Bukele driving: El Salvador saw a 60% drop in the homicide rate in 2022

Thanks to President Nayib Bukele’s security reforms, El Salvador recorded 496 homicides in 2022, one of the lowest values in decades, and approximately 57% less than those counted in 2021, an official source revealed Tuesday.

“2021 ended with 1,147 homicides, and 2022 accounted for 496 crimes,” the head of the Ministry of Defense, Rene Merino Monroy, said at a press conference.

It is worth noting that when Nayib Bukele became president in 2019, the Central American country registered 2,390 homicides, a security crisis unmatched anywhere else on the continent.

In his first year in the presidential office, Bukele implemented a series of reforms in the Police and the Armed Forces and got Congress to approve the first phases of the Territorial Control Plan (PCT) to fight gang members, mainly the maras.

Before Bukele, there were entire neighborhoods where the police did not dare to enter because they were controlled by the maras, financed by drug trafficking and organized crime.

The president recovered the rule of law, eliminated the narco-states, and returned security to the population.

The homicide rate in 2020 dropped by 43% to just 1,340 murders, mainly attributed to violence from gang members.

Until the arrival of the right-wing president, they spent their weekends robbing, raping, and murdering people without consequences.

In 2021, the figure dropped by 14% to 1,147 homicides, stabilizing at around 1,000 murders yearly.

But this figure did not satisfy Bukele, who governs a country with more than 6 million inhabitants.

At the end of March 2022, the leader of Nuevas Ideas approved an exception regime in the Legislative Power, which allows the militarization of the streets of the main cities, imposes curfew when needed, and intervenes in telecommunications.

But perhaps the most important factor of the emergency regime is that it enables “administrative detention”, which allows the detention of any person for a maximum of 15 days.

This empowered the Military Police to arrest hundreds of maras, even though they had not been caught committing a flagrant crime.

Based on tattoos, complaints from neighbors, or general knowledge of who are members of the bloodthirsty Salvadoran gangs, Bukele’s security forces have arrested more than 60,000 criminals in the past year.

As a result, the homicide rate dropped again to one of the lowest values in living memory: only 496 murders.

A drop of 57% compared to the previous year and 79% compared to the day he came to power.

The leftist organizations Human Rights Watch and Cristosal are pressuring Nayib Bukele to end the state of exception.

However, the population repeatedly validates the government of New Ideas at the ballot box and asks for more security.

Bukele came to power with a strong discourse against organized crime, promising actions that neither the leftist FMLN nor the conservative ARENA carried out in their long years of government. Bukele implemented everything in his first term.

With information from Derecha Diario

More: Latin America news in English, every day from The Rio Times.