A bombshell report published Tuesday by the bilingual conservative outlet El American accused the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, of cutting a deal with the nation’s biggest gangs to falsify homicide statistics that abruptly ended when Bukele ordered a spree of arrests against prominent gang members.
Bukele’s alleged negotiations with gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) had already been the subject of reports by outlets like El Salvador’s El Faro newspaper; the allegations that the pact broke, resulting in an abrupt spike in homicides in addition to the already existing rise in instances of other violent crimes in March, are new.
Bukele – a prolific social media user who has marketed himself as a technology-savvy Millennial, famously becoming the first world leader to take a selfie during a U.N. General Assembly speech – has not responded to the report at press time but published a post on Twitter documenting the statistical collapse of the homicide rate in El Salvador on Monday.
El American’s Orlando Avendaño contended in his report on Monday that Bukele engineered that collapse by asking gangs to hide their killings, digging mass graves the government would not reveal to officially document the killings as “disappearances.”
“For no obvious reason, he succeeded, and El Salvador, a traditionally violent country with a strong history of gang warfare, began to record days without a single homicide,” Avendaño noted. “No one understood what was happening, all while Bukele bragged about it on his Twitter account.”
Citing Salvadoran journalists, both on and off the record, Avendaño’s report cited evidence that Bukele had hidden the country’s extremely high homicide rate by having gangs disappear the dead.
“In all of 2020, some 200 people disappeared in El Salvador. By the end of 2021, the figure had doubled. The state pretended to be looking for them, but relatives of the disappeared have denounced several times that no one is helping them,” the report observed. “In February of this year, several mass graves were found by the police.”
“They were being reported as disappeared, not as homicides,” conservative Salvadoran lawmaker Cesar Reyes told El American. “Then, at the end of March this year, the murders began to be counted.”
“What was happening was that the criminal groups had these clandestine graves so that the government would not count the deaths as homicides,” he insisted.
The homicide rate skyrocketed overnight in March after Bukele declared war on the nation’s violent gangs, claiming to arrest 600 people in one day and imposing a month-long state of emergency that erased the country’s freedom of association and allowed the government to spy on any citizen’s private communications. Bukele announced that he would ration food for those imprisoned, warning human rights activists, “if the international community is worried about their little angels, they should come and bring them food, because I am not going to take budget money away from the schools to feed these terrorists.”
A month later, El Salvador’s legislature approved expanded funding for new prisons. Bukele controls the Legislative Assembly.
“Following months of historically low murder rates (at one point the figure was close to zero), El Salvador recorded its most violent weekend in decades: 87 people killed between March 25 and 27 of this year,” El American noted. “On March 26 alone, 62 people were killed. The bloodiest day in the recent history of the small Central American country.”
El Salvador documented 79 homicides in all of February.
Citing reports from El Faro, El American noted that MS-13 members anonymously confirmed that they had an agreement with the government and that Bukele unilaterally broke it with mass arrests of gang members. One such anonymous member told El Faro that government officials asked gang members for a meeting to talk strategy and then arrested the gang leaders on the spot.
“They failed to comply. They captured when they didn’t have to. They said ‘come to such and such a place, we are going to talk,’ and instead of talking, they captured,” the MS-13 member reportedly said.
Bukele boasted of collapsing homicide rates in El Salvador on Twitter Monday, the same day the El American report dropped.
“Homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in the most dangerous countries in the world … from 1991 to 2021,” Bukele narrated, sharing an animated graphic showing El Salvador dropping in rankings.
“This is how they had our country and this is how it started to change since our government began,” Bukele wrote. “And now, with the #warongangs, everything is improving much more. We continue…”
Much of Bukele’s Twitter feed is now dedicated to images of weapons allegedly captured from gangs, armored vehicles the government allegedly recently purchased for the “#warongangs,” and other propaganda meant to show the seriousness of his government in eliminating gang violence.
“More will come, but I will show you those later,” Bukele wrote on Sunday, sharing a video of armored vehicles allegedly added to the government’s fleet.
Bukele remains extremely popular. A poll by Francisco Gavidia University published in late May found that 72.23 percent of Salvadorans would vote to re-elect Bukele. A poll published on June 1 by La Prensa Gráfica found Bukele enjoyed an 87-percent approval rating and a nine percent disapproval rating, a stark contrast to other Western Hemisphere leaders like Peru’s Pedro Castillo, Chile’s Gabriel Boric, and America’s Joe Biden. An anonymous journalist expressing concern about Bukele’s censorship of gang reporting to El America confessed that he or she had voted for Bukele.
Bukele began his political career as part of the socialist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The party ousted him in 2017 for allegedly verbally abusing a woman in the party after months of tensions and constant criticism of the party from Bukele. His New Ideas party actively attempts to avoid being identified with any ideology, instead advocating for vague, anti-corruption populism, but Bukele has used his power to bring El Salvador closer to communist countries like China while denigrating the United States. Bukele enjoyed friendly relations with President Donald Trump as they both shared the goal of keeping Salvadorans from leaving the country – keeping migration to the United States to a minimum while injecting human capital into El Salvador.
Bukele largely ignored last week’s Summit of the Americas, which took place in Los Angeles, only weighing in on Twitter late in the week, snidely referring to the Organization of American States (OAS), which hosts the summit, as the “Washington Ministry of Colonies.”