Q24N (EFE) The President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, affirmed this Tuesday that his country registers a rate of 1.8 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, without detailing the exact number of violent deaths so far in 2023.
“To this day, El Salvador’s annualized homicide rate is 1.8 per 100,000 inhabitants. The lowest in all of America, even below that of Canada,” Bukele posted on Twitter shortly after midnight.
Hasta este día, la tasa de homicidios anualizada de El Salvador es 1.8 por cada 100,000 habitantes.
La más baja de toda América, por debajo de la de Canadá. https://t.co/1IUDyUw83J
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) February 7, 2023
The message was accompanied by a publication by the Police stating that on Monday it closed the day with zero homicides.
According to official data, El Salvador registered 496 homicides in 2022, approximately 57% less than those recorded in 2021. However, authorities had stopped including in this count the deaths of gang members in alleged confrontations with security forces, data that previous administrations included.
In 2015, El Salvador registered the most violent year in its recent history. The number of murders began to decrease a year later, in 2016, a trend that was accentuated in the Bukele government.
El Salvador is under an emergency regime, approved at the end of March 2022 by Congress after an escalation of homicides attributed to gangs and which has left more than 62,900 detainees.
The exception regime suspends constitutional rights, such as the defense and inviolability of telecommunications, in addition to the fact that administrative detention goes from 3 days to a maximum of 15 days.
Humanitarian organizations and the Office for the Defense of Human Rights (PDDH) have collected more than 7,400 complaints, the majority due to arbitrary detentions, while, according to the PDDH, 102 deaths of detainees have been recorded.
Bukele recently inaugurated the Terrorism Containment Center, with a capacity for some 40,000 people and whose construction began in the context of an emergency regime.
The construction of the prison occurred amidst criticism from the opposition, which has pointed out a lack of transparency, mainly due to the approval in the Legislative Assembly, dominated by the ruling party, of a law that allowed bypassing the usual controls in state works.
Ealier, Bukele tweeted, in Turkish, that El Salvador will send an aid plane of more than 100 personnel to Turkey, along with search and rescue, civil protection teams, firefighters and rescue dogs.
