El Salvador closed out another stretch without a single homicide this month, the latest entry in a security record President Nayib Bukele has turned into a signature achievement of his presidency. But the same week those numbers circulated, a very different kind of accounting was drawing international attention: Amnesty International’s warning that the state of exception producing those numbers may itself amount to crimes against humanity.
The headline figures are, by any measure, extraordinary. El Salvador’s homicide rate has fallen from a peak of 106.3 per 100,000 people in 2015, when the country was widely described as the most violent nation on earth outside a war zone, to roughly 1.3 per 100,000 in 2025, a decline of more than 98 percent. Through mid-August of this year, the country had logged 189 days without a homicide, a pace roughly consistent with 2025’s own historic run. Defense Minister René Merino Monroy and Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro have both credited the drop to the Territorial Control Plan launched in 2019 and, especially, the state of exception declared in March 2022, which suspended constitutional protections including the right to legal counsel and protection from warrantless arrest. Officials say the emergency measures have led to more than 92,000 arrests of suspected gang members since 2022, and Villatoro has said the results position El Salvador as the safest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Amnesty International’s report, released in July, does not dispute that violence has fallen. It argues instead that the mechanism producing that decline has inflicted a different, less visible form of harm on a mass scale. The organization characterized the state of exception as a “widespread and systematic attack on the civilian population,” the legal threshold for crimes against humanity, and documented at least 470 deaths in state custody since 2022, a figure roughly in line with Human Rights Watch’s own count of 458 in its most recent annual review. According to reporting cited alongside these findings, roughly 90 percent of those who died in custody had not been convicted of any crime at the time of their death. Of the more than 92,000 people arrested, roughly 8,000 have since been released after review found no gang involvement, according to Bukele’s own public statements — an acknowledgment that a meaningful share of those swept up were, by the government’s own admission, not the intended targets.
The tension between these two accountings, one measured in homicides avoided and the other in detainees who never faced trial, is not new. InSight Crime’s Alex Papadovassilakis has questioned whether Bukele’s government overstates the significance of consecutive homicide-free days, given that the metric excludes deaths inside the prison system itself and depends on classification decisions made by the same government touting the numbers. A BBC investigation published this year into communities like La Campanera, once a Barrio 18 stronghold on the outskirts of San Salvador, found the transformation on the ground is real but comes paired with a different, quieter fear: not of gangs, but of speaking critically about the government at all. The BBC’s own framing captured the paradox directly: “the fear is different now.”
The legislative assembly, controlled by Bukele’s allies, has extended the state of exception on a rolling monthly basis since March 2022, and it remains in effect as of this August, more than four years after it was first declared as an emergency, 30-day measure. In 2025, the same assembly removed presidential term limits, clearing the legal path for Bukele, whose approval ratings remain among the highest of any head of state in the hemisphere, to seek reelection indefinitely.
For a Salvadoran readership and diaspora audience that has lived the before-and-after of this transformation directly, the tension in these dueling reports will likely feel less abstract than it does from abroad. Neighborhoods that were once no-go zones for police are now genuinely safer, and the daily texture of life in much of the country, freedom to walk streets after dark, to run a small business without paying extortion, has changed in ways residents describe as real and hard-won. Whether the sustained emergency powers producing that change amount to a justified trade-off or a human rights crisis obscured by favorable statistics is likely to remain the defining argument over Bukele’s legacy, one that neither a 189-day streak nor an Amnesty report alone will settle. What both records agree on, even as they diverge sharply on what it means, is that El Salvador four years into the state of exception is a fundamentally different country than the one Bukele inherited in 2019 — the open question is what that transformation has cost, and who has been left to bear it.
Human-Directed AI Journalism: This article was drafted with AI assistance under direct human editorial direction, fact-checked, and approved for publication by The Navarro Report