El Salvador's Ticking Time Bombs: The Hidden Costs of Bukele's Gang War

One murder every hour. That was the grim reality El Salvador faced in 2015 when international observers dubbed it the homicide capital of the world. That year, the nation’s murder rate stood at 103 per 100,000 people—almost twenty times higher than the American murder rate during the same period.

While El Salvador’s homicide rate would gradually reduce in the following years, dropping by half to 51 per 100,000 in 2018, the crisis remained severe, paralleling the extreme violence seen in Ecuador today amidst a declared internal armed conflict. Enter Nayib Bukele. A charismatic former marketing executive, Bukele won the 2019 Salvadoran presidential elections by portraying himself as a political outsider and promising to end two of the country’s most endemic challenges: runaway corruption and rampant gang violence.

Following his election, Bukele implemented the Territorial Control Plan, a multiphased strategy aimed at breaking the gangs by disrupting their financing, recruiting, and economic networks. This plan, coupled with a subsequent declaration of a state of emergency in 2022, saw a dramatic increase in police powers. Authorities were permitted to detain suspects without charges for up to fifteen days, leading to the flooding of gang-controlled areas with security personnel, including military officers.

While heavily contentious for associated human rights abuses, the plan has undoubtedly achieved its primary metric of success. By 2022, the number of homicides had dropped by more than 97.7 percent, and Bukele was receiving international plaudits from other nations in the region suffering their own crime waves. Yet, regional observers are starting to ring alarm bells, warning that El Salvador is sitting on multiple ticking time bombs poised to explode.

All of these looming crises are directly linked to Bukele’s historic war on gangs.

Alleged Secret Pacts and Political Financing

In early May of this year, El Faro, a digital outlet that covers Central America, published reports featuring Salvadoran gang members who alleged that Bukele’s government had made secret pacts with the criminal organizations. The leaders of one of El Salvador’s biggest gangs, the Barrio 18 Revolucionarios, painted a picture of a president who had maintained close ties with the nation’s armed groups since the earliest days of his political career. They alleged that in 2014, Bukele’s party paid them $250,000 to help get him elected mayor of the capital, a critical position that helped cement Bukele’s national profile on the way to his 2019 presidential election win.

These operatives further alleged that the pact continued once he became president, incorporating loopholes that allowed gang members to continue extorting and murdering without fear of punishment. Further investigations by the independent outlet ProPublica revealed that Washington suspected Bukele and members of his inner circle were diverting money meant for aid to the gangs. This alleged deal provided criminal groups with money and power in exchange for votes and artificially reduced homicide rates.

According to the outlet, federal agents drew up a request to review United States bank accounts held by Salvadoran political figures, including Bukele, to look for evidence of money laundering related to the suspected diversion of funds. Following the investigation, one agent noted that information obtained revealed the individuals in question were heavily engaged with MS-13 and were laundering funds from illicit businesses involving the gang. These political figures were also believed to have been funding MS-13 to support political campaigns, while MS-13 received direct political funds.

Even the Salvadoran government had found internal evidence of deals between Bukele’s administration and the gangs. Attorney General Raúl Melara discovered that in 2020, the administration held negotiations in maximum-security prisons with El Salvador’s three main gangs: the Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13), Barrio 18 Revolucionarios, and Barrio 18 Sureños. In exchange for their commitment to holding the national homicide rate at a historic low, the gangs demanded improved prison conditions and increased employment opportunities for their members outside of prison.

However, before the Attorney General could complete his investigations or make any arrests, he was ousted by the new parliament, where Bukele’s government held a supermajority. Many regional observers viewed this dismissal as a direct attempt to derail the investigation and obscure the fact that the administration had forged an alliance with the gangs.

The Inevitable Collapse of Gang Truces

The most immediate threat to El Salvador’s newfound stability is the fragile nature of the alleged truce itself. Deals between governments and gangs invariably collapse because criminal organizations consistently prioritize their own interests, which inevitably oppose state objectives. El Salvador is already intimately familiar with this cycle.

The staggering 2015 murder rate of 103 per 100,000 people occurred directly on the heels of a previous truce between the government and the gangs that lasted from 2012 to 2014. According to a police chief who spoke to the local outlet La Prensa Grafica, the gangs utilized that truce as a strategic opportunity to stockpile weapons and diversify their revenue streams, ultimately deepening their control over vulnerable communities. That historical truce served less as an opportunity for lasting peace and more as an operational pause for heavily armed criminals.

They utilized the reprieve to rest and restock before committing one of the most gruesome series of murders the country had ever seen. Bukele’s government experienced a similar violent rupture in 2022. Between the 25th and 27th of March that year, MS-13 carried out a sudden spate of killings that left 87 people dead.

A spokesperson for the group explicitly stated that the killings occurred because the government had failed to honor its clandestine promises. The gang representative claimed the government was conducting unauthorized operations and making unapproved arrests. When gang leaders were called to designated meeting places for negotiations, authorities instead detained them.

MS-13 executed the mass killings as a calculated pressure tactic to force the government into releasing those it had arrested. This incident provides a grim preview of the bloodshed the country could witness if the current arrangement fully disintegrates. However, the operational environment today differs significantly from 2014.

Back then, gang structures remained mostly intact, and lower-ranking members were not incarcerated en masse. President Bukele’s administration has taken drastic measures to avoid a repeat of past truce collapses. Following the March 2022 massacre, the administration instituted the ongoing state of emergency, which has so far led to the arrest of 89,000 people.

