--- title: "Why El Salvador's Gang Crackdown Can't Be Exported" description: "In March of 2022, the government of El Salvador launched one of the most consequential gang crackdowns in modern history. Soldiers poured into the streets. Constitutional rights were suspended. Entire cities were placed under siege so security forces could conduct house-to-house searches for gang members. What followed was a transformation that, by almost any measure, looks like one of the most successful state interventions against organized crime ever attempted.\n\nThe numbers tell the story. The year before the war on gangs began, El Salvador's murder rate sat on a par with that of Guatemala, Brazil, or Haiti. Three years later, recently published data for 2024 shows a country with homicide levels lower than Canada. It is little wonder that Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele is today the most popular leader in all of Latin America.\n\nYet for all its success at home, there is something strange about the Salvadoran model. No other country has been able to replicate it. That is not for lack of trying. Nations as varied as Honduras and Ecuador have attempted to follow in Bukele's footsteps, achieving only limited gains in public safety — even as San Salvador openly boasts about the model's exportability.\n\nThat raises an obvious question: why? Why do El Salvador's spectacular results seem impossible to copy, and what does it mean for a region riddled by gang crime if its single greatest success was a one-off? The answer, it turns out, lies not in any one policy that can be packaged and shipped abroad, but in a rare combination of advantages El Salvador happened to possess at the precise moment it pulled the trigger.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- El Salvador's homicide rate fell from a staggering 105.2 per 100,000 a decade ago to an all-time low of 1.9 per 100,000 in 2024 — almost identical to Canada's 1.94 and below two EU countries, Latvia and Lithuania.\n- El Salvador's gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, were unusually weak and geographically concentrated, making them far easier to surround and dismantle than the cartel-linked groups in Ecuador or Honduras.\n- A pre-existing prison isolation regime, a relatively large police force, the element of surprise, and an earlier secret deal that yielded a database of gang members all gave San Salvador advantages its imitators lack.\n- Copycat efforts in Belize, Peru, Ecuador, and Honduras have produced mixed results at best and outright disappointment at worst, with several countries seeing murders rise rather than fall.\n- Bukele's total grip on the legislature, courts, and security services — combined with comparatively contained corruption — created conditions other nations simply cannot reproduce.\n\n## From the Ashes\n\nExactly a decade ago, El Salvador was one of the most violent countries on Earth. Plagued by gang crime, its homicide rate stood at a staggering 105.2 per 100,000. To use a technical term, such a figure is nuts. For perspective, Haiti is currently enduring a wave of violence so vast that the state has basically collapsed — yet its homicide rate is thought to be 60.2 per 100,000. That is still an insane number, but nowhere near El Salvador's in 2015.\n\nHad anyone suggested back then that, within a decade, the murder rate of this small Central American nation would match Canada's, most people would have assumed they were performing an ironic bit. Yet that is exactly what happened. In 2024, El Salvador's homicide rate hit an all-time low of 1.9 per 100,000 — almost identical to the 1.94 recorded in Canada in 2023, the most recent year for which data exists. It is lower than the rate in two EU countries, Latvia and Lithuania, and far below the United States, which stood at 5.7 in 2023.\n\nThese comparisons come with an important caveat. They are, to borrow a phrase, a little \"apples to blood-soaked oranges.\" The Salvadoran government follows different rules for measuring homicides than most nations, meaning that bodies discovered in mass graves, for instance, are not counted. As the research outlet Insight Crime puts it, the government \"does not follow the Bogotá Protocol, the standard for measuring homicides in the region, so its murder rate cannot be directly compared to other countries that do.\"\n\nEven if the official 2024 figure is an undercount, however, no serious observer disputes that the change has been remarkable. The Financial Times reports that in December, this nation of 6.3 million went 24 straight days without a single murder. Considering the crackdown began after a weekend in which gangs killed roughly ninety people, that is an extraordinary achievement.\n\nThe flipside is well known. Since March 2022, around 80,000 people have been imprisoned with little in the way of due process, and basic rights have been waived. As a share of its population, El Salvador now jails more people than any other nation on Earth. Whether the ends justify the means is a debate for Salvadorans themselves to settle. The focus here is something else entirely: the unusual features of the Salvadoran War on Gangs — the most unusual being that it actually worked.\n\n## A Revival of the Iron Fist\n\nFor all that it seems like something new, the crackdown is essentially a revival of Latin America's age-old \"mano dura\" policies. While popular, these iron-fist approaches have rarely translated into lasting gains. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador all tried versions of mano dura in the 2000s, and all, at best, saw victories that proved fleeting. Further north, Mexico's ongoing Drug War is simply mano dura by another name — and that has, if anything, made the country far more dangerous and far less stable.\n\nThe academic consensus has long been skeptical. As the Journal of Democracy has written, \"Decades of mano dura — or 'iron fist' — experiments in Latin America suggest that hard-on-crime policies are likely to fail.\" That El Salvador's version not only succeeded but did so beyond all expectations is central to the nation's popularity across the region today — or, more precisely, the popularity of President Bukele himself.\n\nAs the public face of El Salvador's transformation, Bukele has become widely admired not just in Latin America but across the western hemisphere. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently declared that \"a country that was once known for violence and for the inability to live openly and freely with one's family and enjoy life has now become one of the most secure in the hemisphere thanks to Bukele's leadership.\"\n\nRubio is not alone. Costa Rica's president and security minister have been effusive in their praise. The Center for Strategic and International Studies notes that \"political parties in Argentina, Ecuador, Honduras, Peru, and Uruguay have explicitly incorporated Bukele's name into their platforms and echoed his tough-on-crime language.\" Yet for all this evident popularity, no other country in the Americas has managed to successfully import the model.