Notes from my skim-reading:

Putting a bunch of assault rifle-wielding soldiers in the town square is not exactly a subtle way to fight systematic extortion, but it works, and the Salvadoran people could see it in action.

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Bitcoin as a legal tender has been a bust for Bukele. But other aspects of Bukele’s Bitcoin affection have been more successful.

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“A report in El Faro, which analyzed 1,251 pages of official arrest records from the Attorney General’s Office from the first weeks of the state of emergency, found that authorities frequently cited things like “suspicious appearance,” (apariencia sospechosa), “nervousness” (nerviosa), “anonymous accusations” (denuncias anónimas), and “having tattoos” (tener tatuajes) as sufficient reason to detain suspects.”

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While I have a generally high opinion of Salvadoran law enforcement and think their arbitrary abuse rate was low, there is a giant caveat I want to put on this analysis. Salvadoran law enforcement has a documented history of extrajudicial killings with permission from higher-ups.

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Of the 77,000 arrests made during the raids, only an estimated 32,331 individuals were full-fledged gang members. Most of the arrests were of “collaborators,” a rather loose term that could refer to a wide range of activities. Many of these collaborators profited, aided, and abetted the gangs, and deserve their fate, but many others likely collaborated under the threat of coercion, or to pay off debts, or were in some other nebulous grey space that exists in gang-dominated impoverished Central American slums.

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Dictatorships concentrate power to permit more state dynamism but at the expense of this dispersed risk.

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Democracy is generally good, especially compared to alternative forms of government, but there are contexts in which democratic institutions can hinder the prosperity of a nation. Voters in a democracy can elect bad leaders, either due to bad judgment or manipulation. The democratic checks and balances between branches of government can be exploited by bad faith actors for cynical political gain.

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Yeah, Bukele probably is capricious and arrogant and ultimately self-serving. As are 95% of politicians, especially the highly successful ones.

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There is probably a theoretical tipping point in any democratic state when the numerous inherent pitfalls of democratic institutions become so powerful that the government ceases to function effectively and requires a reset that can only be achieved undemocratically. This is a risky proposition that can go wrong in a million ways, but it can also work out (ex. Jerry Rawlings, Ataturk, Caesar, arguably Napoleon, etc.).