August 8, 2024, 2:38 PM

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In less than a decade, El Salvador has gone from the murder capital of the world to having one of the lowest homicide rates in the Western Hemisphere. President Nayib Bukele has been at the helm of this radical transformation. Since taking office, he has led one of the most aggressive anti-gang crackdowns ever seen, suspended key constitutional rights, reshaped the judiciary, eroded prosecutorial independence, and consolidated unprecedented political power in the process.

He has done all this with overwhelming support. Despite being widely criticized by Salvadoran civil society organizations and international human rights groups, he received more than 84 percent of the vote in his reelection in February, and support for his measures has polled as high as 92 percent. In Latin America, Bukele has a higher popularity rating than any leader, including the pope.

In June, Bukele was inaugurated president for an unprecedented—and, many argue, unconstitutional—second term. At his inauguration, dressed in an elegant, embroidered suit reminiscent of the military uniform worn by the country’s revered former president, Gerardo Barrios, he proclaimed, “We are now the safest country in the Western Hemisphere.” It is a line that he uses often.

Bukele’s narrative is straightforward: El Salvador was a sick nation, beleaguered for decades by gangs, violence, and corrupt politicians, but now that the country is taking its “bitter medicine,” it is finally safe. Now politicians throughout the region are increasingly looking to Bukele’s approach as a guide for combating violence and insecurity in their own countries.

In Honduras, President Xiomara Castro declared her own “state of exception,” which has suspended numerous constitutional guarantees and dramatically increased the role of the military in public security. In Ecuador, President Daniel Noboa announced the construction of two maximum security prisons designed by the same company behind El Salvador’s notorious megaprison. “For all the Bukele lovers,” Noboa joked, “it’s the same jail.”

Data from the Salvadoran government indeed suggests that violence has plummeted to historic lows under Bukele. A closer look at the data and methods used by his administration, however, reveals a more complicated reality of violence, state control, and repression in the country.

A soldier in camouflage keeps watch in front of yellow police tape strung between booths at the edge of an outdoor street market. The soldier wears a brimmed hat pulled low and a cloth gaiter mask over his lower face, so only his eyes are barely visible.

Soldiers keep watch near to the crime scene where five market vendors and one private security guard were killed during what was allegedly a fight between gangs, seen in San Salvador on March 15, 2017.Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images

In 2019, Bukele ascended to the presidency on a populist, anti-establishment platform that focused on social renewal and made little mention of ironfisted crime policies. Almost immediately, he began a three-year period of secret gang negotiations and diplomacy, which saw the homicide rate fall to just 18 people per 100,000 in 2021. After a weekend of heightened gang violence in March 2022, Bukele, with the support of the legislature, launched the dramatic crackdown known as the régimen de excepción, which suspended several basic constitutional rights and was followed by aggressive criminal reforms. The provisional, 30-day régimen de excepción has become increasingly permanent, having now been extended a total of 28 times, and in 2023 the country’s reported homicide rate plunged to just 2.4 people per 100,000.

However, under Bukele’s crackdown, the government has been undercounting homicides by as much as 47 percent. This is no bureaucratic or clerical error. Since taking office, Bukele’s administration has been laser-focused on reducing homicide rates and improving perceptions of security. This was central to his administration’s negotiations with the gangs from 2019 to 2022.

The government offered incarcerated gang leadership less-restrictive prison conditions, reduced sentences, visits to civilian hospitals—often to communicate with fellow gang members under the guise of receiving fake medical treatment—and a promise to not extradite them to the United States. In exchange, the gangs needed to find ways to lower the number of homicides. One of the ways in which gang leaders achieved this was to authorize fewer killings and genuinely reduce violence.

However, they also increased the practice of burying the bodies of victims in unmarked and often mass graves—in effect, reducing the number of “public killings.” According to a 2022 U.S. federal indictment, during the negotiations, “MS-13 leaders continued to authorize murders where the victims’ bodies were buried or otherwise hidden.”

In May 2021, Bukele’s government formally started changing how it counted homicides. Mesa Técnica, an interagency roundtable that tabulates homicides, began excluding the discovery of clandestine or unmarked graves from its counts. In a country ravished by a 12-year civil war that ended in the 1990s, discoveries of mass graves and unidentified human remains are an all-too-common occurrence, and for as long as the government had been recording homicide data, these deaths had been included.

Marvin Reyes, the leader of the Salvadoran national police union, told Foreign Policy that as the homicide numbers were dropping during Bukele’s first years in office, “we began to find more unmarked and clandestine graves where the gangs would bury their victims.” Since the start of 2021, at least 171 unmarked graves have been discovered (68 in 2021, 43 in 2022, and 60 in 2023) and entirely left out of the nation’s homicide figures.

