 Then, a new president gets elected in El Salvador in 2019. A guy named Nayib Bukele. I think it's Bukele, I think that's how you pronounce it. Nayib Bukele is from a Palestinian immigrant to El Salvador. And he is now the president of El Salvador. And we'll talk about his popularity in a minute, but he is the president of El Salvador. He gets elected in 2019, and it's part of the first things he did is he gets the gang members together and he basically negotiates a truce. And he divides the world up basically, right? This is, again, anarchy, right? So they sit down and they say, look, violence is not good for business, not good for the government, not good for you guys. You know, I want to get re-elected, I want a reduction in violence, so this is what we'll do. We'll divide up the territory between us, in a sense. We'll divide up the violence, and you guys agree to lower the violence between you, lower the number of homicides, and we'll basically leave you alone. You know, and also, by the way, I'm sure this is part of the agreement, although I don't have, there's no evidence, nobody recorded this agreement. Leave the neighborhoods, leave the specific neighborhoods, you know, that are ours, leave them. The rich, the powerful, leave them. It's a small percentage of the El Salvador population. You can have the rest, but just don't fight. Just don't fight, if you fight, we're going to be pissed off. That's not good, just don't fight. And that reduced violence in El Salvador quite a bit to levels of 17.6 per 100,000 by 2021. That lowered it dramatically, it was no longer the most violent country in the world, but in 2021, there were a number of cases where violence, in spite of the fact of being low, historically, it's still 17.6 would make it more violent than I think any U.S. state. You know, the most violent U.S. state is, well, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, the most violent, but let's say of 50 states, Louisiana, with 15.8, it would make it more violent to Louisiana. And there were a number of cases where there was like a gang walked onto a bus and just shot up everybody on the bus. They just killed everybody. Just horror stories like that. And Bukela, you know, wanted to, he wants to, he wants, he's a populist president. He wants to be successful. He wants to win. And in 2021, he basically, what was it, sorry, yes, in 2021, he basically declared, early 2022, I think it was March 2022, he basically declared a war on the gangs. And this is what has brought notoriety right now to El Salvador. What Bukela did was he brought out the military. And the military basically went around and rounded up everybody who was perceived to be accused to be a gang member. Now, one of the things that El Salvador gangs do is they, the members of the gang tattoo their membership on their bodies. If you see these guys from the gangs, they are, their whole bodies are tattooed and their tattoos identify them, membership in particular gangs, which once the enforcement gets, you know, decides to do something about the gang, this is a dead giveaway. So El Salvador basically, the military started rounding up all people associated with the gangs, people who are gang members, people who are helping gangs, people who were accused of being gang members. Over the last year, they have rounded up 60,000 people. That is more than 1% of the population of El Salvador. They have built the largest prison in the Americas. This is a massive prison that holds 40,000, 40,000 inmates. And they have just recently, I think this year, started moving the inmates into this prison. If you, you know, if you've seen photos of the inmates, they're all shaven heads, you know, with no shirts. And you can see just to see people with these tattoos. They basically rounded up everybody. And they don't have enough resources to try them all individually. They don't have enough resources to give them all attorneys. And they're trying them in big groups. And they're locking them up for years. Many of them are getting 30, 40 year sentences. 60,000 El Salvador already had a 40,000 prison population, something around 2% of all El Salvador's adults are now in jail. The murder rate has dropped from 17 or from 100 to 7.8. 60,000 men in these prisons is, again, this prison of 40,000. It is assumed that anyway from 1% to 10% of the people arrested are innocent, are not part of gangs. The police are not particularly diligent about making sure that they are. And of course, this is creating a big human rights, civil rights, individual rights outcry against what has happened. So that is going to be, so that is the big accusation against them. The change in El Salvador in life, of life in El Salvador is unbelievably dramatic. Unbelievably dramatic. Think about what a country looks when it's, and all you have to do is go to somewhere like Detroit, in Detroit a few years ago, or somewhere like, what are the, what is the most violent cities today in the United States? I mean, I don't have anything today. But 2021, Memphis, Detroit, Milwaukee, downtowns, wow, even Atlanta is up there. Memphis has a 48.7 per 100,000, Detroit 47.9. I mean, this is a devastated downtowns. Baltimore, Baltimore, where's Baltimore? Baltimore, Baltimore is not in the top 10 most violent