Brian Winter: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is there a better alternative? I think yes, but it takes time. It involves building up your police forces, professionalizing your judiciary, and sending people the old-fashioned way to jail, by putting them on trial first. For societies that are not willing to tolerate that, that don’t have that patience — because they think that they’re going through a crisis, an emergency — I have to say I understand why Bukele has an approval rating upwards of 80 percent, because the results are real. The history of the world is full of societies, including democratic societies, that have been willing to suspend civil liberties in the name of a national emergency. We did that here in the United States during the Civil War with the suspension of habeas corpus. We did it with the internment camps of the World War II era with the Japanese population. We, as a society, almost always regret these things after the fact, but they’re seen as necessary at the time. The real debate for me that Bukele awakens is, I may think that what Bukele is doing is anti-democratic, but if he was just voted in a second term as president with a huge mandate, then arguably El Salvador’s society has a democratic sovereign right to make that decision and to sign off on what he’s doing, which is, again, sending a lot of people — including, almost certainly, innocent people — to jail. If that’s a cost that Salvadoran society is willing to take, then perhaps they have a right to do that. It remains to be seen how exportable that model is to other countries in the region. You hear a lot of politicians saying nice things about Bukele, but no other country really has yet gone down that path. Ecuador and Honduras are trying a bit, but half-heartedly. It may be an all-or-nothing thing if you’re going to make it work. Otherwise, gang members just train other gang members.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.