\n\n## The Export Model\n\nTo grasp why mano dura holds such appeal in Latin America, one statistic suffices. Despite being home to only eight percent of the global population, the wider Latin American and Caribbean region accounts for roughly a third of all the world's murders. In raw terms, that means a regional murder rate of 20.9 per 100,000 people, against a global average of 5.8. While other parts of the world struggle with wars, insurgencies, and terrorism, nowhere suffers under the burden of homicide worse than here. The major driver is the presence of transnational crime groups, often tied to the drug trade.\n\nWhat El Salvador's crackdown offers, then, is hope: that these cartels and armed gangs can actually be defeated. It is a perception the Salvadoran government is keen to promote. To quote CSIS again, \"Officials in Bukele's government appear to welcome the idea of exporting the model.\"\n\nSo far, most governments adopting the approach are effectively copying from afar rather than flying the Salvadorans in for consultation. Belize, for instance, introduced a state of emergency that its police commissioner, Chester Williams, said was modeled on El Salvador's methods. Chile announced the construction of a Salvadoran-style mega-prison for gang members. Elsewhere, the pressure is more indirect, rising from voters — such as the Guatemalans who marched in the streets asking Bukele to come and lead their country.\n\nThere have also been more direct attempts at importing the model. Peru's recent states of emergency and mega-prison plans came after its justice minister, Eduardo Arana, visited El Salvador. Argentina has strengthened security ties with San Salvador. Yet whether the Salvadoran approach was simply copied or pursued with consultation, the results have been the same: a mixed bag at best, and an active disappointment at worst.\n\n## When the Copies Fall Short\n\nBelize is instructive. Although the country declared a state of emergency in March 2024 to tackle gang violence, Insight Crime reports that it ended the year with a thirteen percent increase in murders. Peru, meanwhile, tried to directly import the Bukele model and, despite several states of emergency, finished 2024 with a 35.9 percent rise in homicides — albeit from a low base.\n\nThese examples are not cherry-picked. While some copycat nations did report improvements in public safety, none came remotely close to the dramatic change in El Salvador. That gap is the mystery worth solving. The clearest way to do so is to examine the two principal countries that launched mano dura crackdowns in the wake of Bukele's success — one with mixed returns, and one that appeared to fail almost completely. Those countries are Honduras and Ecuador.\n\nIt is often said that Bukele is Latin America's most popular leader. For a few months in the spring of 2024, however, he lost that crown to another young president overseeing a militarized approach to gang crime. Daniel Noboa took power in Ecuador as the once-peaceful nation was plunging into an abyss. From a country whose murder rate had sat slightly below that of the United States, Ecuador had become more violent than Haiti. Presidential candidates were being murdered, mutilated bodies were hung from bridges, and prison massacres routinely killed scores of inmates.\n\n## Ecuador's Stalled Offensive\n\nIn early January of 2024, Ecuador's gangsters escalated dramatically. In a series of coordinated attacks, they set off car bombs, tried to storm hospitals and universities, and — most memorably — took a TV crew hostage live on air. In response, Noboa declared a state of \"internal armed conflict,\" designated the gangs as terrorist organizations, and sent the military to crush them.\n\nThough Noboa claimed he had little in common with Bukele, the inspiration behind Plan Fénix is unmistakable. Soldiers stormed prisons. Curfews were imposed. Some 60,000 suspects were arrested. By the time the approach was put to a referendum that April, it commanded overwhelming support. So far, so similar to El Salvador in 2022 — a trend reflected in Ecuador's falling crime rates.\n\nBut then the trajectory diverged. The criminal groups began to fracture and reorganize, and the intervention's effectiveness started to stall. By year's end, only the slightest improvements in public safety had materialized. Homicides were down nearly 13 percent, but kidnappings had soared. As Insight Crime wrote, \"the modest drop in homicides masked what was otherwise a year of persistent violence.\"\n\nWorse was to come. January 2025 was the most violent month in Ecuadorian history. The local outlet El Universo reports that murders ran nearly 37 percent higher than during the previous January — itself a month so bloody that it had triggered the declaration of an armed conflict. That is a single month, and it is not certain the rest of 2025 will prove as deadly; Ecuador may yet finish another year with homicides below its 2023 peak. Still, the contrast is stark. Within a year of launching its own crackdown, El Salvador had seen its murder rate fall from a level on a par with Guatemala to below that of Uruguay, traditionally one of Latin America's safest nations. By any objective measure, mano dura in Ecuador has not lived up to its hopes.\n\n## Honduras: Better, But Not Enough\n\nA more mixed picture exists in Honduras, where a \"state of exception\" was declared just months after the one in neighboring El Salvador. Initially confined to two cities, it eventually expanded to cover 158 of 298 municipalities. As CSIS writes, President Xiomara Castro \"has implemented several Bukele-like measures including the suspension of civil liberties, such as freedom of movement and assembly, and the deployment of 20,000 police and military personnel.\"\n\nIn this case, the crackdown was conducted in closer coordination with the Salvadorans. Bukele even visited the country and received a rock star's welcome. The results were better than in Ecuador, but still somewhat disappointing. First, the good news: between 2022 and 2024, homicides in the cities of Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula halved. Across Honduras, the homicide rate fell from 35.8 per 100,000 to 25.3. That is a far less impressive decline than El Salvador's, but it still equates to hundreds of people being alive who might otherwise be dead, and it moved Honduras from being unusually violent even by Latin American standards to being on a par with Colombia or Brazil.\n\nNow the less encouraging news. While murders fell, other crimes in Honduras remained stubbornly high. The worst is probably extortion, which the United States Institute of Peace claims is still as bad as it was when Castro launched her crackdown. And despite killing fewer people, the nation's gangs still control whole neighborhoods in deprived urban areas. As one interviewee told the non-profit, \"the state of exception has had no major impact in these communities. There's no difference in terms of safety or gang control.\"\n\nFor die-hard Bukele fans, the explanation for why both Honduras and Ecuador struggled might seem obvious: the absence of the Salvadoran president himself. But it is unlikely that one man's charisma alone could account for a crackdown's success. What is truly revealing about these two cases is how they expose the structural factors behind El Salvador's victory — and why those factors are so difficult to reproduce.