Skip to footer

El Salvador's first 'murder free' day in three years: The first of many?

The Salvadorian government allegedly made a truce with gang leaders. Giving criminals impunity for reduced violence may weaken the legitimacy of the state, but it's saving lives, writes a blogger.

• A version of this post ran on the author's blog, bloggingsbyboz.com. The views expressed are the author's own.

Last Saturday, El Salvador had its first murder free day in three years. It was symbolically important for one of the most violent countries on earth, but it also wasn't much of an outlier this month.
 
 Murders are down about 50 percent since the unannounced truce took hold in early March. Initial official statistics say there were 411 murders in January, 402 in February, and 230 in March. In the first 12 days of April, there were 70 murders. That's a huge decline. It's fair to say that the first month of the truce resulted in about 200 fewer murders.
 
We can and should have academic, philosophical, and political discussions about this. What does it mean for society to negotiate with gangs and organized crime? What did the government give in exchange? Shouldn't the government be more transparent about the negotiations? What are the tradeoffs? Is it sustainable over the long term?

I'm someone who would have been very hesitant to consider negotiations with gangs, particularly with the concessions that the Salvadoran government has allegedly made to gang leaders (though they deny it). I don't think it's sustainable. I do think that the tradeoffs of giving criminals impunity for reduced violence weakens the position and legitimacy of the state in some way. I do think this gives the gangs power in the sense that they can threaten the government with resuming violence at any time.
 
However, it's hard to argue with the results. It's really tough to argue that it would have been better for 200 more people to die than for the government to have given up whatever it did in the negotiations with the gangs.
 
We're no longer engaged in a philosophical exercise of what might be the merits and drawbacks of negotiating with the gangs. El Salvador has half the murder rate it did a month ago. Given the violence in that country, it's a result that would be considered a success under nearly any circumstances. It's a result that the US and other donor countries were willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to achieve through the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) and other security initiatives and would have proclaimed a giant victory if it had happened under their strategy. It's a result that is tough to lose in exchange for a different policy.

One side of this debate now has real results. No matter how you look at it, it's a game changer.

– James Bosworth is a freelance writer and consultant based in Managua, Nicaragua, who runs Bloggings by Boz.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to El Salvador's first 'murder free' day in three years: The first of many?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/Latin-America-Monitor/2012/0420/El-Salvador-s-first-murder-free-day-in-three-years-The-first-of-many
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe