Since his 2019 election, President Nayib Bukele has overseen a sharp decline in homicides, with El Salvador experiencing its least violent years since the civil war ended in 1992.1 Officials attribute the astonishing drop-off to the effects of the government’s security policy, but evidence suggests that Bukele’s initial success owed more to negotiations between the government and criminal gangs that have plagued the country for decades – the three most prominent being the MS-13 and the 18th Street gang’s two factions (ie, the Southerners and the Revolutionaries).2 Reported jailhouse meetings between officials and gang leaders even prompted the former attorney general to open an investigation, but the new legislature dominated by Bukele’s party voted to replace him in May 2021, and the probe was shelved.3 In the face of a horrific spike in murders in March, however, El Salvador’s leadership changed tack, meeting the threat with an extraordinarily heavy hand.4 Apparently prompted by the disruption of secretive talks with the government, in late March the MS-13 mounted a sudden but brutal campaign of killings, spurring the government’s draconian response. Bukele’s government immediately declared a “state of exception”, which continues to this day, with mass arrests of suspected gang members.

5 More than 53,000 alleged gang members, including over 7,500 women, have been captured so far, more than doubling the number of people in the country’s prisons.6 El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world, at around 2 per cent of the adult population.