\n\n## Boots on the Ground and Weak Gangs\n\nIt may sound obvious, but it is fundamental: to run a tough-on-crime crackdown, you need the police officers and soldiers to enforce it. Remarkably, that was not the case in Honduras. When Castro launched her war on gangs in late 2022, the country had a mere 184 officers per 100,000 people. For context, even the safest European nations — those with negligible murder rates — typically field more police per capita. The Czech Republic has close to 400. Austria has well over 300. Even tiny, crime-free Iceland has more cops per capita than Honduras.\n\nEl Salvador stood in sharp contrast. As 2023 got underway, Bukele's government commanded 418 police officers per 100,000 residents, and it had also invested heavily in the military, at least by Central American standards. Even that might not have been enough had San Salvador faced sophisticated armed groups like those in Ecuador, where local gangs have received money and firepower from Mexico's Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.\n\nBut Bukele's government enjoyed a crucial advantage: El Salvador's gangs were relatively weak. CSIS crunched the numbers on the two main groups, MS-13 and Barrio 18, and concluded that they were both \"highly localized and lack significant transnational economic strength.\" MS-13, for example, was estimated to make just $31 million a year, compared with up to $29 billion for a powerful Mexican cartel. The same report found the average MS-13 member probably earned as little as $65 a month.\n\nThe gangs' economic activities — mostly shakedowns and extortion — also kept them concentrated in a small number of dense urban areas. As Italy's Istituto Affari Internazionali has noted, this is extremely unusual for Latin American crime gangs, which tend to be more spread out. Thanks to this quirk, El Salvador's security forces could entirely surround cities like Soyapango, block anyone from leaving, and conduct house-to-house searches for gang members. Within larger cities, specific blocks could be given the same treatment.\n\n## The Element of Surprise and the Prison Factor\n\nNone of this would have mattered had the gangs known what was coming. Here we reach another factor in El Salvador's success: surprise. When the crackdown launched in the spring of 2022, it was not a slow process. Following one extremely murderous weekend, the government declared a state of emergency and went in hard. The outlet Global Americans has written that the gangs were \"eminently unprepared to confront the full force of the Salvadoran security apparatus.\"\n\nEcuador was the mirror image. There, the gangs struck first — coordinating jail breaks, massacres, and hostage takings in a deliberate show of strength. They may not have anticipated quite how hard the state would punch back, but there is no doubt they were ready for a serious fight. As the same outlet writes, \"in Ecuador, gangs were ready and willing to fight in the face of a government offensive.\"\n\nThen there is the issue of prisons. In most of Latin America — from Brazil to Ecuador — gangs and cartels use prisons as bases to recruit new members and direct street operations. Not so in El Salvador. As the IAI writes, Salvadoran prisons have been under \"extraordinary measures\" since 2016, long predating the Bukele government. These measures isolated inmates, reduced their chances to talk or make contact, and even barred prisoners from receiving outside visitors. As a result, being thrown into the Salvadoran penitentiary system already meant being cut off from gang life. When Bukele built his mega-jail, the rupture became more total still. Today, guards are reported to teargas entire cells packed with people, simply to stop a handful of inmates from talking.\n\nSan Salvador is not alone in recognizing prisons as a problem. One of the first acts of the Ecuadorian crackdown was to send the military into the penitentiary system to restore order. Yet a recent Insight Crime report revealed that gangs there appear to have once again seized key rackets, such as food distribution — and this with the military still nominally in charge. That difference points to a deeper one between El Salvador on the one hand, and Honduras and Ecuador on the other: the presence of high-level corruption.\n\n## Behind the Scenes: Corruption and Control\n\nIt will surprise no one that Latin America is a fairly corrupt place. With the exceptions of Uruguay and Chile, almost all countries in the region rate below the global average in Transparency International's annual Corruption Perceptions Index. But there is standard Latin American corruption, and then there is the utter mess drowning Honduras's institutions. There, cartels have infiltrated every level of society — to the point that former President Juan Orlando Hernandez and his chief of police, Juan Carlos Bonilla, were both convicted in the US for plotting to smuggle cocaine. As CSIS writes, \"the Honduran government is plagued by corruption within its law enforcement, judiciary, and political institutions.\"\n\nEl Salvador is no corruption-free paradise; Transparency International ranks it as more corrupt than Ecuador and not far ahead of Honduras. The difference lies in how far that corruption has gone in bending politicians to serve cartels rather than the public. In Honduras, USIP writes that drug-traffickers have \"penetrated and corrupted government at the national and local levels.\" Under Hernandez, who only stepped down in 2022, that meant turning the country into a \"safe haven\" for cartels — even assigning the security services to protect cocaine smugglers who paid the president bribes.\n\nA similar story holds in Ecuador, where gangs funnel money to politicians and judges willing to take a bribe, and kill those who refuse. As the Economist has written, \"corruption is rife. In 2023 police began investigating several government officials for links with the Albanian mafia. Months later, the main suspect was found dead. In 2022, 25 air-force officials were punished for sabotaging radar equipment that was monitoring the activity of drug gangs in Ecuadorean airspace.\" This is only the tip of the iceberg. The ongoing Caso Metastasis investigation has implicated everyone from lead prosecutors to members of the national assembly, so corrosive to Ecuadorian society that Insight Crime described corruption there as a national \"cancer.\" By contrast, Transparency International links El Salvador's corruption to matters like dodgy procurement contracts and a lack of government accountability — far from ideal, but not in the same league as gangs infiltrating the judiciary.\n\n## The Secret Deal That Mapped the Gangs\n\nThere is one more piece to El Salvador's advantage, and it cuts against the official narrative. Despite the government's later posture, there had in fact been high-level contacts between the state and the gangs. Shortly after taking office in February 2019, Bukele struck a backroom deal with gang leaders to keep violence down. For a while, it worked. El Salvador's murder rate in 2018 had still been stratospherically high, at 51 per 100,000; after three years of Bukele, it was down to 17.6 — an impressive drop.