El Salvador’s government is asserting its standing in global security discussions after President Nayib Bukele responded to comments made by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson regarding crime reduction strategies in the United States.
In a video shared by the outlet @America on X, Mayor Johnson argued against incarceration-based approaches, saying “We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence. We’ve already tried that, and we’ve ended up with the largest prison population in the world without solving the problems of crime and violence. The addiction on jails and incarceration in this country, we have moved past that. It is racist. It is immoral. It is unholy and it is not the way to drive violence down.”
President Bukele, whose administration is credited with drastically reducing crime in El Salvador, offered a direct rebuttal. Reposting the clip, he wrote, “You can LITERALLY incarcerate your way out of violence. That’s precisely why incarceration exists in the first place.”
He accompanied his response with graphs highlighting El Salvador’s experience: as the country jailed tens of thousands of gang members and dismantled criminal structures, its homicide rate plummeted. The data illustrated what Bukele described as an inverse relationship between incarceration and violent crime—an outcome his government argues grants El Salvador the authority to speak on security matters with firsthand evidence.