Read the full IRTF Migrant Justice Newsletter each month at https://www.irtfcleveland.org/blog
IRTF recently held our annual Summer Solidarity Social. About 100 IRTF friends gathered to welcome Leslie Schuld, director of our partner organization in San Salvador, the Center for Exchange and Solidarity (CIS). Leslie gave us an alarming report of what is going on in El Salvador today. With President Bukele’s “State of Exception” crackdown on violent crime entering its third year, more than 80,000 have been arrested. Families are being torn apart. Their loved ones are languishing in overcrowded prisons with deplorable conditions, lack of medical care, and cases of torture. With mass incarceration (and cases of at least 265 documented deaths in prison), EL Salvador is facing its biggest threat to democracy since the end of the 12-year civil war in 1992.
President Bukele—just elected to a second term in February—is popular both among Salvadorans (because of the reported decrease in violent crimes) and among US policy-makers.
Because US policy-makers want to “address root causes” of migration to stem the tide of migrants heading north to the US-Mexico border, they are quite pleased with President Bukele, whom they believe has found the magic bullet: criminal/racial profiling, arbitrary arrests, suspension of constitutional rights, and mass incarceration. Foreign investors (like Google, which partners with the government on digitizing health care and education) and cryptocurrency companies like Bukele, too.
But has emigration from El Salvador really decreased? A recent analysis of US immigration data shows that Bukele’s purported success may be vastly overstated.
This narrative — that Bukele’s takedown of the gangs improved life in El Salvador such that far fewer people want to move north to the United States — makes intuitive sense. But the data say otherwise: Bukele’s purported triumph in reducing migration may not be real.
Researchers calculated how many Salvadorans were encountered by US Customs and Border Protection agents at the US southern border each month for the past ten years and what percentage of El Salvador’s national population they represent. They compared those numbers to Guatemalans and Hondurans. If Bukele’s claims are correct, then numbers of Salvadorans crossing the US border would decrease after his State of Exception was implemented in March 2022. But the data don’t show it.
The data on Guatemalan and Honduran migrants undercut Bukele’s bragging. Because the percentage of Guatemalans and Hondurans trying to cross the US southern border mirror those of Salvadorans, there must be something else influencing migration from all three countries. At the very least, it’s unlikely that Bukele’s crackdown alone is responsible for fewer Salvadorans crossing the US border.
US policy-makers, including the US State Department, need to pay closer attention to President Bukele. Emigration out of El Salvador has NOT slowed down during Bukele’s suspension of constitutional rights and mass incarceration. So they need to stop giving him credit for something he hasn’t done. And they need to condemn his government’s human rights abuses.
We, as people poised to act in solidarity, need to pay attention, educate ourselves, and be ready to take action when called by civil society groups in El Salvador and their partner organizations in the US—like CISPES, US-El Salvador Sister Cities, Share Foundation, and IRTF.
Source: Much of this intro to our newsletter is based on an article (El Salvador - Its Migration Success Story Doesn’t Add Up) published in the Boston Globe on August 1, 2024, authored by Jeffrey Swindle (a college fellow and lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University) and Matthew Blanton (a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin).
