El Salvador’s tough-on-crime approach becomes a blueprint for Brazil’s far-right

A group of far-right Brazilian lawmakers on Tuesday held a public hearing with Gustavo Villatoro, El Salvador’s justice minister. They had a clear goal: importing to Brazil the Salvadoran state of emergency, that suspends civil liberties under the pretext of fighting gang violence. 

In many ways, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador is the hardcore leader that succeeded where Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro failed. Since coming to power in 2019, Mr. Bukele has championed a zero-tolerance policy toward organized criminal street gangs — which includes the use of lethal violence and systematic human rights violations within the country’s prison system.

Mr. Bukele’s war on gangs escalated in March 2022, after a streak of 87 homicides in just a few days gave the government a pretext to rule under state of emergency laws that remain in place today. 

“For more than a year, procedural safeguards, such as the presumption of innocence and the right to a defense, have been suspended,” Amnesty International warned last month. An estimated 2 percent of the country’s adult population (or roughly 100,000 people) are now behind bars.

Despite the reasons for concern, Mr. Bukele’s tough-on-crime stance has earned him immense support from voters in what was until recently Latin America’s most violent country. In the 2021 legislative elections, Mr. Bukele’s party gained a supermajority, giving him the ability to pack the Supreme Court with allies and essentially control all branches of power (something Mr. Bolsonaro could only dream of doing).

So far, the mano dura (or “iron fist”) policies in El Salvador have earned him the approval of 91 percent...