Pending the official report on the violence, March could be the quietest month in the history of El Salvador in terms of security and crime. According to experts, it would be the icing on the cake for President Nayib Bukele when the Central American country celebrates one year under an emergency regime. The intention was to eradicate the high homicide rate generated by the maras or gangs and the figures are proving it right despite the criticism from national and international defenders of human rights.
“We are now with the lowest homicidal violence figures on record if we take 1992 as a starting point, the year the civil war ended,” Salvadoran journalist and writer Roberto Valencia told RFI in Spanish. This expert on issues of violence traces an x-ray of the strong turn that has taken place in the country in the last twelve months. “For El Salvador this is a milestone -he continues- and this year an even more pronounced decline is projected: Single-digit figures are expected, around one homicide per 100,000 inhabitants, that is, a level very similar to that of European countries.
But Valencia qualifies these results. “Do these figures mean that Salvadoran society has stopped being violent as it has been in recent decades? No, there is still a lot of cloth to cut, but the data we have on the table is this.”
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Another piece of information serves to understand the impact of the security plan implemented by President Nayib Bukele in March 2022: 92% of Salvadorans support the emergency regime and those who protest and denounce abuses and violations of human rights are in the minority. “Bukele today has very high levels of popularity but what is surreal -Valencia explains- is that the polls also give him the support of social and political actors who have no sympathy for his regime.”
The other side of the coin
After the application of the state of emergency, the Salvadoran government has regained control of the national territory, has attacked gang structures and arrested dozens of their leaders.
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The expert on violence underlines at the same time that, as denounced by important actors of the national and international community, “there is an unprecedented degradation of the rule of law and democracy in El Salvador and this will have consequences in the future, when it no longer exists that massive popular support for Bukele’s policy What is most worrying, Valencia concludes, is the extreme militarization and that way of doing politics of the ruling party, which verbally assaults those who the bukelismo considered a political rival.”
