Last week, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele gave a speech to the UN in which he defended his policies of jailing tens of thousands of suspected gang members to improve public safety in what was once the murder capital of the world.

“If we had listened to them we would have continued losing thousands of Salvadorans to terrorists,” Bukele told the General Assembly on Tuesday. “Thank God we ignored them.”…

“We are no longer the world’s capital of death, and we achieved it in record time,” he said. “Today El Salvador competes with Canada for being the safest country on the continent.”

There’s no arguing with his results. El Salvador really has changed for the better in the view of most people who live there.

María José, a long-term resident of Las Margaritas, is a big Bukele fan. After the trauma of gang rule, which started in the 1990s after a wave of Salvadoran criminals were deported from California, she is grateful for a peaceful life.

Before Bukele’s mass incarcerations, hers was one of many lives pockmarked with brutality. Gang members killed one of her relatives. Soon afterwards, she saw a man murdered in front of her house and decided to build an extra wall to protect herself…

“We’re very thankful to God that this president came to clean up the communities,” she said. “We are living in a different world. Now people can sleep outside in hammocks.” People who had previously fled have taken back possession of their abandoned homes, she added, gesturing to some houses opposite.

A little more than a mile from María José’s house is La Campanera, a former stronghold of MS-13’s rival Barrio 18. Ana, a cleaner, explained how grim things had been. She had a gun pointed in her face three times, regularly had money extorted from her and once saw an older man targeted for not being part of the community. “We couldn’t do anything. He said to the gang member, ‘Please don’t kill me.’ We could only cry. And a little bit later they came back wearing his clothes.” His dismembered body was later found nearby.

So decent people no longer live in constant fear of rape and murder and that has made President Bukele the most popular leader in all of Latin America, maybe the most popular in the world.

One recent survey put backing for Bukele at 93 per cent, believed to be the highest approval rating of any elected leader in the world. In Latin America, he recently was ranked a more popular leader than the Pope.

And yet, there’s no doubt that locking up 1% of the population, sometimes based on nothing more than an anonymous phone call has resulted in the imprisonment of some innocent people who will have no real chance at a fair trial. The government says it has freed about 6,000 people out of 70,000 arrested but mass trials are being planned with as many as 900 people tried and sentenced at a time. El Salvador is a safer place but it’s also become a dictatorship. Consider this description of the crackdown on gang members. Doesn’t it sound a bit familiar:

Bukele’s war on the gangs began in March last year, when his government declared a state of emergency, enabling the police to arrest anyone suspected of having gang connections. A tattoo or even just a telephoned tip-off from a member of the public has been considered sufficient evidence for imprisonment. The state of emergency, initially meant to last 15 days, has never been lifted.

Governments love to declare a state of emergency during which they can use extraordinary powers. But those emergencies never seem to end. Megan McArdle has a column today arguing that El Salvador has become a test case of what people are willing to give up for basic safety on the streets.

The reason a quasi-police state looks so good to Salvadorans is that so many of them were already living under a police state, except that it was run by gangs such as MS-13. Want to have a business? Pay hefty extortion. Want to own a vehicle? You owe the gang a monthly fee. Want to play soccer on the local field? Sorry, that’s gang turf. Want to have relatives visit you at home? First get permission from the local boss for them to enter his territory. Reject the wrong suitor? He might kill you. He also might kill you just because he can.

Residents of gang territory had no recourse, because anyone testifying against a gang member risked death. Bukele’s erosion of due process reversed the power dynamic: Now, you don’t have to testify, you just make an anonymous phone call. This required Bukele to take undemocratic shortcuts, undermining the independent judiciary and centralizing immense powers in himself. It put a lot of innocent people in jail, many reportedly in horrific conditions…

It’s not entirely surprising that the people of El Salvador prefer the official police state to the freelancers. And this is where El Salvador offers a useful lesson to the rest of us: Do not make people choose between human rights and safe streets, because they will choose safe streets every time.

The rates of crime, especially violent crime, in the streets of America’s cities are nowhere close to what they used to be in El Salvador. And yet, you can see how crime and disorder is slowly starting to result in changes in deep blue places like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. People are happy to vote for progressive criminal justice reform when crime is low but when it begins to impact them personally, things change. Democratic officials in these places (at least some of them) are taking the hint that there’s a limit to what people will put up with.

El Salvador has made significant strides in solving its violent crime problem. The problem is that they now live in a dictatorship where police can do anything they want and an anonymous call can land anyone in prison. No doubt this has already been abused and it will continue to be abused for as long as there are no checks on police power and no criminal justice system to determine actual guilt vs innocence. As is always the case, you can go too far in either direction.