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🇦🇷 El Salvador President Nayib Bukele: “Crime is cancer. You remove it — no excuses.
“We calculated, that eliminating crime would cost us about 10% of GDP. We estimated that our GDP would drop by 10%, to eliminate crime. But instead of falling by 10%, our GDP grew by 3.5%!”
This young man governing El Salvador is truly a blessing!
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TRANSCRIPT
President Nayib Bukele: They told me, “You know you can’t end crime.” And I said, “Why?”
And they told me, “Not because of the technical capacity to end it, but because of the blow to the economy.”
And I said, “What blow to the economy? Well, how many gang members are there?”
“70,000.”
It was explained to me that those are 70,000 people, who earn money illegally – which is wrong – however, that money goes to the households; to buy diapers for the babies, food for the children, rent, electricity, telephone, cable, internet, clothes, beer, motorcycles, gas, cell phone bills, etc.
I was told that entire economy would collapse, in one fell swoop and there wouldn’t be a legal, parallel economy that would replace it, at the same speed.
So, it was explained to me that we need to end crime, little by little, so that the legitimate economy could, little by little, replace the criminal economy.
But these kinds of theories that sound good to intellectuals don’t actually apply to reality.
The reality is that crime is crime. Period.
And if you allow it, they will always win in the war of incentives. Because if a young person comes and says, “Well, I don’t have many opportunities, I’m going to sell tomatoes in the market.”
Selling tomatoes in the market is hard, in the beginning. It’s not fun, it’s not something to be particularly proud of. One has to go load the tomatoes in the Sun, sell them, maybe not in the nicest place; sell the tomatoes, they’re going to go bad, the product may not be one’s own, it may be on consignment. If the tomatoes go bad, I still have to pay for them. But if I manage to sell them, I might earn five dollars.
And then, I’m on my way home, a gang member may arrive and say, “Let’s see my five dollars!”
So, the incentive for the young person is to become a gang member and to collect the five dollars and to be the one selling the tomatoes, to maybe earn five dollars – only to give it to the gang member.
The war of incentives is never going to be won, that way.
So, we understood, by force, and with hardcore policing, that the only way to go after the gang member was to arrest him. Not to punish him, but to remove him from society. The criminal needed to be removed from the equation, so he can no longer collect.
Now, the young person thinks about his new incentives, and says, “Well, what do I do? Do I become a gang member and they take me to prison? Or the better option: Do I go to work and make money, that no one will steal from me, now?”
So, now he can get a girlfriend, because his girlfriend is no longer a gang member. The point is that the incentives of society are corrected.
I told the person from the Cabinet, “We understand that we are going to pay an economic cost to end the crime,” but I made the analogy of a patient with cancer: “If they tell me, ‘Look, you have a major cancer, with metastasis and everything, but it’s curable. But we need to do several surgeries, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, immunotherapy, and then you’re going to end up bad but improved. And then, you can gain weight and recover.'”
I would choose that option: I undergo the surgery, I undergo the chemotherapy, I undergo the radiotherapy, I undergo a lot of therapy, I end up bad – but I recover.
Unlike saying, “No! I’m going to stay like this!” or “I feel good, I don’t feel so bad,” but well, then the cancer is going to end up taking me.
So we agreed to pay the economic cost. And we calculated, not in the financial cabinet, but in the security cabinet, that we were going to have a cost of 10% of the GDP; that our GDP was going to fall 10% to end the crime.
But our GDP did not fall 10%, it rose 3.5%!
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