\n\nToday the Salvadoran government likes to pretend the secret deal never happened. But it is well attested — the United States sanctioned government officials in 2021 for precisely this reason — and, crucially, it delivered concrete benefits. As USIP has noted, \"Salvadoran authorities benefited moreover from their secret negotiations with imprisoned gang leaders. This provided them with valuable intelligence, including a database of gang members and collaborators.\"\n\nBy the time the 2022 crackdown arrived, then, the government knew not only where the gangs were based but who many of their members actually were. Combine that intelligence with a substantial police force and the element of surprise, and it is little wonder that MS-13 and Barrio 18 were left reeling. These kinds of backroom deals and intelligence-gathering simply were not possible in Honduras or Ecuador. In Honduras, the president until literal months before the crackdown had himself overseen cocaine smuggling operations. In Ecuador, the political churn that saw presidents resign early and candidates get assassinated left no stable counterpart before Noboa came to power.\n\n## Total Control and the Limits of Imitation\n\nSpeaking of churn, there is a final dimension where Ecuador cannot emulate Bukele: control of the government itself. By the time Bukele launched his war on gangs, his party held the entire apparatus of state in a vise-like grip. To quote Global Americans, \"Bukele's party held a supermajority in the legislature, the supreme court had been packed with loyalists a year earlier, and Bukele himself was already a wildly popular executive who could also count on the loyalty of the security services.\"\n\nCompare that with Ecuador, where Noboa has had to contend with a fractious National Assembly and an extremely short presidential term — a byproduct of the impeachment of his predecessor. His popularity has dropped since the halcyon days of early 2024. A first-round presidential election this February saw Noboa edge out his leftwing challenger by a mere two-tenths of a percentage point. The contrast in political latitude could hardly be sharper.\n\nIn short, El Salvador enjoyed specific advantages at the moment it launched its war on gangs — advantages that paved the way for success and that other comparable nations simply do not possess. While the cases of Ecuador and Honduras are the clearest illustrations, the same logic applies to almost any country that has tried to copy the Bukele model. The potent mix of a strong state and powerful security forces, weak and geographically limited gangs, and control over prisons is not found across much of Latin America.\n\nAnd that is before considering the Salvadoran government's handling of the economy. Maintaining a military deployment is expensive, as is building and staffing a mega-prison. To pay for it, the government leaned on high-interest loans that, as the Economist writes, could have pushed the nation into default. That it stayed solvent until an IMF loan was finally agreed this year owed as much to sheer luck as to skill.\n\nThis does not mean Latin American nations facing horrendous levels of cartel violence should give up. Nor does it mean the only alternative is to abandon enforcement entirely. What it does suggest is that there is no easy, one-size-fits-all answer to controlling this surge of transnational drug violence. Each affected nation will likely need to find the method best suited to its own particular advantages — however difficult that proves to be.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### How dramatic was El Salvador's drop in homicides?\n\nA decade ago, El Salvador's homicide rate stood at a staggering 105.2 per 100,000, making it one of the most violent countries on Earth. In 2024, it hit an all-time low of 1.9 per 100,000 — almost identical to Canada's 1.94 in 2023, lower than two EU countries, and far below the United States' 5.7. In December, the country went 24 straight days without a single murder.\n\n### Why did the crackdown work in El Salvador but not in Ecuador?\n\nEl Salvador faced relatively weak, geographically concentrated gangs that lacked transnational economic strength, while Ecuador's gangs received money and firepower from Mexican cartels and struck first in a show of force. El Salvador also benefited from a large police force, the element of surprise, an isolating prison regime, and intelligence from an earlier secret deal — advantages Ecuador lacked.\n\n### How did corruption affect the different outcomes?\n\nIn Honduras and Ecuador, cartels and gangs penetrated government deeply — bribing officials, killing those who refused, and even shaping security policy. Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez was convicted in the US for cocaine smuggling. El Salvador's corruption, while real, was tied more to procurement contracts and weak accountability than to gangs controlling the judiciary.\n\n### Did Bukele ever negotiate with the gangs?\n\nYes. Shortly after taking office in February 2019, Bukele struck a backroom deal with gang leaders to keep violence down. The United States sanctioned Salvadoran officials in 2021 over it. The negotiations also handed the government valuable intelligence, including a database of gang members and collaborators that proved decisive when the 2022 crackdown began.\n\n### Can other countries replicate the Bukele model?\n\nThe evidence suggests it is extremely difficult. The combination of a strong state, powerful security forces, weak and concentrated gangs, control over prisons, contained corruption, and total command of government is not found across much of Latin America. Each affected nation will likely need to craft an approach suited to its own circumstances rather than simply copying El Salvador.\n\n## Sources\n\n1. https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/20/will-the-iron-fist-model-spread-in-latin-america\n2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/07/nayib-bukele-crime-far-right\n3. https://www.csis.org/analysis/burgeoning-regional-appeal-mano-dura-crime-fighting-strategies\n4. https://insightcrime.org/news/jailhouse-massacre-ecuador-illustrates-rapid-criminal-evolution/\n5. https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/12/honduras-and-el-salvador-two-crackdowns-crime-different-outcomes\n6. https://www.ft.com/content/99f09fcb-c13e-48dd-9658-18142f521d4f\n7. https://globalamericans.org/why-plan-bukele-does-and-doesnt-work/\n8. https://insightcrime.org/news/insight-crime-2024-homicide-round-up/#h-el-salvador-20-8\n9. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/lessons-from-el-salvador-bukeles-peace-model/\n10. https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/c05/why-el-salvadors-anti-crime-measures-cannot-and-should-not-be-exported\n11. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-bukele-model-will-it-spread/\n12. https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/crime/25.04.2024-latvian-homicide-rate-down-but-still-highest-in-eu.a551770/\n13. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Police_officers_per_100_000_inhabitants,_average_2020-2022.png\n14. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0519\n15. