by R. Cort Kirkwood, The New American:
In 2015, El Salvador was the most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere. Last year, it was listed as one of the safest nations on the planet.
The reason: President Nayib Bukele cracked down on gangs and built a massive prison to house their members — forever.
But Bukele’s anti-crime campaign has done more than make El Salvador safer. He’s made the country safer than top tourist destinations in Europe, U.S. State Department travel advisories show. As Europe has spent years importing criminal and terrorist “migrants” and loosing them in the streets, El Salvador has been tossing its native-born gang members — now considered terrorists and slated for deportation under President Donald Trump’s executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act — in prison.
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BREAKING: The U.S travel advice now says El Salvador is safer than France, Sweden, UK, Italy, Germany & Spain
Europe is unrecognisable. pic.twitter.com/zZU4gEQsQk
— Inevitable West (@Inevitablewest) April 10, 2025
Violent to Peaceful, Travel Advisory Change
The story of El Salvador’s transformation might be traced to 2015.
“El Salvador ended the year with at least 6,640 murders,” Insight Crime reported, citing La Prensa Gráfica:
The grisly statistic represents close to a 70 percent increase over 2014 homicides and gives the country a homicide rate of 104.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, the report said.
El Salvador makes up 13.6 percent of Central America’s population, yet represents 35.3 percent of Central America’s homicides, the report added.
The violence came to a head over the March 25-27 weekend in 2022, when gangs murdered 87 people. Bukele declared a state of emergency and began his crackdown. Some 600 gang members were arrested. By June, the total was 43,000, Reuters reported. The same month, members of The 18th Street gang murdered three cops. Bukele vowed vengeance, which included sending prison inmates to destroy the gravestones of gang leaders. By November, the Associated Press reported, 56,000 gang members were in custody.
All those arrests ended in greatly reduced crime, with Salvadorans less worried about “human rights” than walking about safely. “Salvadorans I talked with recalled feeling ‘liberated’ by the roundups,” Atlantic writer Gisela Salim-Peyer reported. “They no longer had to show their IDs to gang members and pay fees when they went to visit relatives in another town. They discovered new freedoms — like barhopping at night in San Salvador.”
El Salvador just got the U.S. State Department’s travel gold star:
Level 1: safest it gets.
pic.twitter.com/h5wEbxnJmH
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 8, 2025
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