Ecuador’s militarised approach may offer the appearance of peace in the short term, but the endemic violence won’t end until the root causes are addressed.
Wherever the situation becomes absolutely unbearable and governments begin to take drastic measures, human rights groups appear and frightened experts begin to write: “It’s all for nothing, and we don’t know if it will work?”
Erik Hildinger
4 months ago
When a society has to a large extent broken down, is it possible to restore civil life without resorting to measures that violate human rights? Or does the observance of human rights prevent the restoration of civil order once things have gone beyond a certain point? We may find out.
JP Martin
4 months ago
Without security, it is impossible to enjoy any other rights.
Emmanuel MARTIN
4 months ago
Human rights has been bloating to into a kakistocracy run by “no skin in the games” anuwheres.
Nayib Bukele shown a succesfull example of how gangs can be crushed, how it benefits most of society and how it comes at the exepense of gangstas. so yes, gangstas will suffer from a gang crackdown, and judicial conviction standards have to be adjusted to what allows the efficient elimination of gangs.
F*** criminals, the right of honest citizens ar emore important thean theirs. Crush gangs, including their legal arm which consist in a lot of NGOs and other self-processed “human rights defenders”.
And Bukele wants to establish Chinese supplied and inspired surveilance systems to maintain his power. And he wants the power to sentence 900 to life imprisonment people at a time. Unless you’d be happy to live in this sort of society yourself you’re a hypocrite suggesting it for those in other countries. El Salvador and Ecuador aren’t exactly analogous, but the majority of the money that actually buys the guns and funds the networks of these gangs comes from drug consumption in our own countries. The problem starts with us. So there’s every argument we should implement the same policies over here to stop it. There are something over 1 million cocaine users in the UK. You almost certainly know someone that uses it, probably someone from your own family. Would you be happy for them to be tried with another 899 people to face life imprisonment for something that was so destructive you didn’t even realise they were doing it? Would you be happy for these sorts of policies to be implemented knowing at some point the government with these powers might be one you don’t actually like? The answer is to legalise the whole thing and take the money out of the hands of the gangs and let people do what they want with their own lives.
Mike Doyle
4 months ago
Journalists and Human Rights Lawyers – those who turn up after the battle is finished, and knife the victors.
Mrs R
4 months ago
The break down of Law and Order does away with a great many human rights.
Thinking of our own country…was Britain devoid of human rights before Blair introduced the 1998 Human Rights Act and signed us up to the ECHR? Somehow I think we were doing pretty well – although obviously imperfectly – and violent criminals and sex offenders thought a little more carefully about ‘the crime being worth the time’.For example, carrying knives hadn’t become almost routine for inner city school boys who live in fear of being knifed themselves.
Early in the 2000s it was clear that the laws had put the rights of criminals above those of victims rather than helping the common man or woman to have their cases heard in the UK rather than taking them to the EU court.
It is hard to understand why we are still signed up.
Kevin Dee
4 months ago
It’s odd the author talks about how well tooled Ecuadorian gangs are and then expects tackling social and economic conditions as the way to combat them. The El Salvador model is the only one worth following at the moment given the success they have had.
Precisely. Never is the problem laid at the hypocritical door of the countries that provide both the very middle class, probably highly environmentally conscious, and otherwise generally socially pious citizens that consume and pay for the drugs, and the pressure to maintain international drug prohibition laws that provide the funds and incentive to the gangs to carry out their dirty, socially destructive, murderous work. Instead as in the comments here we just suggest their governments install military marshal law over pretty much an entire continent, without any consideration whether this has any chance of actually working where there are societies with large levels of complete economic deprivation being tacitly asked by others with relatively extravagant wealth to do whatever they need to with however much money they need to keep providing the drugs, they will keep doing it one way or another. How about we have marshal law here and armed police visit every house to search for drugs and we build some mega prisons for all the people that actually fund this business, and have a far greater number of options to choose in their lives? How many of the sons and daughters of the prohibitionists would be put away to rot in the stench of cells of a hundred people with two open latrines to share? Would they visit their darlings and tell them it was for their own good because these drugs that were so physically and morally destructive they didn’t even have any idea they might be taking them, were so bad that this is a better result for them? And they maintain their moral high ground, it makes me sick.
