Bukele Should Use His Prisoners To Pacify Haiti

Bukele wants to fix Haiti. He can kill two birds with one stone.

As Haiti plunges into chaos for a thousandth or so time in its history, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele steps in. With the UN approval and funding, he claims, he can fix Haiti, like he fixed his own country by crushing the gangs with an iron fist.

Now, can he fix Haiti? I’m not exactly optimistic. El Salvador, as bad as its gang issues were, is a much lighter patient than Haiti, which is more or less the closest we have to the Hell on Earth. Bukele crushed El Salvador’s gang with military force; Haiti doesn’t have a functioning state, let alone a functional country. On top of that, Haiti’s population is twice that of El Salvador. In all likelihood, it’s all a bluff: he says he can fix it because he knows he wouldn’t have to try.

Still, on the off-chance the Pacification of Haiti by Bukele does happen, here’s a fun proposal:

Bukele should use the gang members he locked up as foot soldiers for the operation. If they survive, they get to live as free men, but only on Haiti.

There are 60 000 + gang members put in prison by Bukele. They will stay in prison until they die, which means 30-50 years for most of them – they are mostly young men.

This is not a particularly great situation (although much better than allowing them to roam free). It’s expensive, you need to sustain large prisons, you need a ton of guards. Worst of all, there is absolutely no guarantee that some future president wouldn’t set them free to please some Western liberals who are “concerned with the human rights violations”. “It’s been 15 years, they’ve learned their lesson, we’re a better society now who can treat them as human beings”. That would, of course, be an insane idea, but leaders make insane decisions all the time.

To exclude that scenario long-term, there must be no prisoners to release. Executing them all would be one solution, sure, but that’s probably too much even for El Salvador. Mass executions, even of violent criminals, are a bad look. Politically that’s off the table.

However, sending criminals to die in a war isn’t. Russia did that, most infamously with late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group. They recruited prisoners with a simple deal: you fight for us, and if you survive long enough, you are a free man. Bakhmut was, to a large extent, taken by soldier-criminals. Violent, cheap, expendable, won’t be missed by many – they made ideal cannon fodder.

Dolik, left, is a former criminal turned soldier. Biber, right, is an experienced commander. Yevgeny Prigozhin, center, is a warlord who hired them to take a fortified city, which they did.

The obvious problem with that approach was that some did survive Bakhmut, and are now free men. Which they shouldn’t be: they are violent criminals, murderers and rapists, who are dangerous for normal people. As a result, every couple days you read stories like “Former rapist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was pardoned by Putin after serving in the Wagner group for 6 months rapes three more women and murders one just a week after getting freedom”. This shouldn’t happen.

Now, was the short-term increase in crime in Russia because of the released criminals greater than the long-term decrease in crime because of all those who died in Ukraine instead of getting released after serving their full terms in 5-15 years? I don’t know; very likely not. Still, even if it wasn’t an awful trade-off, it’s not ideal.

Which is why Bukele should make the same deal with his own prisoners, but then just leave them in Haiti. Forever. If they ever step a foot on the soil of El Salvador, they get back to prison for the rest of their lives.

For the gangsters that’s a pretty good deal! Life in Bukele’s prison is miserable. It’s not like you’re safe either: gang-on-gang violence happens all the time, and Bukele stopped separating prisoners by gangs. Sure, you can die in a war, but people who value their lives a lot don’t join gangs. Even if you die, you die a war hero, fighting for the better future for Haiti, not as a despised petty thug. Your poor mother may even be proud.

And if you make it, you are a free man! Now, you’re a free man in Haiti, which isn’t great. But that’s still better than 50 more years in prison. After Haiti is pacified, your services will still be needed to keep the country from collapsing again. So you just become an elite policeman for the rest of your life. That’s a great life compared to what you had in prison, and probably even as a gang member before the crackdown.

Is Haiti that much worse?

El Salvador’s gang members are a pretty horrible human capital. El Salvador itself isn’t exactly impressive, and its criminals are the worst part of its society. Still, even they are better than the Haitians, which are probably one of the worst human capital in the world. So not only shipping them away to Haiti makes El Salvador a better place, it also makes Haiti a better place. They will become a natural local elite. They will have children with local women, who will also be better than average Haitian children. An entire new race will be born. They will probably pass down the gang face tattoos as a status symbol.

Now, some dozen thousands Latin Americans won’t make a huge impact on Haiti, population 11 million. But it would probably still be a change for the better. At the very least, it would be fun.

Can an El Salvadoran gangster army actually restore order in Haiti? I have no idea. Taking out the Haitian gangs shouldn’t be particularly difficult: El Salvadorans are smarter, and they will be better-armed. Establishing military control of Port-au-Prince would probably be pretty doable. All of Haiti might be a harder task. But I’m not a war guy, I’m just taking guesses; again, I actually have no idea.

After we conquer Haiti, what’s next? Well, that’s a whole another question. One thing that we did was establishing the monopoly on power. The local gangsters are out, we control the country now. If new gangsters arise, we crush them. That’s a state. Haiti’s government was supposed to do this, but it failed, so foreigners had to do their job instead.

I have no idea of what comes after. Without the permanent gang war, Haiti would be a nicer place to live. To ensure the gang war doesn’t break out again, the island now has a permanent population of armed El Salvadorans with face tattoos. But beyond establishing some most basic order, I don’t know if there is a way to reform the country.

Still, you can’t make Haiti worse. And a pacification operation against the worst anarchy in the Western Hemisphere is a better use of 60 000 violent young men than just letting them rot for decades.

If Bukele manages to pull that off, he might really be Latin America’s savior he aspires to be.