Video: Are President Bukele’s Celebrations Around Security Gains Justified?

Deborah: [00:00:03] I’m Deborah Bonello, managing editor at Insight Crime, and I’m speaking to our lead investigator in Central America.

Alex, President Nayib Bukele’s government is celebrating 1,000 days without homicides since he took power in 2019. But what does that mean exactly? And are there reasons to doubt the numbers?

Alex: [00:00:22] Well, it’s true that violence has fallen dramatically since Bukele took office. Homicides are at historic lows — that is in large part because the government has launched a ruthless crackdown against the country’s two main street gangs, the MS13 and Barrio 18, which were previously responsible for the vast majority of homicides in El Salvador.

During this crackdown, the gangs have essentially been dismantled. However, there are some reasons to question the government’s figures. Firstly, as InSight Crime pointed out in this year’s annual homicide roundup, El Salvador does not follow what is known as the Bogotá Protocol, which is the standard method for measuring homicides in the region.

But perhaps more importantly, the Bukele government has actually started to omit certain types of homicides from their counts. So firstly, you have the omission of bodies discovered in clandestine graves or unmarked graves. That is important in El Salvador because the gangs have a habit of of disposing of their victims in mass graves. The government has also started to omit people killed in clashes with the police and the military — also important in El Salvador, where the security forces have a complicated history of extrajudicial killings. And more recently, the government has also started to omit homicides that occur within prisons, and this is increasingly important in El Salvador, which during the crackdown has become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.

So, what does all that mean? It means that the government’s data may overstate just how comprehensive the reduction in violence has been, and it may inflate the perceived success of the government’s security policies.

Deborah: [00:02:44] So do we have any idea of how the government’s version of events compares to the reality on the ground in El Salvador, in terms of violence?

Alex: [00:02:57] I think it’s difficult to tell statistically. Certainly, on the ground in El Salvador, there has been a remarkable difference in the peacefulness, particularly in communities that were once dominated by the gangs.

In terms of hard data, it is difficult to scrutinize the government’s numbers because under Bukele, government transparency has decreased quite radically. There was an investigation by Foreign Policy last year that concluded that the Bukele government had been underreporting murders by an average of a third since he launched his grand crackdown in 2022. That information was based on government figures compared with information collected by civil society actors and also the local press.

Unfortunately, it’s becoming harder and harder for independent organizations to verify the numbers, as the Bukele government, in recent times, has begun to take steps to target independent civil society actors in the press with legal attacks. And so that space is shrinking, and there’s a good chance that it will become more and more difficult going forward to determine just how significant the reduction in violence has been from a statistical point.

DB: [00:04:38] Indeed. The less critical voices there are, the less we know about what’s truly going on. But as you say, some of his security gains are impressive considering the situation that El Salvador was facing just a few years ago. Alex, thanks very much for your time. For those watching, to know more about the gangs in El Salvador and the security situation there, please dip into our our archive at insightcrime.org