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The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

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Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#101

Post by tastyface »

rayiner wrote: post #49

The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-... . The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a…

So they "solved" gangs and installed a ruthless and illegal dictatorship in their place — which may in fact be secretly conspiring with those same gangs behind the scenes.

I feel sorry for El Salvador. It may now have to experience several generations of Soviet-style repression and suffering before a new regime is able to overthrow the current one. Meanwhile, thousands of families will never get to find out what happened to their loved ones in those horrifying concentration camps.

FYI, many of our (Americans') ancestors fled their home countries precisely to escape this sort of state-enacted brutality.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#103

Post by tastyface »

rayiner wrote: post #93
tepalmnagon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country. Or, you could just acknowledge that it is inherently inhumane, despite the improvements it's making for your country. Of course authoritarian measures bring results and of course in a country like El Salvador, in it's previous s…

[flagged]

How do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it?

As the number of incarcerated grows from 2% to 5% to consolidate Bukele's power, what recourse will anyone have outside the party elite?

The pattern of strongman politicians, indefinite emergency measures, and erosion of liberties to manifest full bore dictatorship has repeated over and over and over again in the 20th and 21st centuries — and you still can't see it happening? You may enjoy it now, but consider this the honeymoon phase: it only gets worse from here on out.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#104

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

gotoeleven wrote: post #95
hayst4ck wrote: post #11

I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like. In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes. In a world without law, the only restriction…

[flagged]

I think that you should consider trying to widen your media diet. Everyone can benefit from listening to opposing perspectives.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#105

Post by rayiner »

rbetts wrote: post #96
rayiner wrote: post #49

The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-... . The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a…

So easily you gloss over millions of Americans who fought to end slavery, who fought for women's right to vote, who fought for desegregation, who fought for labor rights,... The "comfortable life" in America isn't a 300 year old gift of extra judicial killings - it's a continued culture across 10 generations of individuals and communities fighting for ever fairer freedoms under a shared rule of law.

You’re retconning history from a mid-20th century civil rights lens. That lens focuses on increasing access to a civilizational order that has already been built. Its about expanding access to what white males already had. But it’s an inadequate lens for understanding how that order was built in the first place.

The hard part is getting “from 0 to 1.” You need a state, the state needs to impose order and gain control over warlords, you need law and civil institutions, you need a government that is controlled by more than a handful of people, etc.

England or New England in 1800 was already a more developed society than Bangladesh or Somalia or Iraq in 2024, even though slavery still existed and suffrage wasn’t universal. Just getting to that point would be transformational for much of asia, the middle east, and africa.

This is why nation building in the 20th and early 21st century has failed so spectacularly. You can go into Iraq and create a nice constitution with rights and universal suffrage and religious freedom, but you’re just redistributing 0. The “rights lens” doesn’t actually tell you how to get Iraq in 2024 to the point where England was in 1800.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#106

Post by archagon »

ein0p wrote: post #15

[flagged]

Fun fact: you can solve all crime this way! Just make everything down to the smallest misdemeanor a capital offense. Perfect society, right?

> carrying water for MS13 and Tren de Aragua

Cruel and offensive words.

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#107

Post by tastyface »

rayiner wrote: post #63
tdeck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police in El Salvador start each day with a quota of people to round up and imprison without trial. If they don't meet the quota, they don't get to go home to their families. https://apnews.com/article/nayib-bukele-san-salvador-el-arre... https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/12/07/we-can-arrest-anyone-w... Frankly it's shocking every time I see people praise Bukele on Hacker News.

[flagged]

I suspect that people like you require the personal experience of having a loved one black-bagged in the middle of the night without recourse to understand OP's position. Every authoritarian regime ever uses the same logic to build up their police state: "for the greater good".

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#108

Post by at_a_remove »

This is pretty sad as a headline. It's not a warning, it is business as usual.

