By Horace Palacio: Every time blood runs in Belize City, I hear the same cry on the radio, in the rum shop, and all over Facebook.
We need a Bukele. Lock them all up. Look at El Salvador.
Today I want to answer that cry seriously, because it deserves a serious answer, not a sneer. And my answer comes in three parts. I understand the temptation. The price is far higher than the Facebook memes admit. And Belize, quietly, is already proving there is a better road.
First, the honesty. El Salvador was hell on earth. In 2015 its murder rate hit 106 per one hundred thousand people, the worst in the world, a country owned by two transnational mega gangs running extortion as a national economy. Today its government reports 82 murders in an entire year. Grandmothers walk streets they could not walk for thirty years. That relief is real, and I will never mock a people who craved it. If you survived that nightmare, you would cheer the strongman too.
But now let us read the receipt, the part the memes always crop out of the picture.
To get there, El Salvador declared a state of exception in March 2022 that was supposed to last thirty days. It has been renewed every month since, more than thirty five times. Under it, roughly eighty five thousand people have been detained. Due process suspended. Access to a lawyer suspended. Trials held in masses, up to nine hundred accused at once, before judges whose faces are hidden. Today about three of every one hundred Salvadoran men sit in prison, the highest rate of imprisonment on the planet.
And who exactly is in those cells? President Bukele himself has admitted that eight thousand innocent people were jailed and later released. Human rights investigators who study the arrests estimate that actual gang members may be fewer than a third of those captured. The rest are ordinary civilians, sons grabbed off corners to fill police quotas, fathers who disappeared into prisons their families cannot contact. More than 350 people have died in custody. Torture has been documented by Amnesty International and the region’s own human rights commission. And the machinery, once built, did not stop at gangsters. It has been turned on journalists, human rights lawyers, and critics of the government.
That is the full price. Not safety instead of freedom for criminals. Safety instead of freedom for everyone, forever, on the word of one man.
Now ask the question nobody asks. Is that even the medicine for our disease?
Because here is what the loudest voices miss. Belize does not have El Salvador’s disease. They had one hundred and six murders per hundred thousand. Belize’s rate today sits around twenty, and our whole country recorded 91 murders last year, most of them driven by small, loose street crews concentrated in a few neighborhoods, not two armies of seventy thousand soldiers taxing an entire nation. You do not treat a fever with chemotherapy. And run Bukele’s math at our size. Three of every hundred men imprisoned, and thousands of Belizean sons are behind bars. Scale his eight thousand admitted innocents to our population, and hundreds of innocent Belizean boys sit in cages tonight. From which village? Whose family? Yours?
And here is the argument that should end the debate in a country like ours. A state of exception is a weapon you hand to whoever wins the next election. Belize is a tribal two party state, and we both know it. So before you demand the power to jail without trial, answer honestly. Do you want that power in the hands of the party you despise? Because in a democracy that is exactly where it will eventually land. Bukele’s model requires trusting one man forever. Our constitution, wisely, trusts no one that much.
Now the part that should make every Belizean sit up. We do not need to import a miracle, because we are already building one.
In 2018 Belize’s murder rate stood around thirty seven per hundred thousand. By 2023 it had fallen to around twenty one. Read that again. We cut our murder rate nearly in half in five years, with our courts open, our constitution intact, and not a single mass cage built. The first half of last year ran twenty nine percent below the year before, and the Minister of Home Affairs credits exactly the unglamorous things that work, community policing, data driven CompStat targeting, patrols focused on hot spots. Yes, the second half of the year turned bloody and the count reached 91, because violence comes in waves and our job is unfinished. But the direction is proven. Democracy is not why we still have murders. Incomplete work is.
So here is how we finish it, with evidence, not slogans.
Aim at the few, not the many. In every city on earth, a tiny number of known individuals drive most of the shooting. Boston proved a generation ago that when the state sits those young men down with one clear message, the violence stops today or everything lawful lands on you tomorrow, and here is a real job and a real way out if you choose it, youth murder collapses. That is precision. Bukele uses a net that catches thousands of innocents. We should use a spear.
Treat violence like the epidemic it is. Glasgow was once called the murder capital of Western Europe. It cut its killings roughly in half, not with mass jails, but by treating violence as a disease, interrupters who stop retaliation before it fires, intervention at the hospital bedside, services wrapped around the wounded. Belize’s own interrupters and intervention workers should be funded like the front line they are.
Close the recruitment pipeline. The gangs draft our boys between eight and fourteen. Outbid them there, in the schools, the sports fields, the trades, with men worth imitating, or arrest forever and change nothing.
Make justice swift and certain. The Belizean shooter does not fear our sentences. He fears nothing, because he expects the file to die, the witness to vanish, the case to drift for years. Certainty beats severity everywhere it is tried. Protect witnesses, clear the court backlog, and raise the conviction rate, and watch fear change sides.
Choke the iron river of guns at our borders and ports, because every one of those 91 files begins with a weapon this country does not manufacture.
And when emergencies demand it, use our targeted, time limited states of emergency as what they are, a scalpel with an expiry date and a judge still standing over it. That is the entire difference between a tool and a regime.
So no, Belize. We do not need a Bukele. We need to finish what Belizeans have already started, with the courage of El Salvador and the constitution of Belize.
Because safety purchased with cages full of innocent sons is not safety at all. It is fear wearing a uniform. And a nation that cut its murders nearly in half as a free people has no reason to kneel to any strongman to finish the job.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.
The post Belize can beat crime without a Bukele, in fact we are already proving it appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Horace Palacio: Every time blood runs in Belize City, I hear the same cry on the radio, in the rum shop, and all over Facebook. We need a Bukele. Lock them all up. Look at El Salvador. Today I want to answer that cry seriously, because it deserves a serious answer, not a sneer.
The post Belize can beat crime without a Bukele, in fact we are already proving it appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
