The Problem with El Salvador’s Crime Rates • Bukele’s government has understated the number of murders since the crackdown began in 2022.

Indeed, data from the Salvadoran government suggests that violence has fallen to historic lows under Bukele. However, a closer look at the data and methods used by his government reveals a more complex reality of violence, state control and repression in the country.

At its peak in 2015, the country had a murder rate of 105 people per 100,000. In 2019, when Bukele became president, he made little mention of ironclad crime policies. Instead, he began a three-year period of secretive gang negotiations and diplomacy that saw the murder rate drop to just 18 people per 100,000 in 2021.

In March 2022, Bukele launched the dramatic crackdown known as the régimen de excepción, which suspended several fundamental constitutional rights and was followed by aggressive penal reforms. In 2023, the country’s reported homicide rate fell to just 2.4 people per 100,000.

But under Bukele’s tougher approach, the government has undercounted the murder rate by as much as 47 percent.

The government offered imprisoned gang leaders less restrictive prison conditions, reduced sentences, visits to civilian hospitals (often to communicate with other gang members under the guise of fake medical treatment), and a promise not to extradite them to the United States. In return, the gangs had to find ways to reduce the murder rate. One of the ways gang leaders accomplished this was by allowing fewer murders and actually reducing violence.

However, they have also stepped up the practice of burying victims’ bodies in unmarked and often mass graves, effectively reducing the number of “public killings.” In May 2021, Bukele’s government began formally changing the way it counts killings, excluding the discovery of secret or unmarked graves from its counts.

Then, in April 2022, just days after Bukele declared the régimen de excepción, the government began excluding figures for people killed in confrontations with the police or military. Including these killings in the data would increase the homicide rate by 19 percent in 2022 and 20 percent in 2023.

The last type of murder that is now omitted from the Salvadoran government data are murders that occur in prisons. In the two years since the repression began, 91 people have been murdered in prison.

The analysis shows that under Bukele, the homicide rate has been understated by an average of almost 27 percent since 2021, and by 33 percent since Bukele began the crackdown in the spring of 2022. In 2023, Bukele claims to have reduced the homicide rate to 154, bringing the murder rate down to just 2.4 homicides per 100,000 people. The data suggests that the actual number of homicides in El Salvador last year was 288, and the true murder rate was 4.5—a staggering underestimation of 47 percent.

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