cities. At least not for 2021. It's interesting. I'm looking for Baltimore. It's not in the list. I must be missing something because I also think it's one of the, wait a minute, the following major cities did not report data. Okay. Baltimore didn't report data for 2021, so we don't know. If you want the most violent cities in 2021, among those who reported the data, it's Memphis, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Kansas, city, Louisiana, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Columbus, Ohio, Minneapolis, Minneapolis, did I say Minneapolis? Albuquerque, Houston, Dallas, Nashville, Tulsa, Denver, Denver. That's surprising. But Denver's 14.1. Right now it's double the rate of El Salvador, double the rate of El Salvador. DC would have the highest, but I don't think DC reported for that year. No, DC, let me see, because DC is listed in the states one. Yeah, DC is 28.2, so it's nowhere near as bad as some of these others. All right, I mean, we're getting distracted. Let's go back to the story of El Salvador. So you can just imagine what neighborhoods looked like. People were afraid to go out of their homes. 60% of El Salvador population live in what you would consider slums, where the gangs dominated, where the gangs controlled everything. Couldn't go out of your home. People were being shot up regularly in the streets. People didn't hang out outside. They didn't go visit friends. Children coming home from school, rushed home, stayed home, not playing outside. I guess the most dramatic example of this that I ever saw in fiction was I think it was season three of The Wire, which depicts gang violence in Baltimore. And you know, and the neighborhoods are just dead. They're just dead. Anybody who can leaves, but of course in El Salvador, there's nobody to leave. There's nowhere to leave to. In Baltimore, there is. You can leave to a bunch of different places around the country, around the state. In El Salvador, where do you leave to? I mean, the brave ones, the courageous ones, the ones who really value their lives, where do they leave to? They leave to the U.S. They leave to the U.S. And they're those evil illegal immigrants that we try to force back down there. But most of people are stuck and the neighborhoods are just dead. And what's interesting, and this is what The Wire showed so beautifully in that I think it's season three, is that when the gang violence declined significantly and in the show for a variety of reasons, gang violence for a few months, I think declined significantly. Suddenly, the residents of the neighborhoods are going outside. They're planting flowers in their front yards. They're sitting on their front porches. They're hanging out with friends. They're playing in the streets. Suddenly, life comes back. And it's not just life. People have more money. They're not paying protection. Their income immediately goes up because they don't have to pay the gangs. And immediately, investment money comes into the neighborhood from outside. It doesn't go into the neighborhood when the neighborhood is just dominated by violence. But once you eliminate the violence, capital flows in. Businesses are built. Employment is created. Wealth is created. Standard of livings go up. I mean, the elimination of violence is the number one. In many respects, the number one, the most important, the fundamental function of government. And why is that? Because it's only once you eliminate violence among human beings that then we can interact, start using our minds, start being entrepreneurs, start creating, start building, start improving our lives, pursuing our happiness. Eliminating violence is the core, the fundamental, I'm tempted to say only, but it's not only, but it's close to the only function of government. And it's there so that we can live our lives, so that we can utilize what it is to be human, our minds, to live the best lives that we can, so we can use our mind to choose our values as individuals. Flowers are no flowers. What kind of life you want to lead, not what kind of dodging bullets, but a life. So the fundamental is a government is there to protect us from violence. And when a government like in El Salvador neglects that forever and lets anybody use violence, they don't care. Then what you get is massive spikes in violence, massive spikes in poverty, massive declines in quality of life, declines in standard of living. And people escaping, the better people, the good people escaping, because there's nothing worse. And this is why I hate Anarchy so much. There is nothing worse than living under the constant threat of violence. There is nothing worse than living under the constant threat of violence in the hands of some non-objective, you know, physical monster that will inflict violence on anybody at any time because that is the only way that they can gain anything because once violence becomes the means by which we interact, well, it's all about power, then it's all about who can commit more violence. It's all about who is the stronger gang, the bigger gang, the gang with the bigger weapons who is less reluctant to kill more people. And that's what you get. That's what Anarchy is. So that's what you got in El Salvador. So if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.