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/03/02/el-salvadors-wild-crypto-experiment-ends-in-failure\n\n" url: https://warfronts.pub/article/why-bukele-model-cannot-be-exported.md canonical: https://warfronts.pub/article/why-bukele-model-cannot-be-exported datePublished: 2026-06-02 dateModified: 2026-06-02 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://warfronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Warfronts image: "https://media.warfronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/Dy0KNMcAAGk/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: d7cbf5c9d6cec01a9060f45a367bf0dd8a7f4d485201aeecd48b0e82d525a410 tokens: 7187 summaryUrl: https://warfronts.pub/article/why-bukele-model-cannot-be-exported.md.summary.md --- In March of 2022, the government of El Salvador launched one of the most consequential gang crackdowns in modern history. Soldiers poured into the streets. Constitutional rights were suspended. Entire cities were placed under siege so security forces could conduct house-to-house searches for gang members. What followed was a transformation that, by almost any measure, looks like one of the most successful state interventions against organized crime ever attempted. The numbers tell the story. The year before the war on gangs began, El Salvador's murder rate sat on a par with that of Guatemala, Brazil, or Haiti. Three years later, recently published data for 2024 shows a country with homicide levels lower than Canada. It is little wonder that Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele is today the most popular leader in all of Latin America. Yet for all its success at home, there is something strange about the Salvadoran model. No other country has been able to replicate it. That is not for lack of trying. Nations as varied as Honduras and Ecuador have attempted to follow in Bukele's footsteps, achieving only limited gains in public safety — even as San Salvador openly boasts about the model's exportability. That raises an obvious question: why? Why do El Salvador's spectacular results seem impossible to copy, and what does it mean for a region riddled by gang crime if its single greatest success was a one-off? The answer, it turns out, lies not in any one policy that can be packaged and shipped abroad, but in a rare combination of advantages El Salvador happened to possess at the precise moment it pulled the trigger. ## Key Takeaways - El Salvador's homicide rate fell from a staggering 105.2 per 100,000 a decade ago to an all-time low of 1.9 per 100,000 in 2024 — almost identical to Canada's 1.94 and below two EU countries, Latvia and Lithuania. - El Salvador's gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, were unusually weak and geographically concentrated, making them far easier to surround and dismantle than the cartel-linked groups in Ecuador or Honduras. - A pre-existing prison isolation regime, a relatively large police force, the element of surprise, and an earlier secret deal that yielded a database of gang members all gave San Salvador advantages its imitators lack. - Copycat efforts in Belize, Peru, Ecuador, and Honduras have produced mixed results at best and outright disappointment at worst, with several countries seeing murders rise rather than fall. - Bukele's total grip on the legislature, courts, and security services — combined with comparatively contained corruption — created conditions other nations simply cannot reproduce. ## From the Ashes Exactly a decade ago, El Salvador was one of the most violent countries on Earth. Plagued by gang crime, its homicide rate stood at a staggering 105.2 per 100,000. To use a technical term, such a figure is nuts. For perspective, Haiti is currently enduring a wave of violence so vast that the state has basically collapsed — yet its homicide rate is thought to be 60.2 per 100,000. That is still an insane number, but nowhere near El Salvador's in 2015. Had anyone suggested back then that, within a decade, the murder rate of this small Central American nation would match Canada's, most people would have assumed they were performing an ironic bit. Yet that is exactly what happened. In 2024, El Salvador's homicide rate hit an all-time low of 1.9 per 100,000 — almost identical to the 1.94 recorded in Canada in 2023, the most recent year for which data exists. It is lower than the rate in two EU countries, Latvia and Lithuania, and far below the United States, which stood at 5.7 in 2023. These comparisons come with an important caveat. They are, to borrow a phrase, a little "apples to blood-soaked oranges." The Salvadoran government follows different rules for measuring homicides than most nations, meaning that bodies discovered in mass graves, for instance, are not counted. As the research outlet Insight Crime puts it, the government "does not follow the Bogotá Protocol, the standard for measuring homicides in the region, so its murder rate cannot be directly compared to other countries that do." Even if the official 2024 figure is an undercount, however, no serious observer disputes that the change has been remarkable. The Financial Times reports that in December, this nation of 6.3 million went 24 straight days without a single murder. Considering the crackdown began after a weekend in which gangs killed roughly ninety people, that is an extraordinary achievement. The flipside is well known. Since March 2022, around 80,000 people have been imprisoned with little in the way of due process, and basic rights have been waived. As a share of its population, El Salvador now jails more people than any other nation on Earth. Whether the ends justify the means is a debate for Salvadorans themselves to settle. The focus here is something else entirely: the unusual features of the Salvadoran War on Gangs — the most unusual being that it actually worked. ## A Revival of the Iron Fist For all that it seems like something new, the crackdown is essentially a revival of Latin America's age-old "mano dura" policies. While popular, these iron-fist approaches have rarely translated into lasting gains. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador all tried versions of mano dura in the 2000s, and all, at best, saw victories that proved fleeting. Further north, Mexico's ongoing Drug War is simply mano dura by another name — and that has, if anything, made the country far more dangerous and far less stable. The academic consensus has long been skeptical. As the Journal of Democracy has written, "Decades of mano dura — or 'iron fist' — experiments in Latin America suggest that hard-on-crime policies are likely to fail." That El Salvador's version not only succeeded but did so beyond all expectations is central to the nation's popularity across the region today — or, more precisely, the popularity of President Bukele himself. As the public face of El Salvador's transformation, Bukele has become widely admired not just in Latin America but across the western hemisphere. