The news coming out of Port-au-Prince this week is grim, confusing, and thoroughly emblematic of a broken world. President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador announced that several bodies handed over to authorities in Haiti do not belong to his abducted countrymen, leaving the search to grind on through the wreckage of a collapsed state. For folks sitting around the diner counter in Ohio or Wisconsin, an abduction in the Caribbean feels distant, like an dispatch from another planet. But the tragedy unfolding down there carries an old, stubborn lesson about human nature and what happens when the civic foundation rots out from under a country.
Edmund Burke famously reminded us that good order is the foundation of all good things. Without it, you do not get free enterprise, you do not get quiet neighborhood streets, and you certainly do not get the high-minded constitutional liberties that our coastal punditry takes for granted. In Haiti, order was not merely disrupted; it was driven out of town entirely. Armed gangs dictate terms to what little remains of the government, infrastructure lies in ruins, and human life has been reduced to a bargaining chip.
Now enter Nayib Bukele, a leader who routinely sends the editorial boards of our prestige newspapers reaching for their smelling salts. In the comfortable salons of Washington and Manhattan, Bukele is treated as a dangerous strongman because he used uncompromising state power to lock up tens of thousands of violent gang members who had turned El Salvador into a slaughterhouse. Yet if you talk to ordinary Salvadoran families who can finally walk their kids to school without paying extortion money to street thugs, you hear a very different tale. Bukele grasped a basic, conservative truth that polite society prefers to ignore: a government that cannot protect its citizens from violent predators has failed its primary reason for existing.
The bitter irony of this week’s developments is hard to miss. Salvadoran nationals—citizens of a country that only recently dragged itself out of the grip of criminal syndicates through sheer force of will—have been swallowed up by the lawless vacuum of Haiti. The fact that unidentified remains were delivered, examined, and found not to match the missing men speaks to the terrifying fog of an anarchic territory. When there are no reliable police, no functional courts, and no sovereign authority capable of enforcing the peace, even the basic facts of life and death become casualties of the chaos.
For decades, our foreign policy establishment poured billions of taxpayer dollars into Haiti, armed with glossy slide decks, non-profit grant money, and fashionable academic theories about nation-building. They genuinely believed you could construct a civil society from the top down by importing Western administrative processes while ignoring the absolute necessity of basic, physical security. The result of that managerial hubris is on full display today in Port-au-Prince. The grand theorists who turn their noses up at hard-edged law enforcement have no answer for a warlord standing in an intersection with an automatic rifle.
There is a domestic lesson here for our own politics, even if the Beltway class refuses to see it. We have watched echoes of this detached thinking in American cities, where progressive prosecutors and soft-headed bureaucrats decided that enforcing the law was too crude or outdated. Predictably, public order deteriorated, and working-class neighborhoods paid the heaviest price. Regular Americans—the machinist in Kenosha, the dry cleaner in Canton—know instinctively what the academics managed to forget. Civilization is a fragile thing, sustained only by the steady, unyielding enforcement of the law.
As Bukele presses on to locate his missing people, we ought to keep those Salvadorans and their families in our prayers. But we should also take a long, unblinking look at the smoking ruins of Haiti. It stands as a grim monument to the perils of weak authority and sentimental governance. If a nation wishes to enjoy freedom, prosperity, or justice, it must first establish order. Anything else is just wishful thinking whispered from the safety of an air-conditioned seminar room.