Since he asked

Bloggings by Boz, being a military analyst kind of guy, doesn’t quite know what to make of a separate peace in El Salvador:

Last Saturday, El Salvador had its first murder free day in three years. It was symbolically important for one of the most violent countries on earth, but it also wasn’t much of an outlier this month.

Murders are down about 50% since the unannounced truce took hold in early March. Initial official statistics say there were 411 murders in January, 402 in February and 230 in March. In the first 12 days of April, there were 70 murders. That’s a huge decline. It’s fair to say that the first month of the truce resulted in about 200 fewer murders.

We can and should have academic, philosophical and political discussions about this. What does it mean for society to negotiate with gangs and organized crime? What did the government give in exchange? Shouldn’t the government be more transparent about the negotiations? What are the tradeoffs? Is it sustainable over the long term?

Of course, one doesn’t have the luxury of “academic, philosphical, and political” discussions when one is fending off violent attacks.  Dead men and women can’t negotiate anything, and not being dead would seem to be a pretty good place to begin any sort of social reconstruction.

While Boz had to end his comments a few years back, and this isn’t meant to be snarky, I have to ask when the United States stopped making deals with criminals, and criminal gangs?  One doesn’t have to point to isolated cases like World War II, when the U.S. government made deals with mafia boss Lucky Luciano to keep shipyards working, and the Sinaloan poppy growers and gangsters to provide opium to the U.S. black market .  It’s fairly normal for governments to tolerate a certain amount of criminality, and expect organized crime to be involved in certain sectors of the economy. Who built Las Vegas?

Perhaps it’s academic… or political… or philosophical… to ask why states  criminalize the production of some goods and provision of services, but permit others that may be equally pernicious?  Why is it legal for British Petroleum to poison the Gulf of Mexico and face only financial sanctions when management of the heroin trade can earn one the death penalty in the United States… and why can the United States demand the extradition of heroin traders, but Mexico or Cuba not demand the extradition of British Petroleum executives or other parties?  For that matter, why was the opium trade legal and honorable when it sales were controlled by imperialist powers and sold to the non-white, but illegal when the sales and consumer groups switched?

“What does the government give in exchange,” Boz asks.   Not dealing with organizations with any legal basis to begin with, I don’t see how the state cedes anything, merely recognizing the status quo. Not killing people, and not getting people killed, though, puts the gangsters into a position where they have to justify their legitimacy, or face retribution.

Is it sustainable?  Does it need to be? … it’s those wars that aren’t sustainable.