President Nayib Bukele described El Salvador’s transformation as something that could not be explained by human effort alone. “Our war against poverty didn’t have a single chance. I don’t know how to explain it, more than because it was God’s hand.”
The transformation President Bukele is referring to began with crime reduction. El Salvador recorded 2,398 homicides in 2019, the year he took office.
By 2024, that number had fallen to 114, a murder rate of 1.9 per 100,000 people. Once widely considered the most violent country in the world, El Salvador is now among the safest in the region.
To achieve this, Bukele implemented the Territorial Control Plan, declared a state of exception that suspended aspects of due process, and arrested more than 96,000 gang members.
Many were imprisoned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a high-security facility equipped with cell phone jammers to prevent gang leaders from continuing to operate from inside the prison.
Improved security has led to an improved economy. Tourism has returned to the country in significant numbers. In 2019, El Salvador hosted approximately 1.7 million tourists.
By 2024, arrivals had reached 3.9 million, generating $3.5 billion in foreign revenue, an increase of roughly 129 percent. Tourism contributed about 14 percent of GDP in 2024, up from 6.4 percent five years earlier. The UN World Tourism Organization recorded a 35 percent increase in visitors in 2023 compared to 2019.
Foreign direct investment surged as well. In 2023, FDI reached $760 million, a 344 percent increase that surpassed the country’s annual average of $466 million over the previous two decades.
According to El Salvador’s Central Bank, overall poverty dropped by 5.9 percent from 2023 to 2024, reducing the number of Salvadorans living in poverty by approximately 114,000 people in a single year.
Multidimensional poverty, which measures access to health care, education, and housing rather than just income, fell from 25.1 percent in 2023 to 21.1 percent in 2024.
Bukele’s approval rating has consistently exceeded 80 percent since taking office and reached 85 percent in a May 2025 poll. He won re-election in February 2024 with nearly 85 percent of the vote, and his party captured 54 of 60 legislative seats.
He attributed the change to divine intervention, stating that “no one can doubt it… it’s evident that God works when asked with faith.” In his view, the transformation of what was once considered the most dangerous country in the world into a far more secure nation stands as “the clearest miracle.”
Bukele argued that improving a country that was already functioning would be one thing, but turning “the worst” into stability and security was something entirely different. That, he said, is what makes it “a miracle example,” emphasizing that the scale of the change goes beyond what human effort alone could achieve.
He pointed to the results themselves as proof, while also acknowledging that even those responsible for the policies cannot fully explain how it happened. “We have to confess that we don’t know how it happened,” he said, adding that if it could be fully explained, “then it’s not a miracle.”
Describing the country’s situation before the crackdown on gangs, he could just as easily have been describing Mexico or several other Latin American countries where narcos effectively control the government.
He said that, prior to his reforms, El Salvador had been governed by two competing systems: a legitimate democratic government elected by the people and a parallel structure imposed by criminal organizations. He described this second system as “the dictatorship of the gangs,” where power was enforced through violence rather than consent.
He explained that, unlike a democracy, no one could choose or vote out this criminal authority. “Whoever doesn’t want to comply gets shot,” he said, calling it “the true dictatorship that El Salvador lived through.”
According to Bukele, these gangs exercised more territorial control than the official government, which he described as incapable, corrupt, and complicit in criminal activity. While the state collected taxes, many citizens avoided or were exempt from them. In contrast, gang extortion, which they referred to as “income,” was unavoidable.
He stated that roughly 85 percent of Salvadorans were forced to pay this extortion, effectively creating a parallel tax system that covered nearly the entire country. In his view, this amounted to a de facto government imposed by criminal groups.
Bukele also described the failure of past enforcement efforts. Authorities would arrest gang members, but “the next day 101 came out,” meaning arrests were quickly offset by releases and new recruits. He added that gangs retaliated by targeting police families, discouraging law enforcement from taking action.
As a result, he said, the country functioned as what many would call a failed state. When the state cannot enforce law and order, it loses its monopoly on violence. In that vacuum, criminal organizations assume control, effectively becoming a parallel government.
For decades, liberal criminologists argued that incarceration and the threat of punishment do not deter crime, and that only addressing root causes such as poverty, inequality, and lack of opportunity could reduce violence. El Salvador has disproved that argument in real time. Bukele’s government achieved what no Western academic study ever could: near-certain arrest and lifetime imprisonment for gang activity, applied at scale across an entire country.
The result was a 95 percent reduction in homicides in five years, in a nation that remained poor throughout. Crime collapsed because the rational calculation changed.
In the West, liquor stores are robbed more frequently than banks, even though banks hold more cash and staff are instructed to comply. Despite the higher payoff, criminals are less likely to rob banks because the FBI will almost certainly catch them and a federal judge will sentence them to decades in prison.
Salvadoran gang members stopped collecting extortion from tortilla vendors for the same reason. With a near 100 percent chance of being caught and sent to a prison widely described as a living hell, criminals have decided that crime does not pay. El Salvador has proved that large-scale crime reduction is possible. It is a matter of political will.
The post A Matter of Political Will: How El Salvador Destroyed Three Decades of Liberal Criminology appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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