“Not one grain of rice” will be given to prisoners in the Terrorism Confinement Center, vowed El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, if innocent people are killed in the streets.
President Bukele has become a model for the right and a target for liberals and human-rights organizations because of his harsh crackdown on gangs, which is saving lives daily in El Salvador. By locking up 100,000 gang members, he has transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world into one of the safest in the Americas.
In a press conference, Bukele addressed rumors that gangs were considering retaliating against ordinary citizens at random. He issued a direct warning. “There are rumors that they want to start taking revenge on the honest people, at random. Do that, and there won’t be a single meal in prison.”
He said that if gangs carried out such attacks, imprisoned members would face immediate consequences. “Let’s see how long their homeboys last in there,” he said. “I swear to God they won’t eat a single grain of rice.”
Bukele dismissed potential criticism from international organizations, saying he did not care what they might say in response to stricter prison measures. “Let them come and protect our people,” he said. “Let them come and take their gang members, if they want them so much. We’ll give them all to you, two for one.”
Bukele has shown the world that crime can be stopped. Criminal gangs can be neutralized by locking them up. In a previous interview, he said the purpose of prison was not to punish, but simply to remove criminals from society so they could not hurt people anymore.
His plan not only worked in El Salvador, but could work anywhere. There just needs to be the political will.
In a separate press conference, he came down hard on Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Bukele argued that no government is incapable of eliminating crime if it truly exercises state power. “How is it possible that a criminal organization can control an entire territory and the government can’t take it out?” he asked. In his view, the idea that a state cannot defeat crime is “absurd,” because “Leviathan, the state, is always stronger than any criminal organization.”
He said El Salvador had already demonstrated this principle. Critics often claim that drug trafficking alone explains the power of criminal groups, but Bukele rejected that argument as incomplete.
Pointing to Europe, he said he is “totally against drugs” and emphasized that El Salvador is fighting a drug war. Yet, he argued, drug consumption in Europe is “much higher, legal and illegal,” than in Latin America. Despite that higher consumption, Europe does not have cartels controlling territory. There may be dealers, he acknowledged, but there are no drug cartels, “much less controlling territories.”
In Europe, he said, no cartel controls the south of France while another controls the north. “That doesn’t happen in Europe because the state controls its territory.” By contrast, he argued that in parts of Latin America governments have effectively ceded control, saying they cannot control certain regions and must “leave that area to the cartels, the other area to the criminal organization, the neighborhoods to the gangs.”
“It can’t be. Something has to be wrong,” Bukele said. He cited large sectors of Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil as examples where criminal organizations exercise territorial control. He claimed that cartels in Latin America control territory comparable in size to Europe.
While that comparison may be somewhat exaggerated, it is close. Europe covers roughly 3.86 million square miles, about 10 million square kilometers.
If you combine the total land area of Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, countries where powerful criminal organizations such as the Sinaloa Cartel, CJNG, Clan del Golfo, ELN, and Comando Vermelho operate, you reach approximately 5.02 million square miles, or about 13 million square kilometers.
Cartels do not formally own these countries, but in many areas they exercise parallel governance, collecting extortion payments, enforcing their own rules, controlling movement, and determining who can operate economically.
In much of Latin America, the state often maintains nominal control, meaning there is a flag, a police station, and formal institutions. Cartels frequently exercise effective control, deciding who lives, who works, and who pays.
In Mexico, U.S. intelligence assessments have estimated that cartels “control or influence” roughly 30 to 35 percent of national territory. That figure understates the problem. Even where the federal government retains a physical presence, courts, legislators, and the presidency often operate under constraints imposed by cartel power, limiting the government’s ability to enact policies contrary to cartel interests. One could argue that cartel influence extends far beyond the percentage of land they physically dominate.
In Colombia, armed groups and cartels such as the Clan del Golfo and the ELN exert significant control over large portions of rural territory, particularly in coca-growing regions, affecting governance in dozens of municipalities.
In Brazil, criminal organizations such as Comando Vermelho control hundreds of favelas and continue expanding into remote regions of the Amazon, an area geographically comparable in scale to parts of the European Union.
Modern cartels no longer need to control a single massive block of land like a traditional state. Instead, they dominate strategic corridors, including ports, mountain passes, and border towns. By 2026, this has evolved into a form of hybrid control, with cartels using drones to monitor territory and shadow governance structures to influence local elections, effectively ruling specific regions without formally replacing the state.
Repeating his central question, he asked how a criminal organization can control an entire territory while the government cannot remove it. His answer was blunt: “Because they are in the government. That’s why.”
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