El Salvador closes 2024 with a record low number of homicides

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — El Salvador closed 2024 with a record low 114 homicides, continuing notable security gains under a second full year of a state of emergency that has given the government extraordinary powers and curtailed some fundamental rights.

President Nayib Bukele said via the social platform X that the number announced Wednesday by the small Central American country’s Attorney General’s Office made it the safest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Not all nations had published their 2024 annual homicide totals, but the 1.9 homicides per 100,000 in population that Bukele said had been achieved would put it below what any Latin American country had reported in 2023. El Salvador’s official total does not include the killings of five suspected gang members in shootouts with security forces.

In March 2022, El Salvador’s notoriously powerful street gangs killed 62 people in a matter of hours. The congress granted Bukele’s administration a requested “state of exception” to crackdown on the gangs that included suspending some Constitutional rights and giving police more powers to arrest and hold suspects.

More than 83,000 people have been arrested since, the majority jailed without due process. Bukele has said that 8,000 people who were innocent have been released.

Civil rights organizations have reported 354 people who have died in government custody during the crackdown.

Despite the restrictions, the improvements in security have contributed to Bukele’s extremely high popularity. For years, many Salvadorans lived in fear of the gangs that controlled swaths of the country, extorting, killing and forcibly recruiting.

In 2015, El Salvador had 6,656 homicides, making it one of the world’s deadliest countries. In 2023, there were 214 homicides. The advances have inevitably raised the question of whether the state of emergency can still be justified to which Bukele and his ministers have obliquely answered that they have not yet achieved all that they wish.

The congress, in which Bukele's party and allies hold a supermajority, continues to renew the special powers each month.

The gangs' repressive control made it difficult and dangerous for residents to travel between neighborhoods, including for work. Now residents say they can walk their neighborhoods without fear.

In February, Bukele romped to victory, winning an unprecedented second five-year term despite a constitutional ban on consecutive reelection. A friendly Supreme Court allowed it.