Bukele's recipe doesn't work in Honduras, where the narco kills more than the maras

report SRA 2024 / [PDF version].

° President Xiomara Castro decreed a state of emergency in December 2022; in March 2023 she announced the upcoming construction of two maximum security prisons.

° El Salvador is a smaller country, the president has negotiated under the table with the gangs and about a third of its members have fled, some precisely to the neighboring country.

° Honduras also faces the problem of drug trafficking, Castro has fewer levers of power than Bukele and in Honduras there is a greater complexity of police forces.

El Salvador and Honduras have been plagued by the same problem for decades. The gangs have turned both countries into two of the most dangerous nations in the world and with the highest homicide rates in the entire continent fees . Originating among Central American immigration in Los Angeles, the Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs expanded since the 1990s into El Salvador and Honduras - to a lesser extent, Guatemala - once the wars that had driven out the population there ended.

After some previous unsuccessful attempts at mano dura in El Salvador, the election of President Nayib Bukele in 2019 marked a considerable change, and his success in reducing violence has been replicated in other countries, including Honduras, where some similar measures have been implemented without a clear reduction in the homicide rate so far. The greater presence of drug trafficking in Honduras, through which the Colombian cocaine route to the United States passes - El Salvador is somewhat more marginalized - may explain this difference, in addition to the more omnipotent power exercised by Bukele, at times with dystopian overtones.

Until the beginning of the present war against the maras, it was estimated that there were between 30,000 and 60,000 active members in El Salvador, practically doubling the 25,000 to 36,000 in Honduras, even though the population is a third smaller (counting also the people around them who are partially involved, in the Salvadoran case, issue reached 300,000).

Homicide rate

Upon his arrival to the presidency, Bukele launched the Territorial Control Plan, in order to put an end to gang members. This project was based on three fundamental axes: attacking the gangs' finances, cutting off their communication in the prisons and recovering the center of the big cities. Bukele gave an important role to the Armed Forces, substantially increasing defense spending, and proceeded with the construction of a mega-prison, making El Salvador the country with the highest rate of people in prison in the world.

At the same time, there has been an arbitrary policy of detention and imprisonment of alleged suspects, and an abusive attention in prisons, as Human Rights Watch has denounced. During this war against the maras, Salvadoran authorities have captured more than 68,000 people. The application of the state of emergency since March 2022, there have been detentions without judicial guarantees, extreme overcrowding in prisons and a high number of deaths in prisons.

In this time, El Salvador has gone from having the world's highest homicide rate of 104 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015 to 7.8 in 2022 and 2.4 in 2023. In Bukele's words before the UN General Assembly in September 2023, "El Salvador has gone from being the most dangerous country in the world to being the safest country in Latin America" and "competes with Canada for being the safest country on the continent." Bukele's high popularity, over 90%, led him to a landslide victory in his February 2024 reelection.

Does it apply to Honduras?

Other leaders in the region, following the 'Bukele effect', have shown interest in copying some measures. In general they have been right-leaning politicians, with the exception of Honduran President Xiomara Castro, who in December 2022 also decided to apply a state of emergency in part of the country, especially in the Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula areas, suspending some constitutional rights in order to confront the maras harshly. Since extended, the state of exception has included military operations to regain control of prisons. In March 2023 Castro announced the construction of two maximum security prisons, one on the Swan Islands and the other on Patuca; work has not yet begun.

Despite the purpose of obtaining a drastic reduction in violence as has occurred in El Salvador, in Honduras the results have not been as striking. The homicide rate fell from 38.6 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2021 to 35.8 in 2022 and 31.1 in 2023. While these figures point to progress, it is clear that violence in Honduras has not yet been brought under control.

But why the mixed results in neighboring countries that have resorted to a seemingly similar strategy? The main reason given is that Bukele's plan has involved secret negotiations with the gangs. The Salvadoran president has been found to have held dialogues with the gangs, including allowing access to maximum security prisons to facilitate meetings between gang leaders and clique members. He has even been accused of releasing high-ranking gang leaders in exchange for maintaining a low profile while at liberty.

This strategy is difficult to apply in Honduras, as the configuration of the maras is different. In El Salvador, MS-13 and Barrio 18 maintain a virtually ubiquitous presence throughout the country, while in Honduras the concentrations are different and there is a greater variety of criminal groups, making negotiations more complicated. In fact, in Honduras, it is not the maras that are most responsible for homicides, but drug trafficking, as the Observatory of Violence of the National University of Honduras has pointed out.

The country is an essential link in the Colombian cocaine route: it arrives in small planes in the Mosquitia jungle and from there travels through the north of the country to Mexico, where it is then smuggled by cartels into the United States. The arrest of former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, Castro's predecessor, for trial in New York indicates the influence achieved by drug trafficking. By contrast, El Salvador, the only Central American country without a Caribbean coastline, is left somewhat on the sidelines; the Pacific route goes further out to sea and skips the small state.

In addition, the fact that Salvadoran gang members have moved to Honduras to avoid arrest in their home country (an estimated one-third of Salvadoran gang members are still at large, in part because they have fled), means that violent elements that are not integrated into local command networks are present in the neighboring nation, making police action more difficult.

On the other hand, Honduras has a greater variety of security forces than El Salvador and the president does not completely control all the levers of power like Bukele, which could mean more laxity within the forces, with "infiltration of criminal interests".

Democratic deterioration

Considering the not so successful application of the Bukele method in Honduras, can this be considered a model to be followed by other Latin American countries? The answer is probably no. To begin with, the region is very diverse and so are its circumstances. The same solution cannot be applied to different contexts and problems. In the case of El Salvador, the size of the country facilitates such a forceful action, but it would be a problem in countries with larger populations. Not even Haiti, the country that Bukele himself has targeted by personally offering himselffor a direct UN mandate to give him the authority to resolve the serious chaos in the Caribbean nation, would be a propitious terrain.

Notoriously, the Salvadoran strategy is causing particular damage to the democratic system. The initial fight against the maras allowed Bukele to gain control of the legislative branch, which in turn has C laws that do not conform to the rule of law; with control of the National Assembly, he has proceeded to the unconstitutional appointment of judges (who, in turn, later authorized a presidential reelection prohibited by the Constitution). The lack of independence of the judiciary casts great doubt on the guarantees of those imprisoned, especially those who have been unjustly imprisoned, considered as 'residual victims'. Furthermore, it has been proven that this model causes social inequality, since those who suffer most from states of exception are the marginalized communities.