El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, a Trump ally, has defended his anti-crime policies, which transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest in the Americas.
“The war of incentives is never going to be won,” he said. “So we understood, by force and with blows, that the only way was to go after the gang member and arrest him.”
His Territorial Control Plan transitioned from traditional policing to a massive military-led crackdown following a spike in violence in March 2022.
Under a declared State of Exception, Bukele imposed a “régimen de excepción” that suspended constitutional rights, including the right to legal counsel, freedom of assembly, and the requirement for a warrant before arrest.
Laws were changed to allow children as young as 12 to be tried as adults for gang crimes and to permit mass trials in which hundreds of defendants are processed simultaneously.
He constructed the CECOT (Center for the Confinement of Terrorism), a high-tech mega-prison designed to hold 40,000 inmates in austere conditions, severing their contact with the outside world. As of early 2026, more than 94,000 people have been arrested.
In Bukele’s words, the way to deal with the gang member is “not to punish him, but to get him out of society. He has to be out of the equation.”
He argues the program’s effectiveness is reflected in the numbers. Before the crackdown, the homicide rate was 103 per 100,000. Now it is 1.3 per 100,000. Gangs once controlled 80 percent of the country.
The government has largely retaken control. Business owners used to pay extortion, or “rent,” but since the gangs were locked up, this has sharply declined.
Addressing criticism, President Bukele recounted the story of a woman with no hands who makes chocolate bars. He said her gang-member nephews cut off her hands when she refused to pay extortion money.
“And she will go through life with no hands because she wouldn’t pay extortion. No one defended her human rights. No one defended her. All of these politicians tear their clothes over the rights of the gang members.
People came out to defend the rights of the criminals. They have rights, yes, but not more rights than others.”
At a press conference, Bukele addressed objections beyond human-rights concerns. Critics argued that crime could not be eliminated all at once, not because of technical limitations, but because of the economic impact.
They told him there were 70,000 gang members, which meant 70,000 “jobs.” Though the money was earned illegally, it flowed into households that spent it on diapers, food, rent, electricity, telephone service, cable, internet, clothes, and beer.
If gangs were dismantled overnight, they warned, that underground economy would collapse, and no legal parallel economy would replace it quickly enough.
They advised ending crime gradually so the legal economy could compensate “little by little” for the criminal one.
Bukele rejected that reasoning. “Those kinds of theories, which sound good to intellectuals, don’t apply in reality,” he said. “The reality is that crime is crime, period. And if you allow it, they will always win in the war of incentives.”
He illustrated his point with the example of a young man choosing between honest work and gang life. Selling tomatoes in the market is hard work, he said.
The vendor loads produce in the sun, stands all day in poor conditions, risks spoilage, and sometimes sells goods on consignment, meaning losses come out of his own pocket. After that effort, he might earn five dollars.
Then, on the way home, a gang member demands the money. In that situation, Bukele said, the incentive shifts toward becoming the gang member who collects the five dollars rather than the worker who earns it only to hand it over.
“So the war of incentives is never going to be won,” Bukele said. “So we understood, by force and with blows, that the only way was to go after the gang member and arrest him, to get him out of society.”
Once the gang member is removed, he argued, the young person recalculates his options. The choice becomes prison or legitimate work that will not be extorted.
With gangs dismantled, he said, a young man can earn money, keep it, and build a life without gang coercion. “The point is that now the incentives of society are done correctly,” Bukele said.
Organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International claim to have documented thousands of arbitrary arrests in which people with no gang ties were detained based on anonymous tips or simply for having tattoos.
However, everyone in CECOT has gang tattoos. That suggests either anonymous tips were followed up with investigation and additional evidence, or the claim that people are being arrested solely on the basis of a phone call is inaccurate. No one is being arrested simply because an anonymous person calls and denounces them.
Human-rights groups often cite family testimony to claim detainees are innocent. It is not farfetched to believe that a family might lie in an attempt to secure the release of a relative from detention.
Another claim is that many detainees are former gang members who “retired” years or decades ago, often after finding religion or stable work.
Under current law, having a gang tattoo from 20 years ago, even if the person has since been law-abiding, can be grounds for life imprisonment. That establishes prior gang involvement for which no punishment was previously imposed.
Many gangs operate under a blood-in, blood-out structure, meaning the only way to leave is through death. In that context, gang tattoos function as internal identification. Anyone falsely bearing a gang tattoo risks being killed by the gang itself.
Claims that President Trump sent honest, hardworking immigrants to a foreign gulag or concentration camp are not accurate.
The Trump administration deports illegal aliens but does not dictate how foreign governments handle them once returned.
Many countries refuse to accept deportees, particularly those linked to gangs or terrorism. President Trump made a deal with El Salvador to accept some of those deportees.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the most well-known case of someone deported to El Salvador, his country of citizenship. Under Salvadoran law, gang members and terrorists are incarcerated in CECOT. U.S. Democrats and liberals criticized President Trump over these deportations.
If a home country refuses to accept a deportee, the alternatives are limited. One option would be permanent detention in the United States because the individual has no legal residency status.
However, that would be unconstitutional if the person has not been charged with a crime. The other option is deportation to a third-country willing to accept them, which is what President Trump did.
In Garcia’s case, he is a citizen of El Salvador and therefore subject to Salvadoran law. American politicians should not have involved themselves in extracting him from the legal jurisdiction of his own country.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN, January 2024) led a letter to the State Department calling for a denunciation of Bukele’s “authoritarian actions,” stating, “President Bukele has… overseen the militarized harassment of the legislature, a significant erosion of judicial independence, and the de facto criminalization of civil society.”
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH, 2025) criticized the Trump–Bukele cooperation on deportations, saying, “Disregarding the rule of law, ignoring unanimous rulings… and subjecting individuals to detention without due process makes us less safe as a country.”
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) has been a consistent critic, stating that the “State of Exception” is a “clear violation of human rights” and that the United States should not fund a government that “suspends basic constitutional rights indefinitely.”
As Bukele has argued, many liberals, Democrats, and human-rights advocates have focused on the rights of accused criminals while doing nothing to address the rights of crime victims.
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