El Salvador's iron fist security approach

Danielle Mackey has a really nice overview of the security situation in the World Politics Review with El Salvador's 'Iron Fist' Crackdown on Gangs: A Lethal Policy with U.S. Origins.

The situation will persist until the political beneficiaries of mano dura are willing to recognize its defects. Until then, civilians, especially those who suffer, shoulder the task of resistance. Adonis Ramos is a 23-year-old university student whose father, a police officer, was killed by MS-13 in the rural region of Bajo Lempa, where the family lived, in 2015. “My dad was my superhero,” he said in an interview over Skype from a country in Europe, where the family has fled as refugees. “I wanted the gang members who killed my dad to die. But killing them isn’t a solution,” he says. “These structures exist because of an unjust economic order. The kids in my community who joined—they weren’t born violent. The whole environment they live in is violent. It’s sick.” 

He understands, though, why it’s hard for many people to look past vengeance when they’re grieving a death at the hands of a gang. Policy is the last thing on their minds. “It’s not easy to maintain your reason,” he says, “when you’re emotional because they’ve killed your dad.”

The MS-13 was a U.S. export to El Salvador but how the MS-13 grew there was unlike what it had been here. Mano dura policing is somewhat an export from the U.S. to El Salvador but it played out much differently there than it did here. And it is not as if El Salvador did not have a history of mano dura before Giuliani and others arrived, or even before the U.S. showed up in El Salvador's civil war. And I think that we also conflate broken windows policing with zero tolerance policies with strong fist too often.