It is with huge enthusiasm that the Latin American right has observed the measures taken by Nayib Bukele, incumbent president of El Salvador since 2019. According to his government, homicide rates in the country have dropped to 1.9 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants. If El Salvador had a homicide rate frequently above 50 deaths/hundred thousand people, now the country is arguably one of the Latin American states with lower taxes. The drastic reduction in the number of homicides in a region plagued by violence made Bukele an example to follow for the conservatives. However, his efforts to combat criminal organizations came at a severe cost. Like other leaders of the global right, the Salvadoran president has clearly attacked the country’s democracy. He even called himself the “world’s coolest dictator”. In 2022, following a series of gang attacks, Bukele managed to get parliament, where his party and supporters hold a supermajority, to approve a state of emergency granting the government enormous power, including the suppression of the right to protest. Various social movements, including feminist and LGBT+ groups, have denounced political persecution and restrictions on their political freedoms.

Since the declaration of the state of emergency, thousands of people have gone to jail. The Human Rights Watch has identified that many imprisonments have not respected the legal procedures, with torture being used even on minors. Bukele also managed to get the legislature to dismiss the Supreme Court and align the judicial system with his political interests. With the judiciary under his control, it is not surprising that he managed to get re-elected for another 5-year term, despite the country’s Constitution not allowing re-election. A country that has lived for 3 years in a state of exception that restricts various civil liberties, where people are imprisoned without trial, minors are tortured, and the Supreme Court is closed, cannot be considered a democracy. 

The question that arises, then, is whether this is the Latin American destiny. Do we either have democracy and violence, or do we have oppressive dictatorships and security? The discourse around such an arbitrary choice has taken over much of political discussion. If Bukele and the Latin American right want us to believe his authoritarianism is the only option to overcome violence, we must look with caution and try to understand what is behind the violence in the region.  

The literature that addresses violence in Latin America is far from reaching a consensus on the leading cause of this phenomenon. However, several factors have been identified, and all appear to be interconnected with the region’s social and economic conditions. Some quantitative research has found a strong correlation between higher violence rates and youth bulges, affirming that access to education would promote peace. As the region also presents significant economic inequalities, the difference in access to resources is another factor recurrently mentioned to explain violence in Latin America. In an almost consensual manner, others have identified that the military dictatorship contributed to the rise of violence in the region. This conclusion suggests that dictatorships may even, in the short term, diminish feelings of insecurity through their oppressive methods. However, they have pervasive long-term outcomes. Hence, Bukele’s answer may not have been effective in the long term.  

Therefore, we must consider that Latin American violence seems to be deeply linked to social issues, such as the lack of opportunities for young people, social inequalities, and low access to education. The next step, then, is to interrogate why the region continues to perform so poorly in these areas. There are several possible explanations for Latin American poverty; however, one explains the continuity of this process particularly well. In 1967, the Marxist Brazilian economist Ruy Mauro Marini first used the term “super-exploitation.” Marini argued that the economic elites of the periphery of the international system compensated for their peripheral positions by drastically reducing wages. Since they produce goods with low added value, the increase in surplus value was fundamental for such compensation, which, in turn, generated social inequalities and poverty. Beyond super-exploitation, what he and other dependency theorists, such as Theotonio dos Santos and Gunder Frank, identified was a drain of resources from peripheral zones, such as Latin America, to the center of the system. As Marx already identified in texts such as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, capitalism transforms labor into a commodity. With a large labor supply, the “price” of labor was reduced in these regions. Specialized in low-value-added goods, the international distribution of labor meant that such goods arrived at low prices in the countries at the center of the international system. Considering all this context, Latin American poverty is a necessary tool for international capitalism, or for what Immanuel Wallerstein called the world-economy.  

If violence in Latin America arises because of social inequalities and, in turn, these arise from the functioning of the international capitalist system, we can conclude that violence has its basis in capitalism. It is no coincidence that a recent survey in Brazil that interviewed drug traffickers concluded that most would leave the drug trade if they had an alternative job with a good salary. The solution that dependency theorists have already offered for Latin American problems would involve overcoming a system based on capital accumulation. With better wages and opportunities for marginalized populations, everything indicates that violence in the region would decrease. Returning to the context of El Salvador, if capitalism creates violence and Bukele does not attack capitalism, how has he managed to be successful?  

The current Latin American context suggests a trilemma. In Dani Rodrik’s macroeconomic trilemma, globalization, the nation-state, and democracy cannot coexist, forcing us to choose two of these three. A similar trilemma arises in Latin America: it is only possible to have two of the three simultaneously: 1. liberal democracy; 2. security; 3. capitalism.  

The current context of most Latin American countries is one of liberal democracy and capitalism. In this case, the international division of labor operating on a logic of capital pursuit leads to super-exploitation. In turn, low wages will lead to increased violence, thereby restricting security. Then we have liberal democracy and capitalism, yet violence remains high. If we want security without challenging capitalist logics, we have Bukele and his authoritarian proposal. Democracy will be lost with authoritarian measures, without concern for human rights. Torture, political persecution, and restrictions on civil rights are accepted in such a system, being justified as a mechanism to reduce the number of homicides.  

There is a third possible option, which has not yet been fully implemented: democracy and security, leaving aside the capitalist system. If dependency theorists are right and we break with the system of super-exploitation of labor, social inequalities may dissipate. With access to education and less poverty, fewer people will join violent organizations. Some policies implemented by governments more concerned with income distribution, while not completely breaking with capitalism, are already suggesting that such measures can work. Some studies found that capital transfer programs, such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família, reduce homicides in regions with higher numbers of beneficiaries. 

Latin America suffers from chronic violence that many governments struggle to resolve. If we agree that democracy is preferable to authoritarianism, we cannot allow ourselves to fall into the error of reproducing the discourse that Bukele and other Latin American politicians seek to impose on us. Attacking democracy is not the only way to reduce violence in the region. There is another possibility, perhaps much more demanding, but certainly much more promising: to overcome capitalism. A new economic, political, and social system that puts peace, rather than capital, at the core of any social relation may be the best option for achieving peace in Latin America without resorting to authoritarianism.  

Further Reading on E-International Relations

How London’s Latin American Women Make Families, Communities and Rights Visible

Latin American Critical Economic Thinking and the Labor Market

Decoloniality and Contemporary Regionalism in ALBA

China in the Pages of Americas Quarterly: Three Interpretations

Unaccompanied Children on the Move: From Central America to the US via Mexico

Migration Management and Safe Migration along the Indonesia-Malaysia Corridor

Luis Gouveia Jr (he/him) is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the University of Coimbra / Centre for Social Studies, Portugal. His doctoral research, which analyzes the BRICS and its cooperation in international security, is financed by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. He completed an MSc in Latin American Studies at the University of Oxford (St Antony’s College) and has recently published his first book “E se colocarmos a paz no centro da política?” (What if we bring peace to the core of politics?).

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