This March 27 marks two years since El Salvador imposed a exception regime which allowed him to capture any gang member or suspected gang collaborator without a warrant.
Several communities in El Salvador that for years suffered the scourge caused by gangs now experience security. However, behind the measure there are more than 3,000 complaints of arbitrary detentions, torture, abuses and human rights violations.
Also read: El Salvador takes the La Campanera neighborhood from the dangerous 18 gang
Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, has offered to export his security model in Haitia Caribbean country mired in poverty and with a deep crisis of insecurity caused by gangs.
“All the 'experts' said that these groups could not be defeated because they were an 'intrinsic part of our society.' They were wrong. We annihilate them. The same should be done in Haiti,” Bukele said on March 10 when he offered on his X account to provide a solution to the Haitian problem.
“We will need a UN Security Council resolution, the consent of the host country and all mission expenses to cover,” he added.
But could the Salvadoran president find a solution to the conflict that Haiti is experiencing? What similarities does that country have with El Salvador?
For Marvin Reyes, leader of an organized police movement in El Salvador, it cannot be applied the Salvadoran strategy in Haiti because the political and social conditions are not the same nor do the gangs share the same characteristics.
“Several members of the Haitian gangs were police officers and members of the armed forces. They are people who know very well about weapons and strategies. They not only know about weapons but also about heavy caliber weapons and abundant ammunition. In a foreign intervention they would know how to organize themselves because they know the territory and its people well,” Reyes said in an interview with the Voice of America.
Instead, Salvadoran gangs emerged as rebellious youth groups that sought to escape the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s. They settled in the United States as migrants and formed gangs with which they began their criminal operations.
When thousands of these young people were deported from the United States, they settled in the poorest neighborhoods of El Salvador where they recruited other young people and trained them to murder, kidnap and extort.
What was believed to be impossible, the Bukele government made it a fact in 2022. The gangs were dismantled after the government imprisoned some 75,000 people accused of illegally forming groups. Reyes does not believe that the police force to which he belonged will achieve the same in Haiti.
“A contingent of foreign military and police forces does not know the terrain, does not know the type of society in which these groups operate and does not know the capacity of their weapons: how many weapons they have, how many explosives or if they have other types of war material. such as grenade launcher or missile launcher. “It is an extremely unknown and complicated scenario,” Reyes added.
When the Exception regime began in March 2022 in El Salvador, the police and the Army deployed their operational force in the neighborhoods where there were gang leaders and lower-ranking gang members who failed to organize or respond to the affront.
The Salvadoran government already had a database that included the names and addresses of several gang members. He also knew the role they played within the gang.
Another aspect that Reyes exposes is that in Haiti there is no government. Recently Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigned due to the political turmoil that the island is experiencing. Instead, Bukele aligned the three powers of the State to implement the emergency regime, which is constitutionally contemplated for 30 days, but has already been extended to two years.
Haiti has experienced acute political crises since its birth as a nation in 1804. The stains of corruption and violence have plunged it into deep political instability. Added to this, the health and environmental crises made the country the poorest in the Americas, according to the World Bank.
Haiti fights armed gangs led by Jimmy Cherizier, alias “Barbecue”, a former Haitian police officer identified by the UN and the United States as responsible for numerous atrocities, including massacres.
See also: What is happening in Haiti and what are the consequences for the region?
It is estimated that at least 200 gang groups operate in Haiti, mainly in the capital Port-au-Prince. In addition to drug trafficking and arms trafficking networks.
In 2021, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. In 2022, the country requested an international mission to assist police in their fight against gangs. In 2023 the homicides by 119% compared to the previous yearand at the beginning of 2024 the crisis worsens.
For the specialist in violence and citizen security in Latin America, Verónica Reyna, the Bukele model cannot be applied in Haiti because it is not sustainable over time. Reyna believes that this model includes an anti-democratic ingredient and violates human rights, something that the international community has opposed.
“Bukele's result has been achieved through the dismantling of democratic functioning and the rule of law in El Salvador; It rests on the absence of controls and above all on the massive and systematic violation of human rights. “If any country wants to replicate this model it is because it wants to replicate those three elements,” he told the Voice of AmericaQueen.
With the measure, Bukele reduced the homicide rate from 39 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019 to 2.4 in 2023. In 2023, the UN asked El Salvador to lift the measure.
The UN has not responded to the call
Several countries have approached Haiti to offer help with the crisis, including the US. Additionally, Kenya and Haiti signed agreements to deploy 1,000 Kenyan law enforcement officers. In January Kenya's Supreme Court ruled the plan unconstitutional.
In these cases, the UN promotes peace operations in countries in conflict, as it did with the “Blue Helmets”, a UN mission sent to Haiti that had military personnel in charge of protecting civilians, monitoring the borders and observing peace processes. peace. The mission was retired in 2017.
However, Bukele's offer is unprecedented, since according to the United Nations Charter, no country can intervene in the internal affairs of others. In this case, El Salvador as an independent State cannot, according to international regulations, exercise public force in another State like Haiti.
At the end of January 2024, Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa offered former Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry a“evaluation mission” who would arrive in Haiti to prepare a proposal to solve the problem of insecurity.
The Voice of America He consulted the Salvadoran government's international press officer about the progress of those meetings, but said that at the moment no further information had emerged.
The UN has formulated a humanitarian response plan that seeks to provide food, health, and protection to 3.6 million Haitians over the next 12 months with support from partner countries.
“The civilized world knows that Haiti's problem is not gangs but a failed state,” he told the VOA Napoleón Campos, specialist in international relations,
Campos sees it as unfeasible for the UN to support Bukele's offer after reports that the “iron fist” in El Salvador has also swept away thousands of innocent people without criminal records or criminal links.
At least 7,000 people in El Salvador were released after spending months in prison unjustly accused of gang membership.
Furthermore, according to the record of the human rights organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, 220 people, of the more than 72,000 captured, died in prison in 2023 while awaiting a fair trial.
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