I like to look up El Salvador news often just to stay current with what's going on over there wether it's related to Bitcoin or not, and I invariably see the same kinds of things every time; articles about how the "crackdown" has imposed a "human cost" which is too high and how innocent people are getting swept up.

So I thought I'd share a conversation I had recently with a woman from the janitorial staff at my office building who comes from El Salvador.

She tells me that she left the country because it was too dangerous for her, but before leaving she used most of her life savings to buy a house for her adult daughter who decided to stay. That was 20 years ago.

Since then, she has never been able to visit the house she owns where her daughter lives. If she visits #ElSalvador, she must stay with friends in neutral territory and have her daughter visit during the day, never at night. Since they can't get approval from the local gang to enter the neighborhood this is how it was for 20 years, until Bukele was elected and the massive clean-up started.

In June 2022, for the first time ever, she went to her own house, visited her daughter at home without anyone's permission needed, walked around the neighborhood for hours, well into the night, and even caught a pickup soccer game at the local pitch which had previously been off limits to everyone but the gang members. She says the entire neighborhood was there, cheering, talking, laughing. She says her daughter was particularly happy about was being able to order pizza delivery for the first time ever as drivers couldn't enter gang territory before.

The joy on her face as she's telling me all of this is amazing. And she's not the only one. Over 4000 homes have been returned to their rightful owners in the last 12 months. This number alone exceeds the amount of human rights complaints that have been brought by rights groups, and doesn't include the lives saved, the money saved by no longer having rampant extortion, the massive improvement in quality of life from being able to travel freely, the economic growth from new areas of the map being unlocked and available to businesses, new markets to be served, new businesses springing up which couldn't under gang rule, and importantly (this one will be hard for 1st worlders to really grasp) the peace of mind that makes life enjoyable in the first place. Literally the second layer of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Look, with over 66k arrests in 1 year, I absolutely understand that innocent people are being swept up, and that is a very bad thing indeed, something to avoid as much as possible. But I come from Caracas. I know what it's like to live in fear, a half-life, never being able to do things that I now completely take for granted in my new 1st world home, like literally just walking in the streets of my neighborhood, going to the store, talking on the phone in public and even just having 1 phone instead of the real phone and the decoy phone to give muggers when they come, and they always do.

Bukele is not perfect, his people are not perfect, the state of exception is not perfect, nothing about the security policy is perfect. But the benefits are real, tangible, they reach far and wide. They are life-changing for many and even life-saving for some.

A proper cost-benefit analysis here should analyze 4 things; benefits of the policy, costs of the policy, benefits of the alternatives, and costs of the alternatives.

These "news" outlets are almost invariably focused on the costs of the policy, and they ignore the other 3 things entirely.

My question(s) to these "news" outlets is;

You've laid out the costs of the policy. But what are the benefits of it? What are the costs of the alternatives? What are the benefits? Do you even have an alternative to propose?

I don't think they're interested in any of that.