Starker on 8/6/2023 at 17:49
Quote Posted by demagogue
Hell of a marketing tactic they cooked up for this game.
Bears an uncanny resemblance to United States, New York.
Azaran on 8/6/2023 at 18:23
Quote Posted by demagogue
And what's this "no alternative solution"? Are El Salvadorians somehow not capable of forming stable, law-abiding and human rights respecting democracies while dealing with gang violence. Bad history and social forces makes that a challenge, but countries like Panama, Chile, and Ecuador, most of South America sans Venezuela for that matter, beg to differ.
All of that said, if you really want to fight against the drug market fueling gangs in Central and South America, easily the number one thing that needs to be done is drugs need to be legalized in the US, or rather they need to be moved from a criminal issue to a medical issue.
Edit2:
Oh also 66K people detained? No way those are all hardened killers, not even near. It's the same playbook as Trump & Duturte, and every dictator since the beginning of time. You just call your political opposition "terrorists" and "gang members" and suddenly you can imprison them with impunity and people that also hate the targeted group think you're making the country safer when literally the government is the biggest criminal in the room.
valid points, but are you gonna wait and hope that the country one day fixes itself? I'd rather have a radical, imperfect fix, than wait and hope for a bright future that may never come.
I also think we're pretty disconnected from some realities in the west. I wonder if your opinion would change if you lived in El Salvador, witnessed atrocities every other day, and had to pay a chunk of your salary to the local clique in exchange for them not killing your family
Nicker on 8/6/2023 at 18:51
I thought they were celebrating the overdue death of Televangelist and wannabe theocrat, Pat Robertson at age 93.
Hey, Jesus! Get the lead out! Second coming, yesterday please.
Starker on 8/6/2023 at 19:23
The good die young (cf. Kissinger).
demagogue on 8/6/2023 at 19:42
Quote Posted by Azaran
I also think we're pretty disconnected from some realities in the west. I wonder if your opinion would change if you lived in El Salvador, witnessed atrocities every other day, and had to pay a chunk of your salary to the local clique in exchange for them not killing your family
Fortunately one of our law interns this summer is El Salvadorian. I'll ask her her thoughts about it. I don't want to presume what she may say. I mean she's interning for a human rights NGO this summer, so I could venture some guesses, but you're right in that the right people to ask are the citizens actually living there, and I'm honestly wondering what her take may be and expecting her to have ideas I couldn't have considered.
Also worth noting though that my day job involves researching countries that have regular street violence and police crackdowns, almost always against "terrorists" and "gangs" ... Myanmar, Cambodia, Philippines, Hong Kong, etc. So it's not like it's the first time I'm hearing about the issues countries like that face. One of my best friends here in Texas had his wife's brother killed by gang violence in Mexico, which forced the whole family to come to Texas actually, and we've talked about the challenges there. (Not to mention our own Duckeh comes from a place sadly wracked by gang violence.) So it's not like I just dismiss the problem of gang violence either and don't see the heavy costs it has on people. But even in those conversations, I didn't hear the police going to war with the people as one of the "good" options.
Well there's more to talk about than can we can cover here, and I haven't fully researched it (and I always try to hesitate to say too much about anything before I've researched a lot into it), but I'll try to give an update about what our El Salvadorian intern has to say about it anyway.
Pyrian on 8/6/2023 at 21:56
Whenever the ancient fascist argument of some variant of "at least the trains run on time", I think it's helpful to remember that the trains didn't run any more on time, they just made it illegal to point that out.
Cipheron on 9/6/2023 at 07:26
I'm not sure how sustainable the solution is either.
65,000 is 1% of the entire population of the country, which is 6 million, and other articles say the total they've locked up is close to 2% of the entire country.
Obviously if you restrict that just to males, it's 4% of everyone is now in prison, and if you restrict that to only younger men, it's 8-10% of everyone being locked up. They're also constructing a new 40,000 person mega-prison to fit even more people in.
With numbers that huge it sounds like the only way you could get that is to just go into the poorer neighborhoods and more or less indiscriminately round up any young men. Sure, the crime rate will drop as a result, but that's not proof that the people they rounded up were guilty of a crime.
Keep in mind, they've prevented 30 homicides per 100,000 population by rounding up 1000 people per 100,000 population. Clearly, 970 out of each 1000 people they rounded up never killed anyone. It's probably worse than that however. Since there are probably 10 murderers per 1000 arrested-people who killed 3 people each, so 99% of the people they rounded up to prevent murders are definitely NOT murderers.