Then, in April 2022, just days after Bukele declared the régimen de excepción, the government began excluding figures for persons killed in clashes with the police or military, which include shootings, patrols, and operations by state security forces. El Salvador’s National Civil Police refers to these incidents as “illegitimate aggressions” or “legal interventions,” which therefore fall outside the realm of intentional homicide.

For context, in the United States, these killings are also counted separately and are called “willful” and “justifiable” homicides. If you were to count people killed by police in the United States in 2022 as official homicides, the national homicide rate would go up by 6 percent. In El Salvador, the inclusion of these killings in the data would increase the homicide rate by 19 percent in 2022 and 20 percent in 2023.

Security forces in El Salvador have a uniquely troubling history of extrajudicial killings. In his book Los Muertos y el Periodista, Salvadoran journalist Oscár Martínez wrote, “When the police say clashes, it probably means ‘massacre.’” Since the Bukele government stopped including police killings in its homicide data, 122 people have been killed in clashes with security forces (92 in 2022 and at least 30 in 2023).

Where El Salvador has become a true leader—not only in the Western Hemisphere but globally—is incarceration. Under Bukele’s rule, El Salvador has become the most incarcerated country in the world. As a result of arbitrary detentions, prolonged sentences, and mass trials, 1.6 percent of the Salvadoran population is now behind bars—more than twice the incarceration rate of Cuba and Rwanda and more than four times that of the United States.

As it happens, the last type of homicide that is now omitted from the Salvadoran government’s data is murders that occur in prisons. It is unclear precisely when the government stopped including these figures in the official counts, but data from government records and civil society organizations indicates that homicides in prison have increased dramatically under the régimen de excepción. During Bukele’s first two years in office, only 16 people died from homicide while under prison custody, and homicides accounted for just 8 percent of total prison deaths. Since then, the number of homicides in prisons has skyrocketed. Detailed data from Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, a nonprofit legal aid organization, indicates that in the two years since the crackdown was launched, 91 people have been killed in prison, meaning that homicide is now the leading cause of death in the prison system today.

Some may note that the United States’ FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report also excludes prison homicides from its national homicide count. However, this is merely because that data is sourced from law enforcement, not correctional facilities. The United States actually uses two collection systems to track homicides, and the other one—the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System—does include prison murders. Ultimately, a homicide behind bars would seem to be an equally valid indicator of societal violence as one on the street.

Given the significant changes to El Salvador’s methodology for reporting murders and the quantitative data available, this analysis finds that under Bukele, homicides have been undercounted on average by nearly 27 percent since 2021, and by 33 percent since Bukele launched the crackdown in spring 2022. In 2023, Bukele claims to have reduced the number of homicides to 154, thus lowering the murder rate to just 2.4 homicides per 100,000 people. The data suggests that the real number of homicides in El Salvador last year was 288, and that the real murder rate was 4.5—a staggering undercount of 47 percent.

While the reduction in violence and the dismantling of the gangs under Bukele has certainly been remarkable, El Salvador is simply not the safest country in the Western Hemisphere, as he likes to claim. Even if one were to ignore reports of mass repression and human rights violations by the government, El Salvador, in its most generous reading, would only be the safest country in Central America.

Nowadays, when a Latin American country experiences escalating crime, there is invariably a conversation about the Bukele option. Yet the régimen de excepción, which is so often singularly framed as the Bukele model, is neither a document of public policy, a piece of legislation, nor a defined security strategy. In its truest form, it is a prolonged suspension of four constitutional guarantees—the right to assembly, legal counsel, private communication, and limits to pretrial detention—followed by a series of draconian sentencing reforms, which have collectively enabled mass incarceration on an unprecedented scale. Under Bukele, these temporary and exceptional measures have effectively been transformed into what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as “a permanent technique of government.”

Rarely mentioned in the conversation are also Bukele’s three years of secret gang negotiations, a period in which arrests fell by 25 percent, and yet official reported homicides plunged by 66 percent. Nor are the stark differences between El Salvador and other Latin American countries with burgeoning crime epidemics, such as Ecuador and Haiti. El Salvador’s criminal landscape has been dominated for decades by three unsophisticated street gangs that had little to no involvement in the international drug trade and derived the majority of their revenue from petty extortion. By comparison, Ecuador has become a critical transit point for some of the most sophisticated drug cartels in the world, and Haiti’s tragedy is one marked by a unique cascade of political instability, state collapse, economic crisis, and (as some argue) criminal insurgency.

Lastly, both Bukele’s supporters and critics have largely taken his administration at its word, failing to consider that the very data touted by the president and his administration is deeply flawed and that homicides under his rule have been deliberately and dramatically undercounted.

“Everyone is talking about Bukele’s model and that it is going to be successful there,” Salvadoran political scientist José Miguel Cruz told Foreign Policy, “and that is just a fantasy.”