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently declared that "a country that was once known for violence and for the inability to live openly and freely with one's family and enjoy life has now become one of the most secure in the hemisphere thanks to Bukele's leadership." Rubio is not alone. Costa Rica's president and security minister have been effusive in their praise. The Center for Strategic and International Studies notes that "political parties in Argentina, Ecuador, Honduras, Peru, and Uruguay have explicitly incorporated Bukele's name into their platforms and echoed his tough-on-crime language." Yet for all this evident popularity, no other country in the Americas has managed to successfully import the model. ## The Export Model To grasp why mano dura holds such appeal in Latin America, one statistic suffices. Despite being home to only eight percent of the global population, the wider Latin American and Caribbean region accounts for roughly a third of all the world's murders. In raw terms, that means a regional murder rate of 20.9 per 100,000 people, against a global average of 5.8. While other parts of the world struggle with wars, insurgencies, and terrorism, nowhere suffers under the burden of homicide worse than here. The major driver is the presence of transnational crime groups, often tied to the drug trade. What El Salvador's crackdown offers, then, is hope: that these cartels and armed gangs can actually be defeated. It is a perception the Salvadoran government is keen to promote. To quote CSIS again, "Officials in Bukele's government appear to welcome the idea of exporting the model." So far, most governments adopting the approach are effectively copying from afar rather than flying the Salvadorans in for consultation. Belize, for instance, introduced a state of emergency that its police commissioner, Chester Williams, said was modeled on El Salvador's methods. Chile announced the construction of a Salvadoran-style mega-prison for gang members. Elsewhere, the pressure is more indirect, rising from voters — such as the Guatemalans who marched in the streets asking Bukele to come and lead their country. There have also been more direct attempts at importing the model. Peru's recent states of emergency and mega-prison plans came after its justice minister, Eduardo Arana, visited El Salvador. Argentina has strengthened security ties with San Salvador. Yet whether the Salvadoran approach was simply copied or pursued with consultation, the results have been the same: a mixed bag at best, and an active disappointment at worst. ## When the Copies Fall Short Belize is instructive. Although the country declared a state of emergency in March 2024 to tackle gang violence, Insight Crime reports that it ended the year with a thirteen percent increase in murders. Peru, meanwhile, tried to directly import the Bukele model and, despite several states of emergency, finished 2024 with a 35.9 percent rise in homicides — albeit from a low base. These examples are not cherry-picked. While some copycat nations did report improvements in public safety, none came remotely close to the dramatic change in El Salvador. That gap is the mystery worth solving. The clearest way to do so is to examine the two principal countries that launched mano dura crackdowns in the wake of Bukele's success — one with mixed returns, and one that appeared to fail almost completely. Those countries are Honduras and Ecuador. It is often said that Bukele is Latin America's most popular leader. For a few months in the spring of 2024, however, he lost that crown to another young president overseeing a militarized approach to gang crime. Daniel Noboa took power in Ecuador as the once-peaceful nation was plunging into an abyss. From a country whose murder rate had sat slightly below that of the United States, Ecuador had become more violent than Haiti. Presidential candidates were being murdered, mutilated bodies were hung from bridges, and prison massacres routinely killed scores of inmates. ## Ecuador's Stalled Offensive In early January of 2024, Ecuador's gangsters escalated dramatically. In a series of coordinated attacks, they set off car bombs, tried to storm hospitals and universities, and — most memorably — took a TV crew hostage live on air. In response, Noboa declared a state of "internal armed conflict," designated the gangs as terrorist organizations, and sent the military to crush them. Though Noboa claimed he had little in common with Bukele, the inspiration behind Plan Fénix is unmistakable. Soldiers stormed prisons. Curfews were imposed. Some 60,000 suspects were arrested. By the time the approach was put to a referendum that April, it commanded overwhelming support. So far, so similar to El Salvador in 2022 — a trend reflected in Ecuador's falling crime rates. But then the trajectory diverged. The criminal groups began to fracture and reorganize, and the intervention's effectiveness started to stall. By year's end, only the slightest improvements in public safety had materialized. Homicides were down nearly 13 percent, but kidnappings had soared. As Insight Crime wrote, "the modest drop in homicides masked what was otherwise a year of persistent violence." Worse was to come. January 2025 was the most violent month in Ecuadorian history. The local outlet El Universo reports that murders ran nearly 37 percent higher than during the previous January — itself a month so bloody that it had triggered the declaration of an armed conflict. That is a single month, and it is not certain the rest of 2025 will prove as deadly; Ecuador may yet finish another year with homicides below its 2023 peak. Still, the contrast is stark. Within a year of launching its own crackdown, El Salvador had seen its murder rate fall from a level on a par with Guatemala to below that of Uruguay, traditionally one of Latin America's safest nations. By any objective measure, mano dura in Ecuador has not lived up to its hopes. ## Honduras: Better, But Not Enough A more mixed picture exists in Honduras, where a "state of exception" was declared just months after the one in neighboring El Salvador. Initially confined to two cities, it eventually expanded to cover 158 of 298 municipalities. As CSIS writes, President Xiomara Castro "has implemented several Bukele-like measures including the suspension of civil liberties, such as freedom of movement and assembly, and the deployment of 20,000 police and military personnel." In this case, the crackdown was conducted in closer coordination with the Salvadorans. Bukele even visited the country and received a rock star's welcome. The results were better than in Ecuador, but still somewhat disappointing. First, the good news: between 2022 and 2024, homicides in the cities of Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula halved. Across Honduras, the homicide rate fell from 35.8 per 100,000 to 25.3. That is a far less impressive decline than El Salvador's, but it still equates to hundreds of people being alive who might otherwise be dead, and it moved Honduras from being unusually violent even by Latin American standards to being on a par with Colombia or Brazil. Now the less encouraging news. While murders fell, other crimes in Honduras remained stubbornly high. The worst is probably extortion, which the United States Institute of Peace claims is still as bad as it was when Castro launched her crackdown. And despite killing fewer people, the nation's gangs still control whole neighborhoods in deprived urban areas. As one interviewee told the non-profit, "the state of exception has had no major impact in these communities. There's no difference in terms of safety or gang control." For die-hard Bukele fans, the explanation for why both Honduras and Ecuador struggled might seem obvious: the absence of the Salvadoran president himself. But it is unlikely that one man's charisma alone could