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The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-
by rayiner 2y ago
The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-.... The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a tax on the whole country, on the economy, and on kids’ futures. It’s system that beats down builders and cultivators and makes them subservient to the sociopaths.
As someone from a dysfunctional third-world country, the revolution in El Salvador gives me hope that change is actually possible in some of these places. It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country. Your ancestors did the hard things (England punished all felonies by death for centuries) so you have forgotten how your lives became so comfortable in the first place.
- maxerickson 2y agoSending people there and then saying you don't have jurisdiction over them anymore is dysfunctional by any reasonable measure.
- voidspark 2y ago[flagged]
- rayiner 2y agoNote that this often happens because countries won’t repatriate their own criminal citizens: https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/politics/trump-visa-sanctions-immigration/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/politics/trump-visa-sanctions...
- cavisne 2y agoYes this was the case for Venezuela, they started taking flights again when the El Salvador news came out. Refusing to repatriate citizens was part of the argument the Trump admin used to justify use of the Alien Enemies act. If this holds up in court the strategy going forward is pretty obvious. Any country that refuses to repatriate criminals will get hit with the AEA. This will be very politically painful for any country as they rely heavily on remittances from undocumented immigrants in the US, and will quickly fold.
- tastyface 2y ago"Neri Alvarado Borges was told by ICE officers that he was arrested in February for his tattoos — one of which is a rainbow-colored autism awareness ribbon with the name of his brother, who is autistic." "The Trump administration admitted in court documents that 'many' of those sent to El Salvador did not have criminal records. As more information about those deported was unearthed, it became clear that some of the 'evidence' against them was as absurd as a tattoo of a Real Madrid CF logo, or an autism awareness tattoo." "These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, 'I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.'" No, they are not violent criminals. The authorities don't even bother to check. "There is zero probability that a normal innocent US citizen will be sent there." I'm 99% sure that we'll start seeing US citizens sent there in the coming months for crimes as basic as vandalism of Trump or Tesla properties.
- voidspark 2y ago[flagged]
- tastyface 2y agoThose quotes are from three different sources. Which of those would you consider “bullshit” and why? If the Tesla vandals deserve to be in a lunatic asylum or charged with hate speech, fine. Go through the legal process to prove it in court. But to suggest that they deserve to be sent to a foreign black site for a lifetime of torture is simply unhuman.
- grandiego 2y agoWriting from a country with dysfunctional judiciary, I think this is a logical way to overcome crime, at least temporarily. There isn't a "hygienic" alternative when judges are continuously bribed or blackmailed by gang members.
- khazhoux 2y agoIt’s worth a debate, even though in American culture we hold this idea as beyond any consideration. Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". That's a noble thought, but those 100 criminals can cause suffering of 100s of others. So his assessment isn't necessarily accurate. Every innocent father jailed in El Salvador might save 10 children from losing their own father.
- rayiner 2y agoNote that Franklin was the product of a society that had been executing felons for hundreds of years. The homicide rate in both England and New England in the early 1700s was around 2 per 100,000, lower than any western hemisphere country today.
- squigz 2y agoCanada's is less than 2 per 100k https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3510006801 https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=351000... I also have to doubt the accuracy of such data collected in the 1700s.
- dleary 2y agoWhere did you get that figure from? There are many sources online that agree, so I won’t bother to link them, that the population of New England was ~100k in 1700 and ~300k in 1750. The claim that that actual rate of murder in all of New England was 2-6 per year is not believable.
- rayiner 2y agohttps://images.app.goo.gl/ZomfSetCVGTWj1bS9 https://images.app.goo.gl/ZomfSetCVGTWj1bS9 https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/ https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-vio...
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- tepalmnagon 2y ago>It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country. Or, you could just acknowledge that it is inherently inhumane, despite the improvements it's making for your country. Of course authoritarian measures bring results and of course in a country like El Salvador, in it's previous state, they might even be warranted - but it is still inhumane. Inhumanity sometimes has to be fought with inhumanity, Americans of all people should acknowledge that. If you want to argue that it is not inhumane, however, then you are wrong. Imprisonment without due process is inherently inhumane.
- rayiner 2y ago[flagged]
- tastyface 2y agoHow do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it? As the number of incarcerated grows from 2% to 5% to consolidate Bukele's power, what recourse will anyone have outside the party elite? The pattern of strongman politicians, indefinite emergency measures, and erosion of liberties to manifest full bore dictatorship has repeated over and over and over again in the 20th and 21st centuries — and you still can't see it happening? You may enjoy it now, but consider this the honeymoon phase: it only gets worse from here on out.
- xyzzyz 2y ago> How do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it? You think the murder rate went down by two orders of magnitude by locking up good, innocent people?
- tastyface 2y agoIf there are 10,000 murderers out there and you lock up most of them along with 20,000 innocent people, you get the same result. (Bonus points if you happen to snag some annoying journalists, activists, and civil rights leaders in your dragnet, since they can push back on your power play and cast doubt on your stats.) But you can just read the article if you don't believe me: "While polling consistently shows that Bukele is quite popular in El Salvador, surveys also show a steady increase in fear of public criticism of the government — to degrees that sometimes match the president’s approval rating. 'There’s a sector of the population that feels better, because it’s true that we perceive more security, we’re no longer afraid of the gangs. Now we’re afraid of the regime,' says Ramirez. 'We see soldiers everywhere, police everywhere, patrol cars, and they’re arresting people.'"
