Virgos Groove Posted August 10 Posted August 10 Quote Data from the Salvadoran government indeed suggests that violence has plummeted to historic lows under Bukele. A closer look at the data and methods used by his administration, however, reveals a more complicated reality of violence, state control, and repression in the country. Quote However, they also increased the practice of burying the bodies of victims in unmarked and often mass graves—in effect, reducing the number of "public killings." According to a 2022 U.S. federal indictment, during the negotiations, "MS-13 leaders continued to authorize murders where the victims' bodies were buried or otherwise hidden." Quote In May 2021, Bukele's government formally started changing how it counted homicides. Mesa Técnica, an interagency roundtable that tabulates homicides, began excluding the discovery of clandestine or unmarked graves from its counts. In a country ravished by a 12-year civil war that ended in the 1990s, discoveries of mass graves and unidentified human remains are an all-too-common occurrence, and for as long as the government had been recording homicide data, these deaths had been included. Quote Given the significant changes to El Salvador's methodology for reporting murders and the quantitative data available, this analysis finds that under Bukele, homicides have been undercounted on average by nearly 27 percent since 2021, and by 33 percent since Bukele launched the crackdown in spring 2022. In 2023, Bukele claims to have reduced the number of homicides to 154, thus lowering the murder rate to just 2.4 homicides per 100,000 people. The data suggests that the real number of homicides in El Salvador last year was 288, and that the real murder rate was 4.5—a staggering undercount of 47 percent Foreign Policy
Space Cowboy Posted August 10 Posted August 10 I don't know how legit that source is. But Bukele always seemed shady to me.
Bosque Posted August 10 Posted August 10 So assuming the article is correct, they went from 38 murders per 100k people in 2019 to a 'real rate' of 4.5 per 100k people, which is still significantly better than the US around 6.3 per 100k people? I don't think the Salvadorans are going to be too unhappy about that
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