Like El Salvador, Ecuador has wielded political power to purge its crime, a basic responsibility of government too many elites have forgotten.
Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has been inspired by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s effective assertion of state power over crime syndicates. Both countries were once among the most dangerous in the world due to their violent gang-related crime rates and seemingly incurable drug problems. Under their new regimes, however, both have become so safe that they are attracting foreigners.
Noboa has the difficult task of fighting long-entrenched corruption across Ecuador’s prison systems and political agencies. The situation was so dire that gang members hijacked and held hostage a news anchor live on television last month.
Nevertheless, Noboa has taken notes on how Bukele used a state of emergency to assemble the military and police to conduct a nationwide operation that broke all syndicate strongholds in El Salvador. Noboa is even hiring the same company that built Bukele’s mega-prison to build one in his country.
Within a month, Noboa has already lowered Ecuador’s homicide rate by 70% and has cleansed his prison system of most corruption. This has spiked his approval rating among Ecuadoreans up to 80%. Human rights activists are framing the regime as an inhumane threat to democracy, but as one resident said, “We lost our civil rights a long time ago — but because of these criminal groups, not the armed forces.”
In his first term, Bukele shocked the free world by transforming the status of El Salvador, until then called the “murder capital of the world,” into a patriotic paradise. It is now the safest country in Latin America, dropping from a homicide rate of 53.1% in 2018 to 2.4% in 2023. His actions earned him a landslide reelection, and he has a 91.2% approval rating among El Salvadorans.
Bukele, being the figurehead who started this Latin American movement, had received the brunt of the Left’s ire for actually doing his job well. Human rights activist organization Amnesty International USA complained that by locking up over 70,000 violent drug dealers, “Thousands of families have been seriously affected economically because the main breadwinner has been apprehended.” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and several Democratic members of Congress begged the U.S. government to interfere with his election to “defend democratic values.”
It is astounding that American leftists have the audacity to accuse countries such as Ecuador and El Salvador of violating human rights when they encourage mass illegal immigration into the United States and uphold catch-and-release policies for repeat violent criminals.
It is astounding that American leftists accuse these nations of threatening democracy when radical activist politicians openly encourage violence against political dissidents and the U.S. president’s chief medical adviser pedaled a series of lies to encourage the forced masking, vaccination, and isolation of the population of the nation.
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Bukele pointed out the obvious in his inaugural speech last Wednesday: “Why aren’t you happy to see that blood doesn’t run in our country as it did before? Why should we die? Why should our children die so that you can be happy that we are respecting your false democracy, which you don’t even respect in your own country?”
Bukele, whose words also spoke for Ecuador and the other Latin American nations that are joining in the war on crime, effectively gave the middle finger to the decadent and incompetent American leftist establishment. And so do I.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner winter fellow.