- defrost 2y ago> England punished all felonies by death for centuries No. For less than a century, during peak "Bloody Code" almost all felonies specified a death sentence .. that doesn't in any way mean that all felonies were punished by death. A large number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statutes specified death as the penalty for property offences (even minor ones), meaning that the vast majority of the people tried at the Old Bailey could be sentenced to hang. This body of statutes, which later came to be criticised as a “Bloody Code”, meant that one could be executed for stealing as little as a handkerchief or a sheep. Nevertheless, judicial procedures prevented a blood bath by ensuring that sentences could be mitigated, or the charge redefined as a less serious offence. [..] As a result, as documented on the Digital Panopticon website, between 1780 and 1868 less than a fifth of convicts sentenced to death were actually executed. Take it from the Old Bailey: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/punishment https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/punishment
- rayiner 2y agoInteresting, thank you for that clarification. It looks like execution rates were as high as 30 per 100,000 in 1600, dropping to under 5 per 100,000 by 1700: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5955207/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5955207/ The US in 1700 was about 1 per 100,000: https://www.cato.org/blog/despite-federal-return-capital-punishment-dying-out https://www.cato.org/blog/despite-federal-return-capital-pun... The number of executions in the US annually today is only 0.008 per 100,000.
- rbetts 2y agoSo easily you gloss over millions of Americans who fought to end slavery, who fought for women's right to vote, who fought for desegregation, who fought for labor rights,... The "comfortable life" in America isn't a 300 year old gift of extra judicial killings - it's a continued culture across 10 generations of individuals and communities fighting for ever fairer freedoms under a shared rule of law.
- rayiner 2y agoYou’re retconning history from a mid-20th century civil rights lens. That lens focuses on increasing access to a civilizational order that has already been built. Its about expanding access to what white males already had. But it’s an inadequate lens for understanding how that order was built in the first place. The hard part is getting “from 0 to 1.” You need a state, the state needs to impose order and gain control over warlords, you need law and civil institutions, you need a government that is controlled by more than a handful of people, etc. England or New England in 1800 was already a more developed society than Bangladesh or Somalia or Iraq in 2024, even though slavery still existed and suffrage wasn’t universal. Just getting to that point would be transformational for much of asia, the middle east, and africa. This is why nation building in the 20th and early 21st century has failed so spectacularly. You can go into Iraq and create a nice constitution with rights and universal suffrage and religious freedom, but you’re just redistributing 0. The “rights lens” doesn’t actually tell you how to get Iraq in 2024 to the point where England was in 1800.
- rbetts 2y agoPerhaps we agree that sustaining fair societies is a continual march of institutional and cultural building - not something imposed by a document or stamped by 1800's England. I would never argue that US-Iraq style nation building would succeed, for example. In fact, it is a counter example of violence being sufficient to get from 0 to 1. The US applied extreme violence over a population and failed to establish a persistent democratic order. The basis of civilization, as I read history, is more a consequence of surplus than violence. I see, in the chaos of Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, as examples, the results of institutions and cultures effectively destroyed by outside violence, in many cases regressing from 1 to 0. Thank you for sharing your point of view - certainly thought provoking for me.
- tastyface 2y agoSo they "solved" gangs and installed a ruthless and illegal dictatorship in their place — which may in fact be secretly conspiring with those same gangs behind the scenes. I feel sorry for El Salvador. It may now have to experience several generations of Soviet-style repression and suffering before a new regime is able to overthrow the current one. Meanwhile, thousands of families will never get to find out what happened to their loved ones in those horrifying concentration camps. FYI, many of our (Americans') ancestors fled their home countries precisely to escape this sort of state-enacted brutality.
- cavisne 2y agoNearly 25% of El Salvador is in America, although they fled gang violence not Bukele.
- rayiner 2y ago[flagged]
- tastyface 2y agoYou have no idea what my origins are. And I'm not sure why you're so furiously and emotionally defending this dictator all over this thread. I wonder if you've even read the article? Maybe take a few minutes and see if it changes how you feel.
- rayiner 2y agoI’m defending him because I’m realizing how deeply third world countries are suffering from the influence of empathetic individualists like you having so much power in the western world.
- takeda 2y agoIf you can put any person 12 years and up in jail without a trial, and you don't care about accidentally hurting innocent ones I'm surprised it is 2.5 per 100,000 and not 0 per 100,000. El Salvador currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and its president now is serving second term which is not allowed by their constitution.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lazyeye 2y ago[flagged]
- UncleMeat 2y agoIt is indeed rather easy to reduce homicide rates through mass violation of rights. We'd have much less crime if the government just shot every male under the age of 30 whose income is lower than some threshold. But that wouldn't exactly be a good system.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoAh YOU are the designated speaker for the disenfranchised while all other Americans don't have the emotional intelligence/historical background needed to possibly understand. You think way too highly of yourself and your wizened worldliness and too poorly of others. You should try stopping pontificating on your inherently superior wisdom and more time conversing/engaging with others.