According to the London-based Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, this aggressive dragnet means that El Salvador now has one of the world’s highest incarceration rates. With 1,659 prisoners for every 100,000 inhabitants, the nation locks up citizens at nearly triple the rate of the United States and more than ten times the global average.

Mass Incarceration and the Radicalization Pipeline

The sheer scale of the prison population represents a critical vulnerability. While the Salvadoran government maintains that nearly every one of the 89,000 arrested individuals is a confirmed gang member, an associate, or a strong suspect, independent assessments paint a different picture. Organizations including Human Rights Watch have documented that a large number of the incarcerated were detained simply because police were under intense pressure to meet daily arrest quotas.

Officers frequently fabricated evidence to guarantee arrests and avoid severe professional retaliation. The government itself has quietly acknowledged this structural flaw, releasing over 8,000 people after holding them for months without charges, effectively admitting that innocent citizens had been swept up in the security dragnet. Law enforcement personnel have confirmed these systemic abuses.

Officers reported that patrol units were forced to detain three to four people per shift, and failure to meet these quotas resulted in denied leave and disciplinary action. Consequently, police executed illegal arrests in known gang territories simply to satisfy numerical targets. This mandate has created a volatile mixture within El Salvador’s penal system.

Alongside hardened gang members and their associates, thousands of innocent people—including more than 3,000 children—have been incarcerated to fill quotas. By forcing non-combatants into these facilities, the administration may have inadvertently handed the gangs a powerful new recruiting tool. The conditions facing those arrested on falsified charges are uniformly brutal.

Facilities suffer from severe overcrowding, with reports indicating that cells designed for ten people frequently hold twenty. Prisons lack basic ventilation and water, guards routinely utilize torture, and medical treatment is withheld until prisoners face imminent death. Under these desperate circumstances, inmates are frequently pushed directly into the hands of the gangs.

While some individuals seek gang affiliation for basic physical protection or because the state system has abandoned them, the more prevalent pattern involves aggressive, coercive recruitment. Gangs utilize extreme violence and intimidation to force new members into their ranks, threatening severe harm against anyone who attempts to resist. This phenomenon of prison-based radicalization has strong historical precedents.

During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom implemented a policy of internment, arresting hundreds of individuals based on faulty intelligence. Eleanor Leah Williams noted in the Critical Studies on Terrorism journal that internment exacerbated the conflict by fueling the Provisional Irish Republican Army with new recruits, shifting the violence from an urban-based struggle to a nationwide conflict. El Salvador faces a highly similar risk.

By placing innocent citizens in environments where joining a gang offers the only realistic hope of survival, the state may have engineered a massive pipeline that funnels fresh, radicalized recruits directly into criminal networks.

Economic Strain and the Threat of Regionalization

Beyond the threat of radicalization, the financial burden of mass incarceration poses an existential threat to the state’s security model. A nation cannot indefinitely keep more than one percent of its population in prison without suffering severe economic consequences. According to Joseph Addington, an Associate Editor at The American Conservative, the government spends more than $200 million annually to maintain its prisons, consuming over three percent of the national budget.

This represents a staggering sum for a country where, according to the World Bank, poverty levels increased from 26.8 percent in 2019 to 30.3 percent in 2023. While the United States recently provided $6 million for El Salvador to host deported migrants, that external funding is a mere fraction of the ballooning domestic security costs. As Christine Wade, an El Salvador expert at Washington College, observed, the current security policy is financially unsustainable and resembles a fragile house of cards.

To manage the legal backlog, the government passed a measure allowing authorities to detain people for up to five years without trial. Yet, this temporary legal maneuver simply delays the inevitable. At some point, individuals not convicted in upcoming mass trials will be released back into their communities.

These newly freed citizens will emerge radicalized, thoroughly integrated into criminal networks, and harboring deep grievances against the state. Furthermore, incarcerated gang members who entered prison with violent ideologies are now spending years in conditions designed to humiliate them, creating an environment that officials warn is simmering with vengeful rage. The implications of this fragile system extend far beyond El Salvador’s borders.

Evidence suggests that Bukele’s policies may be actively regionalizing the gang crisis. According to investigative reports from El Faro and InSight Crime, gang leaders have alleged that the Salvadoran government actively helped them escape the country to avoid prosecution. These high-ranking operatives are fleeing to Honduras, Mexico, and Guatemala, where they already possess established criminal networks.

Rather than dismantling these organizations, the state may have simply exported experienced gang operatives to neighboring countries that lack the infrastructure, political will, or resources to manage the influx. Other nations attempting to replicate the Bukele model face even steeper risks. In Ecuador, the government initiated a similar crackdown without the underlying secret deals or the complete suspension of constitutional norms that enabled El Salvador’s initial statistical success.

Ecuadorean gangs are substantially more sophisticated, drawing funding and advanced weaponry from Mexican cartels, Italian mafias, and Balkan crime syndicates. Consequently, Ecuador’s attempt at mimicking Bukele has resulted in a catastrophic reversal. After a brief drop in homicides, Ecuador recorded 658 murders between the 1st and 26th of January 2025—a 56 percent increase compared to the same period in 2024, equating to one murder every hour.

With deadly prison riots continuing unabated, Ecuador offers a grim glimpse of what awaits El Salvador should any of its carefully concealed time bombs finally detonate.

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