El Salvador closes 2024 with a record low number of homicides, from 6,500 homicides to 114 - Funko Pop-loving ledditors comfortably living in North America and Western Europe come to terms that tough-on-crime policies maybe do work, and that the cringy problematic cryptobro chud dictator Nayee Bukkake actually.... did a good job?

!remindme 10 years

That will be enough time to vindicate me

Refrain from interacting with me in the future if you continue to sidevote

MS-13 was nowhere close to being like the militarized, drone-using, multi-billion dollar drugs and arms trafficking empire that the Mexican Cartels are

The annual revenue of MS-13 was ... $31.2 million

I honestly think MS13's face tattoo habit helped out, if only a little bit.

Posts like this is why I do Heroine.

I dunno how this matters, but I'm sure it does:

The big difference is that El Salvador went through a civil war 1980-1988 where lots of people got killed and everyone got more extremist. Everyone in the middle got killed off (good example being Oscar Romero where apparently he got killed by the rightoids because they got to him before the leftoids). We talk about "polarization" in the USA. This is a place where the center got wiped out and they were basically left with fascists and commies in roughly equal numbers. Then suddenly the Cold War ends. Only the most evil leaders are still left alive. They're pressured by foreign powers into getting along with each other.

Mexico was nowhere near that fricked-up in the boomer generation.

In Mexico's case, there is a reason why drug cartels first rose in the country's north.

Since Spanish colonial times, the lands north of Zacatecas were largely autonomous, with a settler-colonial setup (unlike the rest of New Spain) and community leaders aka patrons acting as de facto rulers. When Mexico eventually became independent, the central government tried to centralized control of its territories, much to the anger of the North (think Texas or California). As a result, Mexico City largely gave up on centralization and opted for a federal system, which meant that the Northern states had their autonomies guaranteed.

This, along with banning (for a while) and , led to groups of smugglers making big, like Al Capone did in Chicago and the Mob in NYC. The smugglers eventually became the first Mexican cartels, which evolved into primarily smuggling drugs and other high-value products since.

Ok but how do snow bunnies, BBC, and BWC figure into this?

Good post tho.

Check out the effort on that post.

The collapse of Mexico is really depressing. The ever lasting legacy of the PRI

Mexico tried centralization numerous times in its history. However, those at the helm were often r-slurred, like Santa Anna.

El Salvador is tiny, I doubt a significant enough amount of drugs are manufactured or transported through there, it's not even a chokepoint as those could just easily go through Nicaragua or Honduras or whatever

And whatever gangbangers are in the US are already there, I guess this stops the flow of new ones arriving, but surely Mexico is a much bigger supplier of that

The plan is probably to stop the gangs that enable the drug trade to America.

no the plan is for Trump to be able to point to an example of a country that is facist and he wants to do the same thing to Blacks and Mexicans as El Salvodor

Yeah I already said I think he's a CIA asset

Never understood why getting jumped into a gang is seen as scary in comparison to all the evil shit you're expected to do that you won't be able to justify like you could if you robbed a convenience store for smack money.

In July 2003, President Flores announced "Mano Dura" ("Firm Hand") on the radio. The government ordered its new civilian police force, with some military assistance, to flood into the worst neighborhoods of El Salvador and arrest anyone they suspected of gang activity under a new set of laws permitting far greater police powers.

85-95% of the suspected gang members arrested during the crackdown were released within six months. The constitution of El Salvador is very Western and protects the standard rights of due process. The Salvadoran Supreme Court ended up striking down most of Mano Dura and virtually all of those rounded up were let back onto the streets.

That's all you need to know. Whenever someone tries to fix a LatAm country in any which way a commies come along and tears it down, you literally can't escape it unless you become de facto dictator