The Americas | Crime in El Salvador

The broken-truce theory

The end of an armistice between gangs has led to soaring murders

Hoping to lay down arms

“THE best answer to terrorist groups and gangs is to confront them,” believes Rudolph Giuliani, a former mayor of New York city. The man who brought the broken-window theory—that tolerance of small crimes would encourage bigger ones—to the United States’ biggest city unsurprisingly rejects the idea of negotiating with gangsters. Now a group of right-wing businessmen in El Salvador have hired Mr Giuliani to propose tough-guy solutions to crime in one of the world’s most gang-ridden countries. He dispatched a fact-finding mission in January.

The facts, however, may prove him wrong. El Salvador’s murder rate dropped sharply during a truce between the country’s two main gangs in 2012-14, which was brokered by the government. It soared after the agreement broke down early last year. The number of murders rose 57% in 2014 compared with a year earlier, to almost 11 a day, according to the police. A rash of killings in early January 2015 took the number to a staggering 15 a day.

The armistice has now been restored, perhaps fleetingly. Raúl Mijango, a former guerrilla who helped broker the 2012 truce, says that on January 17th leaders of the gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, agreed from their jail cells to halt the killing without any mediation. Murders plummeted again. “Yesterday…was the first day of the year WITHOUT A SINGLE HOMICIDE in El Salvador,” a deputy police chief tweeted exuberantly on January 23rd.

Though such agreements reduce bloodshed they are deeply unpopular. One reason, says Maurício Ramírez Landaverde, head of the National Civil Police, is that although gang members stop killing each other temporarily, gang-related crime that afflicts ordinary people, such as extortion, continues unabated. So does violence between gangsters and police. Seven policemen were murdered in January, Mr Ramírez Landaverde notes. He has instructed his men to carry guns even when off-duty, and to “use them whenever necessary”. John Huvane, chief executive of Giuliani Security and Safety, says that during the 2012 truce gangsters expanded their criminal empires from jail via mobile phones. “It sounds romantic to sit down and talk with them, but this is in-house terrorism,” he says.

Politics hampered efforts to make more of the 2012 truce. Salvador Sánchez Cerén, El Salvador’s left-wing president, all but disowned it in the run-up to his election last March, even though he was vice-president when it was brokered. He feared that the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, which is close to the businessmen who hired Mr Giuliani, would bash him for being soft on crime. With legislative and mayoral elections scheduled for March 1st, Mr Sánchez Cerén has ratcheted up his anti-truce rhetoric. His alternative anti-crime strategy—built around a security council incorporating different parts of society—is just now getting off the ground.

A more fruitful approach would be to build on the truce rather than disown it, suggests Adam Blackwell of the Organisation of American States; it should be part of a “pacification process” that would include economic help for gang-controlled areas to provide alternatives to crime. That has only happened sporadically. The truce encouraged gang leaders to talk to each other face to face and offered an alternative to iron-fist policies that have failed repeatedly to stop violence. Mr Blackwell sees gangs as a violent consequence of social exclusion. If you give gang members a stake in society, he says, they will halt their war against it.

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The broken-truce theory"

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