today could claim a lineage stretching back to the European settlers of this continent who routinely engaged in the extrajudicial murder of Indigenous peoples while expanding westward, or the vigilante mobs that administered “rough justice” to “disobedient” slaves before the Civil War, or even the Ku Klux Klan. As for real-world impact, the Crips or MS-13 never had the audacity to force their way into the U.S. Capitol and trash the place, as Donald Trump’s informal gang did on January 6, 2021.
But why stop there? The Pinkerton detective agency once functioned like a gang in its attacks on the labor movement. The Central Intelligence Agency developed distinctly gang-like behavior overseas with its assassinations, coups, and outright criminal activities. And what about all the deaths associated with corporate gangs like Philip Morris and ExxonMobil? These institutions of “normal” society have had a much higher kill count and a more debilitating effect on the rule of law than the institutions of organized crime.
When it comes to starting fires in the American system, Trump is distinctly the Barbecue type.
When it comes to gang-like activities, much depends on geopolitics. The emergence of the “Washington consensus” and the birth of neoliberalism in the 1970s was an inflection point when it came to encouraging gang-like behavior. Previously, at least in advanced industrial countries, the state had been gradually assuming ever greater economic responsibility through the New Deal and its successors in the U.S. and the development of Europe’s market socialism. Neoliberalism, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, sought to roll back the power of the state through the defunding, deregulation, and privatization of government services.
That sustained attack on state functions ensured an increase in poverty and painful budget crises for institutions like school systems and hospitals, while corporate misconduct proliferated. In poorer countries, where states were already more fragile, the impact was far more devastating.
In Haiti, after the state borrowed money in the 1970s and 1980s to feed corruption and sustain autocracy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed subsequent democratic governments to privilege the free market, while opening ever more quickly to the global economy. Sensing opportunity, non-governmental organizations streamed into Haiti to provide food, housing, and healthcare, everything a cash-strapped government couldn’t do. The succession of catastrophes—coups, an earthquake, cholera, hurricanes—only strengthened the humanitarian sector but at the expense of effective government. In this century, the situation had become so dire that all too many parents were giving their children up to orphanages run by foreign charities. In other words, the road to Haiti’s hell was, in part, paved by good intentions.
Or take the case of Jamaica where, from the late 1970s on, similar IMF programs translated into disaster, especially in the capital, Kingston. Here, too, the state lost power as gang leaders, known as “dons,” expanded their territories. As Michelle Munroe and Damion Blake put it in Third World Quarterly: “Neoliberal policies not only paralyzed the state’s capacity to control and contain violence in the streets of Kingston, these changes also made dons and the gangs they command more lethal and powerful.”
Dons and the gangs they command: that language could soon seem all too eerily appropriate for the United States.
American Bloodbath
America’s ultimate Don is all too clear about what he expects come November, should he lose. “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath,” he told one of his rallies. According to that scenario, the crew that owes allegiance to Donald Trump—the right-wing militias, diehard conspiracy theorists, open-carry gun enthusiasts—will rise up in gang-like fashion in the face of another “stolen election.”
That, however, is an example of Trump’s magical thinking. The January 6 “insurrection” revealed the limits of his influence. What happened in Washington that day never came close to a coup d’état, thanks to the actions of the police and the National Guard, nor was it repeated, even in the reddest of states.
The real bloodbath would take place if Trump won the election. After all, he’s already promised violence as an organizing principle for his second term. As David Remnick has written in The New Yorker, Trump
makes no effort to conceal his bigotries, his lawlessness, his will to authoritarian power; to the contrary, he advertises it, and, most disturbing of all, this deepens his appeal. What’s more, there is no question that Trump has so normalized calls to violence as an instrument of politics that it has inflamed countless people to perverse action.
Trump has also promised a thorough purge of his enemies in the government and beyond, as well as the weaponization of the Justice Department to wage war on all MAGA opponents. As in his first term, he would destroy as many federal agencies as possible. Meanwhile, he would promote drilling über alles and roll back every Biden administration effort to create an industrial policy to guide the United States away from fossil fuels.
