The Problem With El Salvador’s Crime Numbers • Bukele’s government has been undercounting homicides since its 2022 crackdown.

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.

At its peak in 2015, the country had a homicide rate of 105 per 100,000 people. In 2019, when Bukele ascended to the presidency he made little mention of ironfisted crime policies. Instead, 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.

In March 2022, Bukele launched the dramatic crackdown known as the régimen de excepción, which suspended several basic constitutional rights and was followed by aggressive criminal reforms. 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.

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.” In May 2021, Bukele’s government formally started changing how it counted homicides, excluding the discovery of clandestine or unmarked graves from its counts.

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. The inclusion of these killings in the data would increase the homicide rate by 19 percent in 2022 and 20 percent in 2023.

The last type of homicide that is now omitted from the Salvadoran government’s data is murders that occur in prisons. In the two years since the crackdown was launched, 91 people have been killed in prison.

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.

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