IESET.
Policies·sv_plan_control_territorial_2019

Plan Control Territorial — Bukele's seven-phase security plan (Jun 2019)

SLV·2019 present·enacted 2019-06-20·GANA-backed presidency; FMLN-ARENA Legislative Assemblycandidate
movesspending levelproperty rightsrule of law

What the policy did

Plan Control Territorial (PCT) is the seven-phase security strategy launched by the Bukele administration on 20 Jun 2019, three weeks into the first term. Phases included territorial recovery (Phase I, large-scale deployment of Armed Forces and PNC into mara-controlled neighbourhoods), prison-system hardening (Phase II, gang-segregation across Izalco, Zacatecoluca and others, with the Feb 2020 "9F crisis" over the $109m security loan), public-space modernisation, youth-employment programming, and the construction of CECOT (Phase VII, operational Jan 2023). PCT preceded and framed the régimen de excepción of Mar 2022. Homicide rate declined from 38/100k in 2019 to 19.7/100k in 2020 (pre-régimen) — critics (InSight Crime, El Faro) allege a parallel undisclosed truce between the Bukele administration and gang leaderships documented via prison-visitor records and leaked messages, which supporters dispute.

Policy-content fingerprint — what this policy moved, on which axes

Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.

intended
spending level
fiscal.spending_level
General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
increased · moderate
higher spending share
Security and Armed-Forces deployment expanded; $109m loan negotiated Feb 2020.
property rights
institutional.property_rights
Security of private property rights — formal recognition, expropriation risk, titling systems.
increased · moderate
stronger property rights
Territorial-control recovery reduced extortion in targeted zones.
unintended / side-effect
rule of law
institutional.rule_of_law
Rule of law as institutional substrate — contract enforcement, judicial independence, equal treatment before the law. Upstream of most other axes.
decreased · weak · unintended
weaker rule of law
Armed-forces entry into Legislative Assembly Feb 9 2020 ('9F crisis'); alleged extrajudicial deployments.

Enacted by

Empirical evidence — linked hypotheses

Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".

El Salvador's ~98% homicide-rate decline from 103/100k (2015) to 2.4/100k (2023) — with the sharpest decline occurring after the Mar 2022 régimen de excepción and the Jan 2023 CECOT opening — is causally attributable in material part to the Bukele-era mass-incarceration regime (régimen de excepción + Plan Control Territorial + CECOT).
bukele_mass_incarceration_homicide_impact_2019_2024
PARTIAL — mean_gap=+27.06, |gap|/pre_sd=2.4, p_perm=0.222 (gap below 0.5×pre_sd or placebo p≥0.10)
partial
Estonia adopted among the most radical market-liberalisation packages of any post-Soviet state — flat tax (26% universal rate, 1994), currency board (EEK pegged to DM/EUR, 1992), rapid privatisation, unilateral free trade, and minimal capital controls — and by 2007 had recovered to Soviet-era GDP per capita levels and substantially exceeded them, while Belarusian and Ukrainian peers had not recovered comparably.
estonia_market_reform_post_soviet_growth_1991_2007inferred
viainstitutional.property_rightsinstitutional.rule_of_law
PARTIAL — recovery threshold pass=True (year_recovered=1998, 2007 vs 1991 = 70.53282727739165); Baltic−CIS gap pass=False (gap=5.1509956229348575)
partial
Starting from comparable 1945 post-war conditions — same ethnicity, language, pre-war German institutional and industrial inheritance, and with the GDR inheriting a larger share of pre-war industrial capital in Saxony and Thuringia — the Federal Republic's Soziale Marktwirtschaft (Ordoliberal market economy with welfare state) versus the German Democratic Republic's planned economy with administered prices, state-enterprise production, and soft budget constraints produced by 1989 a canonical divergence that pattern-matches >=7 of 10 pre-registered extreme-outcome metrics, each drawn from a different publisher or methodology family.
west_east_germany_economic_system_divergence_1950_1989inferred
viainstitutional.property_rightsinstitutional.rule_of_law
INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — no outcome variable loaded; missing: ['derived: count of canonical_metrics with threshold met']
run pending
El Salvador's FDI inflow, real-GDP growth, tourism arrivals, and business-formation rate accelerated under the Bukele era (2019-2024) relative to a Central American peer-country donor pool (Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Dominican Republic).
bukele_fdi_gdp_investment_climate_2019_2024inferred
viainstitutional.rule_of_lawinstitutional.property_rights
PARTIAL — mean_gap=-0.697, |gap|/pre_sd=1.2, p_perm=1 (gap below 0.5×pre_sd or placebo p≥0.10)
partial
The Soviet central-planning system, having already exhibited TFP stagnation 1970-1989, underwent a canonical institutional and economic collapse 1989-1998 as plan-enforcement was withdrawn without functioning market institutions in place.
soviet_union_central_planning_gdp_collapse_1989_1991inferred
viainstitutional.property_rightsfiscal.spending_level
INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING — no outcome variable loaded; missing: ['derived: count of canonical_metrics with threshold met']
run pending
Zimbabwean property-rights deterioration post-2000 (commercial-farm expropriation without compensation) precedes hyperinflation and output collapse; institutional mechanism is necessary, not merely monetary.
zimbabwe_property_rights_output_linkinferred
viainstitutional.property_rightsinstitutional.rule_of_law
INCONCLUSIVE_DATA_PENDING
run pending
Market-compatible land reforms with compensation show stronger post-reform agricultural investment and productivity recovery than expropriatory reforms.
land_reform_compensation_investment_recoveryinferred
viainstitutional.property_rightsinstitutional.rule_of_law
PARTIAL — coef=-0.2293, p=0.881 (above α=0.1); direction inconclusive
partial
Higher transition-era rule-of-law scores are positively associated with higher log GDP per capita within the post-Soviet and Eastern European transition cohort after country and year fixed effects; Estonia/Poland-style inclusive-institution build-out should outperform partial extraction persistence cases such as Russia and Ukraine.
post_soviet_transition_institutional_variationinferred
viainstitutional.rule_of_lawinstitutional.property_rights
PARTIAL — coef=-3.693e-10, p=0.719 (above α=0.1); direction inconclusive
partial
The v1 decomposition (three channels: WGI gov effectiveness, WGI rule of law, IMF debt/GDP) left 98% of the Nordic-vs-Southern-Europe log GDP/capita gap unexplained.
nordic_outcome_persistence_decomposition_v2inferred
viainstitutional.rule_of_lawfiscal.spending_level
PARTIAL — coef=-0.1578, p=0.211 (above α=0.1); direction inconclusive
partial

Similar historical policies

Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.

References