How did El Salvador solve crime?

Friends —

Ten years ago, El Salvador was the murder capital of the entire world, outside of active war zones. In 2015, more than 6,600 people were killed in a country of just 6 1/2 million people … a homicide rate of more than 100 per 100,000.

This year, the country has gone 150 days without a single murder.

Today your odds of being killed in El Salvador are lower than anywhere else in North or South America. Statistically, it’s safer than Canada. I’ve been covering news a long time, and I can’t think of a national turnaround this fast or this complete.

In fact, I found it so fascinating that I took my staff down there to see it firsthand. We found streets full of people out at night — eating, drinking, having a good time, with no signs of trouble. We often didn’t even bother locking the door where we were staying. It felt safer than plenty of American cities I could name.

It seems like a happy ending for a country that’s seen so much horror. President Bukele fixed a broken, extremely dangerous country, and everyone I talked to there seems thrilled. Except that’s not the whole story.

The interesting question about El Salvador isn’t whether Nayib Bukele made it safe. But what did it cost and who paid?

Getting to this point meant arresting more than 80,000 people, over 1% of the entire country. It’s the highest incarceration rate on Earth. It meant suspending basic rights, holding mass trials, and locking people up on little more than a tattoo or a neighbor’s tip. Bukele himself later said 8,000 of them were released because they were innocent.

Inside the country, his approval is near 94%. People lived through hell, and they’re grateful and don’t want to go back. Outside, human rights groups are using phrases like “crimes against humanity.” I should point out that these are people who never lived under the threat of violence in El Salvador. But I can see and understand both points of view.

And Bukele fixed the country by sidestepping its institutions — purging the courts, rewriting term limits, and sidelining rules meant to constrain him. But he won’t be president forever. What happens to a nation that’s learned to trust one strong man instead of its own rules?

I’ve seen this up close before. I worked in Venezuela back when it was still a democracy, and I talked to people who were happy to trade a little freedom for a crackdown on crime. A few decades later, the men they’d cheered on had run one of the richest countries in the hemisphere straight into the ground.

Share

I’m not saying that’s El Salvador’s future. It might genuinely go the other way; I hope it does. But that question needled me the entire time I was there.

I made a video about what I learned and what we experienced in the country. You can check it out here. Thanks for watching!

Subscribe now

– Ken