“THE best answer to terrorist groups and gangs is to confront them,” believes Rudolph Giuliani, a former mayor of New York city. The man who brought the broken-window theory—that tolerance of small crimes would encourage bigger ones—to the United States’ biggest city unsurprisingly rejects the idea of negotiating with gangsters. Now a group of right-wing businessmen in El Salvador have hired Mr Giuliani to propose tough-guy solutions to crime in one of the world’s most gang-ridden countries. He dispatched a fact-finding mission in January.
The facts, however, may prove him wrong. El Salvador’s murder rate dropped sharply during a truce between the country’s two main gangs in 2012-14, which was brokered by the government. It soared after the agreement broke down early last year. The number of murders rose 57% in 2014 compared with a year earlier, to almost 11 a day, according to the police. A rash of killings in early January 2015 took the number to a staggering 15 a day.The armistice has now been restored, perhaps fleetingly. Raúl Mijango, a former guerrilla who helped broker the 2012 truce, says that on...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/15UUeWY
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