Ecuador’s militarised approach may offer the appearance of peace in the short term, but the endemic violence won’t end until the root causes are addressed.
Wherever the situation becomes absolutely unbearable and governments begin to take drastic measures, human rights groups appear and frightened experts begin to write: “It’s all for nothing, and we don’t know if it will work?”
When a society has to a large extent broken down, is it possible to restore civil life without resorting to measures that violate human rights? Or does the observance of human rights prevent the restoration of civil order once things have gone beyond a certain point? We may find out.
Without security, it is impossible to enjoy any other rights.
Human rights has been bloating to into a kakistocracy run by “no skin in the games” anuwheres.
Nayib Bukele shown a succesfull example of how gangs can be crushed, how it benefits most of society and how it comes at the exepense of gangstas. so yes, gangstas will suffer from a gang crackdown, and judicial conviction standards have to be adjusted to what allows the efficient elimination of gangs.
F*** criminals, the right of honest citizens ar emore important thean theirs. Crush gangs, including their legal arm which consist in a lot of NGOs and other self-processed “human rights defenders”.
And Bukele wants to establish Chinese supplied and inspired surveilance systems to maintain his power. And he wants the power to sentence 900 to life imprisonment people at a time. Unless you’d be happy to live in this sort of society yourself you’re a hypocrite suggesting it for those in other countries. El Salvador and Ecuador aren’t exactly analogous, but the majority of the money that actually buys the guns and funds the networks of these gangs comes from drug consumption in our own countries. The problem starts with us. So there’s every argument we should implement the same policies over here to stop it. There are something over 1 million cocaine users in the UK. You almost certainly know someone that uses it, probably someone from your own family. Would you be happy for them to be tried with another 899 people to face life imprisonment for something that was so destructive you didn’t even realise they were doing it? Would you be happy for these sorts of policies to be implemented knowing at some point the government with these powers might be one you don’t actually like? The answer is to legalise the whole thing and take the money out of the hands of the gangs and let people do what they want with their own lives.
Journalists and Human Rights Lawyers – those who turn up after the battle is finished, and knife the victors.
The break down of Law and Order does away with a great many human rights.
Thinking of our own country…was Britain devoid of human rights before Blair introduced the 1998 Human Rights Act and signed us up to the ECHR? Somehow I think we were doing pretty well – although obviously imperfectly – and violent criminals and sex offenders thought a little more carefully about ‘the crime being worth the time’.For example, carrying knives hadn’t become almost routine for inner city school boys who live in fear of being knifed themselves.
Early in the 2000s it was clear that the laws had put the rights of criminals above those of victims rather than helping the common man or woman to have their cases heard in the UK rather than taking them to the EU court.
It is hard to understand why we are still signed up.
It’s odd the author talks about how well tooled Ecuadorian gangs are and then expects tackling social and economic conditions as the way to combat them. The El Salvador model is the only one worth following at the moment given the success they have had.
Legalize. Regulate. Everywhere.
Precisely. Never is the problem laid at the hypocritical door of the countries that provide both the very middle class, probably highly environmentally conscious, and otherwise generally socially pious citizens that consume and pay for the drugs, and the pressure to maintain international drug prohibition laws that provide the funds and incentive to the gangs to carry out their dirty, socially destructive, murderous work. Instead as in the comments here we just suggest their governments install military marshal law over pretty much an entire continent, without any consideration whether this has any chance of actually working where there are societies with large levels of complete economic deprivation being tacitly asked by others with relatively extravagant wealth to do whatever they need to with however much money they need to keep providing the drugs, they will keep doing it one way or another. How about we have marshal law here and armed police visit every house to search for drugs and we build some mega prisons for all the people that actually fund this business, and have a far greater number of options to choose in their lives? How many of the sons and daughters of the prohibitionists would be put away to rot in the stench of cells of a hundred people with two open latrines to share? Would they visit their darlings and tell them it was for their own good because these drugs that were so physically and morally destructive they didn’t even have any idea they might be taking them, were so bad that this is a better result for them? And they maintain their moral high ground, it makes me sick.