The president of the republic, Nayib Bukele, assured on Tuesday that the homicide rate in El Salvador in 2024 will be “even lower” than that registered the previous year, after the company Statista, placed the country as the safest in Latin America in 2023 after being one of the most violent.
Statista is a Spanish web-based charging company that offers unaudited statistical data and was unknown until today in El Salvador.
Bukele thus reacted in a message on social network 2.4 murders per 100,000 inhabitants, “in last place in the table”as the president highlighted, while at the other extreme he placed Jamaica, with 60.9.
“SPOILER ALERT: The homicide rate for 2024 is trending even further down,” the president published in a message in Spanish and English.
According to data from the National Civil Police (PNC) published, not verified, on its website on January 3, in 2023 there were registered 154 homicides, 341 less than the 495 counted in 2022.
The Police confirm that the homicide rate in 2023 per 100,000 inhabitants was 2.4 and indicates that the daily average of deaths was 0,4.
The Salvadoran authorities attribute the decrease in homicides during the Government of President Bukele to his Territorial Control Plan and the suspension of constitutional guarantees through an emergency regime, which will be in effect for two years and which has left more than 78,100 arrests.
However, the number of violent deaths in the Central American country began to decrease after 2015, the year that was ranked as the most violent in recent Salvadoran history with 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. and the fall was accentuated in 2019, when the Bukele administration began.
He exception regime, which has also increased Bukele’s popularity, was approved in the Legislative Assembly, with a large pro-government majority, after an escalation of murders in March 2022 that claimed the lives of 80 personas in three days and was attributed to the gangs.
A local investigation indicates that this increase occurred after the breaking of an alleged pact between the Government and the gangs.
Government statistics do not include deaths of alleged gang members in confrontations with police, bones and deaths of alleged criminals at the hands of citizens, cases that were included in the figures of previous Governments.