"Give Us a Bukele Too"
Iron-fist security sweeps Latin America, but Ecuador shows its limits

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The "mano dura" (iron fist) security model that President Nayib Bukele built around mass detention in El Salvador is now rewriting the very language of politics across Latin America. In a 2024 poll in Chile, 42% of voters said they wanted "a leader like Bukele." In Lima, walls increasingly carry sprayed slogans demanding "a Peruvian Bukele." In Argentina, ministers in the Milei government invoke his name. Yet in Ecuador, the country that tried hardest to copy the model, crime did not fall, it rose.

What Happened

Across the region, in countries where deteriorating public safety has become the dominant electoral issue, more politicians and voters are reaching for Bukele's name. Chile's polling numbers, the graffiti in Peru, and statements by Argentine ministers all point to a regionwide, not fleeting, mood of "do the same here." ABC News and NBC News have framed the trend as a rising far-right backlash in Latin America.

Background

El Salvador long recorded one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Under a "state of exception" launched in 2022, tens of thousands were detained, and official homicide figures fell sharply. That "success" spread across the region via satellite broadcasting and social media. In societies where safety is the overriding concern, distrust of established parties fuels demands to repeat the approach, and right-wing candidates increasingly make tough-on-crime pledges the centerpiece of their campaigns.

Ecuador's Noboa government, which declared a state of emergency in 2023, imitated the Bukele model through military control of prisons, mass detentions, and designating gangs as "terrorist organizations." But homicides in 2025 climbed roughly 40% year on year, approaching the worst levels in Ecuador's history. Inside the prisons, gang conflict intensified, and human rights groups have documented cases of torture under military control.

The Contrast

The difference lies in the nature of the threat itself. Ecuador's organized crime is a node in cross-border networks that traffic cocaine, so jailing low-level members does not stop the trade. A Project Syndicate essay (March 2026) flagged exactly this structural problem as the risk of the "Bukele effect" spreading across Latin America.

Policy institutes including CSIS cite the conditions that let the Bukele model work: a small country of about six million people, a supermajority for Bukele's party in the legislature, and a relatively simple structure of violence without major trafficking routes. Where those conditions converged, mass detention could produce results. But where the drug economy, population, and territory are vastly larger, as in Mexico, Colombia, or Ecuador, applying the same method risks eroding the institutional foundations of democracy and generating serious human rights abuses while still failing to curb crime. Anger over insecurity is real, but there is a wide gap between the "iron fist" as a campaign promise and its actual effect on deterring crime.

The Author's View

What unsettles me about this theme is that the craving for a "strong hand" tends to fall first on the people in the weakest positions. Mass detention sweeps up not the real kingpins but the easy-to-find foot soldiers and those who simply happened to be nearby. Violence behind bars and torture under military control also concentrate on those least able to speak up. It is entirely natural for people in a collapsing security situation to long for safety, and I have no wish to dismiss that anger. Still, I want to stay watchful about the way a desperate desire for safety gets compressed, untested, into faith in a single "template."

Walking through Latin America, what I feel is that security and governance cannot be separated from a place's history and economic structure. Some countries, like Costa Rica, have built up institutions without even keeping an army; others have been folded into the corridors of the drug economy. Different conditions call for different remedies, and this commonsense principle from health care and welfare applies just as squarely to security policy. "The neighbor succeeded, so give us the same medicine" will save neither people nor societies.

A Note on Terms

Mano dura is Spanish for "hard hand," meaning an iron-fist or hardline approach. In Latin America it has long served as shorthand for tough security policies. The "state of exception" referred to here is the emergency regime, which suspends some constitutional rights, that El Salvador has maintained since 2022.

The fantasy of the iron fist moves elections, but cross-border drug networks do not lose to fantasies.

※ This article is the author’s commentary based on public information. Please confirm the latest figures, dates and procedures with governments and primary sources. Quotations are kept minimal and sources are cited.