account for a crackdown's success. What is truly revealing about these two cases is how they expose the structural factors behind El Salvador's victory — and why those factors are so difficult to reproduce. ## Boots on the Ground and Weak Gangs It may sound obvious, but it is fundamental: to run a tough-on-crime crackdown, you need the police officers and soldiers to enforce it. Remarkably, that was not the case in Honduras. When Castro launched her war on gangs in late 2022, the country had a mere 184 officers per 100,000 people. For context, even the safest European nations — those with negligible murder rates — typically field more police per capita. The Czech Republic has close to 400. Austria has well over 300. Even tiny, crime-free Iceland has more cops per capita than Honduras. El Salvador stood in sharp contrast. As 2023 got underway, Bukele's government commanded 418 police officers per 100,000 residents, and it had also invested heavily in the military, at least by Central American standards. Even that might not have been enough had San Salvador faced sophisticated armed groups like those in Ecuador, where local gangs have received money and firepower from Mexico's Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels. But Bukele's government enjoyed a crucial advantage: El Salvador's gangs were relatively weak. CSIS crunched the numbers on the two main groups, MS-13 and Barrio 18, and concluded that they were both "highly localized and lack significant transnational economic strength." MS-13, for example, was estimated to make just $31 million a year, compared with up to $29 billion for a powerful Mexican cartel. The same report found the average MS-13 member probably earned as little as $65 a month. The gangs' economic activities — mostly shakedowns and extortion — also kept them concentrated in a small number of dense urban areas. As Italy's Istituto Affari Internazionali has noted, this is extremely unusual for Latin American crime gangs, which tend to be more spread out. Thanks to this quirk, El Salvador's security forces could entirely surround cities like Soyapango, block anyone from leaving, and conduct house-to-house searches for gang members. Within larger cities, specific blocks could be given the same treatment. ## The Element of Surprise and the Prison Factor None of this would have mattered had the gangs known what was coming. Here we reach another factor in El Salvador's success: surprise. When the crackdown launched in the spring of 2022, it was not a slow process. Following one extremely murderous weekend, the government declared a state of emergency and went in hard. The outlet Global Americans has written that the gangs were "eminently unprepared to confront the full force of the Salvadoran security apparatus." Ecuador was the mirror image. There, the gangs struck first — coordinating jail breaks, massacres, and hostage takings in a deliberate show of strength. They may not have anticipated quite how hard the state would punch back, but there is no doubt they were ready for a serious fight. As the same outlet writes, "in Ecuador, gangs were ready and willing to fight in the face of a government offensive." Then there is the issue of prisons. In most of Latin America — from Brazil to Ecuador — gangs and cartels use prisons as bases to recruit new members and direct street operations. Not so in El Salvador. As the IAI writes, Salvadoran prisons have been under "extraordinary measures" since 2016, long predating the Bukele government. These measures isolated inmates, reduced their chances to talk or make contact, and even barred prisoners from receiving outside visitors. As a result, being thrown into the Salvadoran penitentiary system already meant being cut off from gang life. When Bukele built his mega-jail, the rupture became more total still. Today, guards are reported to teargas entire cells packed with people, simply to stop a handful of inmates from talking. San Salvador is not alone in recognizing prisons as a problem. One of the first acts of the Ecuadorian crackdown was to send the military into the penitentiary system to restore order. Yet a recent Insight Crime report revealed that gangs there appear to have once again seized key rackets, such as food distribution — and this with the military still nominally in charge. That difference points to a deeper one between El Salvador on the one hand, and Honduras and Ecuador on the other: the presence of high-level corruption. ## Behind the Scenes: Corruption and Control It will surprise no one that Latin America is a fairly corrupt place. With the exceptions of Uruguay and Chile, almost all countries in the region rate below the global average in Transparency International's annual Corruption Perceptions Index. But there is standard Latin American corruption, and then there is the utter mess drowning Honduras's institutions. There, cartels have infiltrated every level of society — to the point that former President Juan Orlando Hernandez and his chief of police, Juan Carlos Bonilla, were both convicted in the US for plotting to smuggle cocaine. As CSIS writes, "the Honduran government is plagued by corruption within its law enforcement, judiciary, and political institutions." El Salvador is no corruption-free paradise; Transparency International ranks it as more corrupt than Ecuador and not far ahead of Honduras. The difference lies in how far that corruption has gone in bending politicians to serve cartels rather than the public. In Honduras, USIP writes that drug-traffickers have "penetrated and corrupted government at the national and local levels." Under Hernandez, who only stepped down in 2022, that meant turning the country into a "safe haven" for cartels — even assigning the security services to protect cocaine smugglers who paid the president bribes. A similar story holds in Ecuador, where gangs funnel money to politicians and judges willing to take a bribe, and kill those who refuse. As the Economist has written, "corruption is rife. In 2023 police began investigating several government officials for links with the Albanian mafia. Months later, the main suspect was found dead. In 2022, 25 air-force officials were punished for sabotaging radar equipment that was monitoring the activity of drug gangs in Ecuadorean airspace." This is only the tip of the iceberg. The ongoing Caso Metastasis investigation has implicated everyone from lead prosecutors to members of the national assembly, so corrosive to Ecuadorian society that Insight Crime described corruption there as a national "cancer." By contrast, Transparency International links El Salvador's corruption to matters like dodgy procurement contracts and a lack of government accountability — far from ideal, but not in the same league as gangs infiltrating the judiciary. ## The Secret Deal That Mapped the Gangs There is one more piece to El Salvador's advantage, and it cuts against the official narrative. Despite the government's later posture, there had in fact been high-level contacts between the state and the gangs. Shortly after taking office in February 2019, Bukele struck a backroom deal with gang leaders to keep violence down. For a while, it worked. El Salvador's murder rate in 2018 had still been stratospherically high, at 51 per 100,000; after three years of Bukele, it