Civil asset forfeiture started expanding in the 1970s and in the next decade, we got Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Gitmo? 2002. Room 641A is the next year. Black ops sites, aka "we can torture you as long as we're not in the United States" is somewhere around there. Extrajudicial killings, I read 2,400 in just Pakistan, that's Obama-era, right? Stingrays, about 2007 or so. Qualified immunity out the yin-yang; hell, you can just shoot up someone's house for nearly a day trying to capture a shoplifter and the courts will shrug. That's 2015. Even the ACLU has become notably more partisan.

Decades ago, back when I thought people were capable of learning from anything other than a hot stovetop, I used to say that we ought to be careful when making manacles to restrict various liberties and cautious when providing more tools for law enforcement, because you just do not know for a certainty that the manacles you made will not be around your own wrists and that the latest tools of the law will not be aimed at you. "Pretend you will eventually be on the losing side," I said.

We've been going along with this business because it was convenient to believe that these little inches taken will not add up to miles. This will only be used on drug peddlers, pedophiles, terrorists, and money launderers, WINK WINK. We have been building this machine for a long time, and we've been smug as a bug on a landline with a FISA rubberstamp warrant.

Why this headline, now? And also, why this headline, now? Now and this because the people who were very comfortable are finally cottoning on to the fact that the various abilities tacked on to the Executive Branch over the decades might actually be used against them (us? ME? but I am one of the good guys, I only helped construct the machine!) and, while fearful, are still unwilling to engage with their own multi-decade culpability, so they must focus on the latest outrage and nothing before it. To do otherwise would suggest that they have some kind of involvement in this particular outcome and just making noises like "Trump," "Musk," and "fascism" keeps their metaphorical hands clean.

At this point, when I mention this kind of thing online, it's less from a desire to sway opinion (almost no chance of that occurring) and more of an opportunity for me, years down the line, to point and say, "Yup. Called it."

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#109

Post by hayst4ck »

gotoeleven wrote: post #95
hayst4ck wrote: post #11

I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like. In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes. In a world without law, the only restriction…

[flagged]

Citizenship is not some indelible mark on your person. It is likely at best some ink on a piece of paper or line in a database that can be lost, stolen, "forgotten", or denied.

Imagine that I were a police officer, I asked for your papers, and then immediately burnt them. How are you going to prove you are a citizen? What if I accused you of faking those documents? What is your recourse? How are you going to prove your citizenship? Are you going to go to the judge that was appointed by the person in power to plead your case? I already think you faked your documents, why should I let you have due process, I already know you are guilty.

Once you take away the structure of law these ideas that you think give you power, like citizenship, are just power on paper. The only real power you have is your friends and family getting upset and going to a journalist to plead your case to the court of public opinion, but maybe those journalists are employed by a billionaire, too, or they are scared they will fall out a window if they question the governments actions.

You are trusting someone who says if you give them power, they will solve your problems. But what if they don't, what if they start causing you problems? Who takes that power away once they already have it or have consolidated it with loyalists?

Re: The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans

#110

Post by anonzzzies »

rayiner wrote: post #93
tepalmnagon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country. Or, you could just acknowledge that it is inherently inhumane, despite the improvements it's making for your country. Of course authoritarian measures bring results and of course in a country like El Salvador, in it's previous s…

[flagged]

So if they lock up, torture (you are a gang member as you looked weird at your neighbour of 20 years who happens to be a friend of a the local police chief) and kill you and your family without any due process that's fine for the greater good? Don't think many people have that idea, probably nor do you; you just think so as it didn't happen to you yet. The overwhelming majority as you say does a lot here; where is the proof and process that it is the overwhelming majority? And that these people are not just people like you and your kids but who do not agree with the regime? According to the process/system, all people in Cambodia were guilty as well. You cannot have read any history and talk like this so I guess you never have.

It will get worse anyway; that 2% will rise and that gov will never go away, killing everyone who opposes them. History shows this every time.

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