When they tell everyone their explicit goals and our only response is to vote harder
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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Who voted for Bukele?
"Stopped playing the game". He literally was already president, initially negotiated with the terrorists, and then simply enforced the laws. He worked entirely within the system. The most illiberal thing he did was arrest judges who were being bribed.
Your example is completely counter to your argument, and is an endorsement of voting for Trump, or at worst Libertarian.
Arresting anyone on suspicion of being a gang member is not working entirely within the system. Also I seem to recall that he more or less forced the Legislative Assembly(?) to do what he wanted. He threw the normal rules overboard which was the right thing to do as you can't resolve such a situation painlessly and without any any collateral damage. He could do that because he enjoys the overwhelming support of the people.
The point I'm making is that you need someone who is willing to do what is necessary. No matter what. If you have judges, senators, congress man etc if the system itself tries to sabotage your efforts you'll have to change the rules. Is Trump such a person? Considering how little he actually achieved during his first term, how he left his supporters hanging after January 6th and how he again surrounds himself with more or less the same type of people, I have my doubts about it.
You can absolutely be arrested for being a gang member because it is an organized criminal racket. The primary reason most prosecutors and judges don't just issue out warrants because of that alone, is because they are attempting to fully document out the scope of the racket.
MS-13 was stupid and decided the only way you could be a member of their gang was by having killed and raped someone, and if you got caught with a tattoo and not in the gang, you would be executed.
As a result, each tattoo is an out-of-court record of admission of guilt to at least one murder, and one rape. That's your probable cause. If that's all you had, without a body, it would be hard to finish a prosecution; unless you hit the whole racket all at once. Which is what happened. Furthermore, the conduct of the gang had morphed from criminal activity into full-blown terrorism. At that point, the entire gang is either enemy combatants, or engaged in an insurrection.
As such, rounding up each and every member of a terrorist insurrection whose members explicitly make out-of-court-records-of-admission for rape & murder is actually super easy. You could do this in the US, and I don't even know that you'd need an insurrection act declaration to do it.
This is the whole point: none of this was outside of the system. It was within it, and all it required was the will to do it.
As for Trump, he's surrounded himself with better people, and had very little power to do anything before he was out of office, and not much in the mean time.
I'm not talking about being a gang member. I'm talking about being a suspected gang member on flimsy reasons. There are plenty of people who've been arrested but completely innocent. Otherwise they wouldn't regularly release people from prison.
That may very well be true for MS-13 affiliated tattoos but I seriously doubt hat MS-13 had a monopoly on all tattoos in El Salvador.
Guilty until proven innocent is not working within the system. The police and judicial system has to follow rules as not to infringe on the rights of innocent people. Even criminals are supposed to have rights. These rules were not followed as it was necessary because the cartel problem had grown so much that Bekele had to use a sledgehammer to destroy them. This has caused quite a bit of collateral damage but it was necessary. Pretending otherwise is ludicrous.
And I'm telling you that you can do this even in the US. If they have the probable cause, they can arrest you and interrogate you, and hold you for a while before the prosecutor drops the case and lets you out. It's an uncooth tactic that could breed public resentment, but it's absolutely within the system and the law.
They arrest you on a minor offense, ask the judge to set a high or no bail because given some context you are probably a gang member. Now you will wait months in jail for a minor offense. In the US, they would typically just turn you into a confidential informant. In Ecuador, they are probably just going to interrogate you to rat on others. If either police figure out you don't have anything, they'll let you go, but the message to the gang will be clear: the heat is on.
This is fully excluding an insurrection or terrorist frame. If you do that, now you can expect a lot looser restrictions on what the state is gonna do and how long it's gonna hold you.
It's not any tattoos, it's specific tattoos. And yeah, it's a monopoly on those tattoos, because they kill you if you aren't one of them. They may also kill the artist if they find out who put it on you. Most likely, you don't get it until your in prison already by an MS-13 prison artist who does it officially. And again, you got that prison sentence from the murder and rape.
This happens in the US too, by the way. Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, Aryan Nation, 1% Hell's Angels, Mongols, whatever. You fly the wrong flag, you'll get killed for it. And yes, MS-13.
None of it was guilty until proven innocent. It was a dragnet. This is actually how "tough on crime" law enforcement is actually supposed to work. It looks harsh from a bleeding heart Democrat stance, but it's actually fully allowed within the system, because the makers of the system fundamentally understood that threats to the system had to be acted upon quickly and aggressively.
I'm sure it's unpleasant, but the reason he's popular is because a terror campaign was destroyed by these genuinely legal means.