What Trump proposes is fundamentally different from the now shopworn Republican strategy of reducing the federal government to the size of something that can be “drowned in the bathtub” (as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once so memorably put it) in favor of “states’ rights.” Trump has nothing but contempt for the politics that advance such a perspective. Like the gang leader he is, he’d rather concentrate federal power in his own hands as an instrument of personal vengeance emphasizing loyalty above all. Instead of the empowerment of state legislatures, Trump prefers chaos, for in fraught times people look to autocratic leaders.
When it comes to starting fires in the American system, Trump is distinctly the Barbecue type. He admires leaders who slaughter people indiscriminately (Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines), change the constitution multiple times to bypass legislative and judicial opposition (Viktor Orbán of Hungary), or kill their political opponents wherever they might live (Vladimir Putin of Russia). He likes the bad boys who have transformed their parties into gangs and their countries into fiefdoms. In short, he’s the ultimate gang leader.
In the MAGA echo chamber, complaints about witch-hunts targeting Trump should be considered just a preface, should he win this November, to a genuine witch-hunt that could make the Red Scare of the 1950s look like a garden party.
Of course, he won’t do it alone. There are plenty of true believers and opportunists to staff his administration and implement his whims, but that’s not enough. As his first term revealed, the guardrails of democracy—opposition politicians, bureaucrats, even certain Republicans who continue to have qualms—can still prevent the country from tumbling over a cliff.
This time around, Trump and those backing him hope to disable enough of the political infrastructure to create the space for non-state actors to do his work for him. In The Donald’s first term, the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Trumpophile Steve Bannon so infamously put it, was a strategy meant to empower actors like corporations and religious institutions to grab power for themselves. Next time around, he’s likely to surround himself with advisers pulled from the think-tank crowd that produced the nightmarishProject 2025 blueprint in order to “free” all MAGA-oriented non-state and (often) anti-state actors to do their damnedest.
But even ruthless think tanks, corporations, and apocalyptic preachers aren’t likely to go far enough for Donald Trump, since they also remain the bedrock of America’s more traditional right wing, the coalition that put Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush into the White House. Trump needs genuine mayhem-makers. By removing restrictions on firearms, he aims to deputize every American citizen in his camp to MAGAfy the United States.
Trump’s repeated exhortations to violence—“lock her up,” “punch him in the face,” “be there, will be wild”—may well take a more specific form in a second term. Like McCarthyites at the height of the Cold War, Trumpists have imagined “Marxists” under every bed, even in the Pentagon. It’s not far-fetched to think that the reelected president might issue a coded call to his supporters to round them all up and dispatch them in some grim fashion.
Trump often accuses his opponents of exactly the sins—attempting to steal elections, having distinctly senior moments—of which he is supremely guilty. In the MAGA echo chamber, complaints about witch-hunts targeting Trump should be considered just a preface, should he win this November, to a genuine witch-hunt that could make the Red Scare of the 1950s look like a garden party.
After Autocracy
Haiti has no government, much less a strong-armed autocrat like Donald Trump. So, it might seem ludicrous to compare the crisis there with the prospective “bloodbath” Trump promises here. But remember: Haiti suffered under two ruthless dictators from 1957 to 1986: Papa Doc Duvalier and his son, Baby Doc. Between them, they ensured that Haiti would never easily establish democratic institutions.
Donald Trump is nearly 78 years old. He doesn’t have a long political future. Yes, were he to win in November, he would surely do what he could to destroy democracy. Still, the true nightmare scenario is likely to come later, as climate change sends yet more migrants surging toward U.S. borders, generates more fires that sweep across the land, and heats politics to the boiling point. That’s when future versions of the gangs Trump has encouraged to “stand back and stand by,” the insurrectionists he’s promised to amnesty, and the loyalists who have shared images of Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck could assault the citadels of power in an attempt to destroy once and for all the rule of law that Trump has spent his life undermining.
Cue the ominous music: From sea to shining sea, the war of all against all may be just around the corner.
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