Before the government suspended it; the murder rate was nearly the highest in the world, and every attempt previously failed.
Freedoms sometimes break down at scale given the right conditions. That's not comfortable to contemplate. If even 20% of people were involved in the gang and using GrapheneOS, you bet that freedom would be revoked. There is no guarantee in natural law that freedom is self-sustaining or chaos-resistant.
Freedom is the privilege of a stable nation that can hopefully stay stable, but freedom does not guarantee stability. Thus why we have outliers like Singapore - very stable, minimal freedom; and outliers like El Salvador previously - very free, very unstable. Stable always beats free, because unstable makes freedom a purely academic exercise in nonsense (sure, the government might not arrest you for saying something, but the local thug will happily do worse; bragging "I have habeas corpus" is idiotic when the local drug lord is your problem and he doesn't honor it).
The murder rate was falling for years prior to Bukele’s election
Obviously extremely “generous” policies for jailing people involved with or adjacent to crime will reduce crime further, but he’s not singularly responsible for improvements and it’s not clear at all where the cost-benefit will net out
North Korea also has very low crime rates, I hear!
Freedoms sometimes break down at scale given the right conditions. That's not comfortable to contemplate. If even 20% of people were involved in the gang and using GrapheneOS, you bet that freedom would be revoked. There is no guarantee in natural law that freedom is self-sustaining or chaos-resistant.
Freedom is the privilege of a stable nation that can hopefully stay stable, but freedom does not guarantee stability. Thus why we have outliers like Singapore - very stable, minimal freedom; and outliers like El Salvador previously - very free, very unstable. Stable always beats free, because unstable makes freedom a purely academic exercise in nonsense (sure, the government might not arrest you for saying something, but the local thug will happily do worse; bragging "I have habeas corpus" is idiotic when the local drug lord is your problem and he doesn't honor it).