Don’t let Ecuador’s pain inflate standing of Latin America’s strongmen | Opinion

The gang poison plaguing Ecuador and Latin America is largely a result of what many now say is its antidote: the trashing of democratic institutions by mano dura leaders like El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, writes WLRN Americas editor Tim Padgett.

We once called the gangs and cartels that terrorize Latin America and the Caribbean a “criminal insurgency.” That is so 20 minutes ago.

They’re not rebels anymore; they’re rulers. They hold large swaths of the western hemisphere south of the Rio Grande — and these days it feels as if they’re locked in a ghastly, Putin-esque game of geopolitical one-upmanship.

No sooner does a heavily armed Haitian gang fire on a hospital in Port-au-Prince brimming with mothers and babies, than a Mexican cartel stages a deadly drone bomb attack on a small community of innocents in Guerrero. That’s followed days later — just last week, in fact — by Ecuadorian narco-thugs storming a TV news station in Guayaquil, during a live broadcast, brandishing explosives and ramming their gun barrels into the necks of horrified hostages.

Ecuadorian police eventually arrested those 13 gunmen, after they’d shot a TV cameraman in the leg (not fatally). But the mayhem, part of a new burst of gang violence plaguing Ecuador in recent years, is just the latest reminder that homicidal delinquency keeps short-circuiting fledgling democracy in much-too-much of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Or have you not seen recent U.N. figures that show the region accounts for 25 of the world’s 33 highest national murder rates — including eight of the top 10, starting with Jamaica at No. 1? If this were an economics column, I’d say bloodshed represents an inordinate share of the continent’s GDP.

So it’s tempting to fall into the currently fashionable response to this nightmare and hail the rise of la mano dura — so-called iron-fisted leaders like Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. He’s getting away with running for a second consecutive term next month — in brazen violation of El Salvador’s Constitution — because for now he’s reined in the vicious, tattooed street gangs known as maras.

Problem is, Bukele’s done it by essentially suspending due process and throwing almost 2% of his country’s population behind bars. Nevertheless, law-and-order advocates across the Americas, including conservatives in America, are hyping the Bukele blueprint as the answer to Latin America’s organized crime pandemic. Ecuadorians I spoke with this week, there and here in Miami, said Ecuador’s new, young president, 36-year-old banana fortune heir Daniel Noboa, should imitate Bukele now if he ever wants to wrest his country back from the narco-cartels.

Trust me, I understand that impulse — and I of course wish Noboa success with the 60-day state of emergency (or “internal armed conflict,” as he’s calling it) that he’s declared. But I hope he also understands a key reality: this poison was brought to Ecuador and so many other Latin American countries largely by precisely what so many folks right now say is its antidote.

That is, the Bukele-esque dismantling of democratic, constitutional, institutional structure — the mano dura panacea. Los narco-mafiosos amassed their power from Guerrero to Guayaquil thanks to the fact that democratic institutions in Latin America, especially judicial systems, have never really had a chance to function. And they’ve had so little chance to function because leaders like Bukele time and again are allowed to suffocate them.

So while Latin America obviously has to focus on the horror that’s bookending this week on one end — the outbreak of gang barbarity in Ecuador that started last Sunday when a top cartel leader escaped from prison — I urge the region to glance at the hope that’s bookending the week on the other side: this Sunday’s inauguration of a new president in Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo.

It’s a constitutional transfer of power that almost didn’t happen. The constitution-trashing powers that be in Guatemala, kindred spirits of the constitution-trashing power next door in El Salvador, fought tooth and constitution-trashing nail to disqualify Arévalo’s election victory. That’s because his anti-corruption platform — his plan to have democratic institutions function — scares the banana-republic bejesus out of them.

An angry protest partnership of Guatemalans and the international community — including, to his credit, Sen. Marco Rubio (but not, to their shame, Miami’s U.S. representatives) — finally defeated the country’s obstructionist corruptos. It’s a potent shot in the arm for Latin American democracy — a reminder that democracy’s institutions do have a future there.

And if they do, then it’s a good bet that democracy’s Antichrists — the gangs and cartels — don’t.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for Miami NPR affiliate WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida. Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org.