El Salvador reaches murder milestone in 2015.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
An explosion of violence, much of it involving criminal street gangs and state security forces, produced a staggering 70% leap in El Salvador's homicide numbers in 2015, a veritable annus horribilis for the impoverished and politically polarized nation whose current per capita murder rate of approximately 104 per 100,000 inhabitants is now presumed to be the world's highest.
The Policia Nacional Civil (PNC) reports that more than 6,657 people were killed last year, up from 3,912 in 2014, when tiny El Salvador had a per capita murder rate of approximately 60 per 100,000 inhabitants and was already one of planet's most dangerous places. The 2015 homicide count--the country's highest since the end of its dozen-year civil war (1980-1992)--is all the more shocking when compared to the totals in 2012 and 2013, when a controversial gang truce brought the annual murder numbers down to roughly 2,500 (NotiCen, June 27, 2013.) Though still high for a country of just 6.4 million, that figure was mercifully low in relation to the yearly death tolls before and since. Between 2009 and 2011, El Salvador averaged approximately 4,200 annual homicides. By contrast, the US state of Massachusetts, which is roughly the same size as El Salvador, both in terms of land area and population, has fewer than 140 murders per year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The administration of former President Mauricio Funes (2009-2014) helped broker the experimental tregua (truce) in early 2012 by transferring jailed gang leaders from the maximum-security Zacatecoluca prison, 60 kilometers southeast of San Salvador, to lower-security facilities (NotiCen, April 26, 2012). But it later abandoned the project in the build-up to the 2014 national elections (NotiCen, April 24, 2014). As a candidate, President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, who served under Funes as both vice president and education minister, kept his distance from the politically untenable tregua. He continued to avoid the issue even after winning and then assuming the presidency in June 2014, waiting until early last year to finally make his position clear.
"We cannot go back to trying to understand each other and negotiating with the gangs, because that is outside the law," Sanchez Ceren said during an appearance on Jan. 5, 2015. "Gang members have decided to become outlaws, so it's our duty to go after them, punish them, and let the justice system determine their [prison] sentences."
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