Hell the USA could do a similar thing and knock the homicide rate in half by marching the cops into black neighborhoods and rounding up all males over the age of 15. But ... should they??
Yeah, it'll be an effective way to get the numbers down, and definitely people who are the ones NOT being locked up or having their family members locked up with be supportive. However it's unarguably a human rights catastrophe in it's own right:
(
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/el-salvador-security-gangs-crackdown-cristosal-report-bukele)
Quote:
At least 153 died in custody in El Salvador's gang crackdown - report
The human cost of El Salvador's controversial “war on gangs” has been laid bare in a new report which claims dozens of prisoners were tortured and killed in jail after being caught up in the year-long security crackdown.
...
The NGO said it had confirmed 29 of those fatalities as violent deaths and another 46 were considered suspicious. In most of those 75 cases, Cristosal said the bodies of the victims showed signs of torture, beatings or strangulation. Other dead inmates also showed signs of injuries but were classified as having died of “undetermined” or “natural” causes meaning the true number of violent deaths could be higher.
...
The rights group, Cristosal, said it had obtained photographs and mortuary reports showing bodies with signs of “asphyxiation, [bone] fractures, significant bruising, lacerations and even perforations”. Some appeared to have died of malnutrition. Nearly half of the victims were men aged between 18 and 38. The NGO claimed some prisoners had been tortured with electric shocks.
Just the 153 known deaths equal the claimed reduction in the homicide rate as a result of the crackdowns, so if that's the tip of the iceberg that it seems it could clearly be a blowout in the number of total deaths, just trading off gang violence for state torture and disappearances.
Quote:
El Salvador's government has rejected criticism of its anti-gang campaign, which has seen more than 67,000 people arrested since its began in March 2022. It dismisses critical NGOs and media organizations as defenders of gangs and “terrorists”.
The government calling journalists "terrorists" is a worrying trend.
Pyrian on 9/6/2023 at 08:12
Quote Posted by Cipheron
Hell the USA could do a similar thing and knock the homicide rate in half by marching the cops into black neighborhoods and rounding up all males over the age of 15. But ... should they??
I mean, that's not too far from what the U.S.
did. Soaring incarceration rates, plummeting crime rates.
Starker on 9/6/2023 at 17:33
Quote Posted by Cipheron
With numbers that huge it sounds like the only way you could get that is to just go into the poorer neighborhoods and more or less indiscriminately round up any young men. Sure, the crime rate will drop as a result, but that's not proof that the people they rounded up were guilty of a crime.
Looks like they are doing just that, plus anyone deemed "inconvenient":
Quote:
(
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/16/how-two-colombians-were-ensnared-in-bukeles-gang-crackdown-in-el-salvador)
[...]
Under the state of emergency, no trial or charges are required to detain someone. Disgruntled neighbours, unhappy partners or rival businessmen can easily take advantage of the breakdown of due process.
“You no longer need to have any link with the gangs to be locked up in El Salvador. You simply need to be a young male,” said López.
The pair say they saw countless other foreigners caught up in the crackdown, including Hondurans, Guatemalans and North Americans.
As Bukele ramps up his attack on the gangs such tales are increasingly common.
On 9 May a fisherman from Isla El Espíritu Santo in the south of the country was released after a year in prison after authorities admitted he was wrongly imprisoned following an anonymous phone call.
In another case a young lesbian woman was taken from her home by soldiers after she was reportedly denounced by taxi drivers who did not like her sexual orientation.
[...]
demagogue on 10/6/2023 at 06:43
I mentioned this before. I was reading up on the conflict in Sudan for a new class, and suddenly Wagner Group somehow became part of the story, hinting at hidden ties connecting the conflicts or violence in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, CAR, Chad, and if you pick at that scab enough, a whole brutish world of mercenaries for hire in Africa and the Middle East rears an ugly head. Not to mention, as we've talked about before, Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, looks like he's trying to position himself as Putin's successor; or at the least there's a power struggle happening there I'm not sure Prigozhin is going to win. In any event, it's worth knowing more about them.
And on that note, WSJ released a good documentary on the Wagner Group today that gives an interesting glimpse into that world.
[video=youtube;EMXnJMCoFYI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMXnJMCoFYI[/video]
By the way, it reminds me of the old saw in Afghanistan: they aren't warlords committing war crimes if you just call them "contractors".
