Voting For Authority in the Philippines and El Salvador
Extrajudicial Crackdowns Function as a Path to Election
President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele is emerging as one of the Western Hemisphere’s most surprising and dynamic politicians. In recent weeks, Bukele broke headlines with both his unprecedented adoption of Bitcoin as an official national currency, as well as the resumption of a wave of crackdowns on cartels and gang violence.
The crackdowns, a major policy triumph of Bukele’s administration, understandably have broad support from swaths of the population who are fed up with previous failures to confront rampant crime. The Bukele administration certainly plays up these mass arrests: images of detainees plaster national newspapers and TV, and prisoners are even paraded around the streets of San Salvador. However, such drastic measures as mass roundups of prisoners and overly penal laws have massive consequences for due process and rule of law in El Salvador.
Collecting thousands of men from inner cities will catch a lot of bad guys, but these efforts, combined with the repeal of legal rights for prisoners and harsher conditions, undoubtedly punish the wrongly accused as well. On an institutional scale, the vesting of expansive punitive powers with the state and the suspension of due process in favor of fighting crime could erode the democratic progress El Salvador has achieved.
So why, in the face of such drastic flaws, do El Salvadorans highly approve of Bukele’s arrests? Why would people vote for authoritarian measures that could easily incriminate them if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time? To answer this we turn to a similar example in Southeast Asia.
The Philippine Drug War
In 2016, the Philippine people elected Rodrigo Duterte into office by a margin of six million votes, far outcompeting every other contender. His platform included infrastructure spending and federalism, but the paramount issue of his campaign was his promise to ruthlessly crack down on drugs and gangs. A few memorable quotes were produced during the campaign:
“If I make it to the presidential palace I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, holdup men, and do-nothings, you better get out because I’ll kill you.”
“Hitler massacred 3 million Jews [sic] … there’s 3 million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”
“Please don’t order me around. … Or would you rather that I declare martial law?”
While luckily Duterte did not declare martial law, nor did he get to enjoy the slaughter of millions, his administration did produce a degradation of rule of law and the death of thousands of drug dealers along with many falsely accused simply shot in the streets. Police accountability was practically non-existent as Duterte protected both the authorities and paramilitaries from federal prosectors, leaving them free to kill anyone who “looked involved with drugs”. Often, these “gang members” turned out to be just ordinary people. Over twelve thousand were killed, the vast majority without trial, and the whole ordeal was, as the current El Salvadoran effort is, wildly popular.
The explanation for this phenomenon can be summarized with the under-appreciated notion that in unstable nations, putting “order before law” is a winning electoral strategy. Both El Salvador and the Philippines are historically weak central states that have immensely struggled to solve the problems of drugs and gangs. Voters see their governments as they are: corrupt and inept at fighting these issues. So corrupt, in fact, that it may be worth it to elect someone who will suspend the law to facilitate a quicker resolution of this crisis.
Cornell professor Thomas Pepinsky writes in “Voting Against Disorder” that politicians like Duterte stem from “frustrations with unstable and ineffective governance, combined with a historically rooted belief that political stability and material progress require the elimination of disorderly elements”. Philippine voters largely would agree that democracy is virtuous, but they are irritated that previous governments — who often use the language of conventional democratic norms — haven’t destroyed crime. Their faith in democracy is thus shaken, and they are inclined to believe strongmen who insist they abandon habeas corpus for a quicker solution to the problem. Opposition candidates who claim they can have both law and order are less likely to be believed in this framework, as the authoritarian candidate can attack them for being too soft or using a model that hasn’t worked in the past.
Philosophically, this is at odds with widely held notions in the West. We are willing to tolerate some level of chaos in the pursuit of liberty. Our decentralized media, free speech laws, and general faith in the individual to regulate his or herself speak to this. But for countries with a significant existing order problem, the rule of iron fists is sometimes tolerated. As Pepinsky notes, “To such politicians and their supporters, order is the prerequisite for effective governance. Law can be a means to secure order, but if law fails, then extralegal means become justified”.
The use of strongman positions on crime is a winning strategy in the developing world, resulting in extremely popular politicians across the globe. Indonesia’s Prabowo and the military regime in Thailand have recently utilized the same tools. All have in common a thread of saving the nation from an existential internal crisis — at the unspoken cost of liberty.
Consider the Voter
It may be easy for some Western audiences to sneer at voters throughout the developing world for electing thuggish politicians who suspend civil rights. But I think it is important to consider the tough human position many are put in to understand why “voting against disorder” works so well in the favor of these candidates.
While electorates in developed nations have the luxury of imagining a world with law and order, and have been inculcated with Jeffersonian views of liberty before security, consider that those in the streets of San Salvador and Manila still weep for relatives killed by drug dealers. They have sons who are groomed by MS-13, and daughters who are unimaginably vulnerable to a city rife with crime. These people harbor feelings of revenge, and one cannot blame them for it. My friend, a former missionary in El Salvador, described anguish in the aftermath of an apartment bombing, and how the citizens rallied to Nayib Bukele for an answer. It’s difficult for these people to consider a society free of crime and compliant with civil rights when their own is scarcely functioning.
Peoples’ political horizons are short, too. Victims of gang violence hear a politician promising a brutal crackdown on those who wronged them and lend their zealous support. They don’t stop to ponder the accused innocents who slip through the cracks, nor do they think of how a broken justice system might indict them in 5–10 years.
None of this is said in favor of strongman politicians who break the law and commit atrocities in the name of order; nor does it completely excuse the common people for failing to see how these officials distort politics. Rather, it’s recognition for the sake of understanding what needs to change. New candidates must learn from the “voting against disorder” phenomenon and forge strategies to confront it. Their campaigns should tangibly deal with the disorder affecting ordinary people and remind them of the democratic values that protect their society from injustice.