was down to 17.6 — an impressive drop. Today the Salvadoran government likes to pretend the secret deal never happened. But it is well attested — the United States sanctioned government officials in 2021 for precisely this reason — and, crucially, it delivered concrete benefits. As USIP has noted, "Salvadoran authorities benefited moreover from their secret negotiations with imprisoned gang leaders. This provided them with valuable intelligence, including a database of gang members and collaborators." By the time the 2022 crackdown arrived, then, the government knew not only where the gangs were based but who many of their members actually were. Combine that intelligence with a substantial police force and the element of surprise, and it is little wonder that MS-13 and Barrio 18 were left reeling. These kinds of backroom deals and intelligence-gathering simply were not possible in Honduras or Ecuador. In Honduras, the president until literal months before the crackdown had himself overseen cocaine smuggling operations. In Ecuador, the political churn that saw presidents resign early and candidates get assassinated left no stable counterpart before Noboa came to power. ## Total Control and the Limits of Imitation Speaking of churn, there is a final dimension where Ecuador cannot emulate Bukele: control of the government itself. By the time Bukele launched his war on gangs, his party held the entire apparatus of state in a vise-like grip. To quote Global Americans, "Bukele's party held a supermajority in the legislature, the supreme court had been packed with loyalists a year earlier, and Bukele himself was already a wildly popular executive who could also count on the loyalty of the security services." Compare that with Ecuador, where Noboa has had to contend with a fractious National Assembly and an extremely short presidential term — a byproduct of the impeachment of his predecessor. His popularity has dropped since the halcyon days of early 2024. A first-round presidential election this February saw Noboa edge out his leftwing challenger by a mere two-tenths of a percentage point. The contrast in political latitude could hardly be sharper. In short, El Salvador enjoyed specific advantages at the moment it launched its war on gangs — advantages that paved the way for success and that other comparable nations simply do not possess. While the cases of Ecuador and Honduras are the clearest illustrations, the same logic applies to almost any country that has tried to copy the Bukele model. The potent mix of a strong state and powerful security forces, weak and geographically limited gangs, and control over prisons is not found across much of Latin America. And that is before considering the Salvadoran government's handling of the economy. Maintaining a military deployment is expensive, as is building and staffing a mega-prison. To pay for it, the government leaned on high-interest loans that, as the Economist writes, could have pushed the nation into default. That it stayed solvent until an IMF loan was finally agreed this year owed as much to sheer luck as to skill. This does not mean Latin American nations facing horrendous levels of cartel violence should give up. Nor does it mean the only alternative is to abandon enforcement entirely. What it does suggest is that there is no easy, one-size-fits-all answer to controlling this surge of transnational drug violence. Each affected nation will likely need to find the method best suited to its own particular advantages — however difficult that proves to be. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How dramatic was El Salvador's drop in homicides? A decade ago, El Salvador's homicide rate stood at a staggering 105.2 per 100,000, making it one of the most violent countries on Earth. In 2024, it hit an all-time low of 1.9 per 100,000 — almost identical to Canada's 1.94 in 2023, lower than two EU countries, and far below the United States' 5.7. In December, the country went 24 straight days without a single murder. ### Why did the crackdown work in El Salvador but not in Ecuador? El Salvador faced relatively weak, geographically concentrated gangs that lacked transnational economic strength, while Ecuador's gangs received money and firepower from Mexican cartels and struck first in a show of force. El Salvador also benefited from a large police force, the element of surprise, an isolating prison regime, and intelligence from an earlier secret deal — advantages Ecuador lacked. ### How did corruption affect the different outcomes? In Honduras and Ecuador, cartels and gangs penetrated government deeply — bribing officials, killing those who refused, and even shaping security policy. Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez was convicted in the US for cocaine smuggling. El Salvador's corruption, while real, was tied more to procurement contracts and weak accountability than to gangs controlling the judiciary. ### Did Bukele ever negotiate with the gangs? Yes. Shortly after taking office in February 2019, Bukele struck a backroom deal with gang leaders to keep violence down. The United States sanctioned Salvadoran officials in 2021 over it. The negotiations also handed the government valuable intelligence, including a database of gang members and collaborators that proved decisive when the 2022 crackdown began. ### Can other countries replicate the Bukele model? The evidence suggests it is extremely difficult. The combination of a strong state, powerful security forces, weak and concentrated gangs, control over prisons, contained corruption, and total command of government is not found across much of Latin America. Each affected nation will likely need to craft an approach suited to its own circumstances rather than simply copying El Salvador. ## Sources 1. https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/20/will-the-iron-fist-model-spread-in-latin-america 2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/07/nayib-bukele-crime-far-right 3. https://www.csis.org/analysis/burgeoning-regional-appeal-mano-dura-crime-fighting-strategies 4. https://insightcrime.org/news/jailhouse-massacre-ecuador-illustrates-rapid-criminal-evolution/ 5. https://www.usip.org/publications/2024/12/honduras-and-el-salvador-two-crackdowns-crime-different-outcomes 6. https://www.ft.com/content/99f09fcb-c13e-48dd-9658-18142f521d4f 7. https://globalamericans.org/why-plan-bukele-does-and-doesnt-work/ 8. https://insightcrime.org/news/insight-crime-2024-homicide-round-up/#h-el-salvador-20-8 9. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/lessons-from-el-salvador-bukeles-peace-model/ 10. https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/c05/why-el-salvadors-anti-crime-measures-cannot-and-should-not-be-exported 11. https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-bukele-model-will-it-spread/ 12. https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/crime/25.04.2024-latvian-homicide-rate-down-but-still-highest-in-eu.a551770/ 13. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Police_officers_per_100_000_inhabitants,_average_2020-2022.png 14. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy0519 15. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/03/02/el-salvadors-wild-crypto-experiment-ends-in-failure <!-- youtube:Dy0KNMcAAGk -->