El Salvador homicides fell to a record-low 114 in 2024. That is the lowest total in the country’s recorded history. The attorney general’s office announced the figure on Wednesday. It works out to about 1.9 killings per 100,000 people. President Nayib Bukele cited the official count on social media. He described it as making El Salvador the safest country in the Western Hemisphere.
The official total excludes five suspected gang members. Security forces killed them in confrontations. Even so, the scale of the change is hard to overstate. In 2015, El Salvador homicides reached 6,656. That was a rate above 100 per 100,000. At the time, it made El Salvador the most murderous country in the world not at war. The 2024 rate is now lower than that of the United States. Independent verification of the figures is limited. Journalists and researchers cannot fully audit police data under the emergency. Critics note the headline count excludes deaths in custody. It also excludes bodies recovered from clandestine graves. Yet no serious observer disputes the direction of the decline. No one disputes its scale either.
KEY POINTS
- El Salvador homicides totalled 114 in 2024, compared with 6,656 in 2015, when gang violence peaked.
- The drop follows nearly three years under a state of emergency, during which police arrested more than 83,000 people.
- Rights groups say hundreds of detainees have died in custody, a cost the government disputes in scale but not in principle.
El Salvador homicides: the crackdown behind the numbers
The turning point came in March 2022. That month, gangs killed 62 people in a single weekend of violence. Bukele asked Congress for a “state of exception.” Lawmakers then suspended a series of constitutional protections. These included limits on how long police can hold suspects. They also removed the right to learn the reason for an arrest. Lawmakers have renewed the emergency monthly ever since.
Under it, security forces have arrested more than 83,000 people. That is roughly one in every 75 Salvadorans. The government built a vast new prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center. The government designed it to hold 40,000 inmates. It filled the prison with alleged members of the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs. Those gangs once controlled entire neighbourhoods. They ran extortion rackets that touched nearly every small business in the country.
Bukele has acknowledged that about 8,000 of those arrested were innocent. Authorities have since released them. Civil-society organizations put the human cost differently. They have documented 354 people who died in state custody during the crackdown. Thousands of families say police swept up relatives with no gang ties. They cite tattoos, anonymous tips or simply living in the wrong district as the basis.
Background and context
For a generation, El Salvador’s politics revolved around the gangs. Their roots trace to Los Angeles street gangs. The United States deported those gangs to Central America in the 1990s. Successive governments alternated between “iron fist” crackdowns and a secretive 2012 truce. The truce temporarily halved the murder rate. It then collapsed amid public outrage. Killings fell steadily from the 2015 peak before Bukele took office in 2019. They dropped from more than 3,300 in 2018 to about 2,400 in 2019. By 2021 they were just over 1,000. But the final collapse of the gangs as a territorial power dates to the 2022 emergency.
The security gains have remade daily life and Bukele’s standing. Salvadorans describe visiting neighbourhoods that were off-limits for decades. Businesses no longer budget for extortion payments. Bukele won re-election in February 2024 with about 85 per cent of the vote. He did so despite a constitutional ban on consecutive terms. The country’s courts set that ban aside.
What happens next
The government has given no date for lifting the state of emergency. It remains the legal foundation of the crackdown. It is also the focus of criticism from human-rights groups and some foreign governments. Analysts note the unanswered questions are long-term ones. Tens of thousands of prisoners will eventually face trials or release. The prison system is straining at capacity. And it is unclear what reintegration, if any, awaits them.
For now, officials are presenting the record-low El Salvador homicides figures as vindication. Whether the model can outlast the emergency powers that produced it will be the central test of Bukele’s second term.
Sources: El Salvador Attorney General’s Office figures released Jan. 1; statements by President Nayib Bukele; human-rights documentation by Salvadoran civil-society organizations.
