El Salvador closes 2024 with a record low number of homicides El Salvador closed 2024 with a record low 114 homicides, continuing notable security gains under a second full year of a state of emergency that has given the government extraordinary powers and curtailed some fundamental rights.
President Nayib Bukele said via the social platform X that the number announced Wednesday by the small Central American country’s Attorney General’s Office made it the safest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
Not all nations had published their 2024 annual homicide totals, but the 1.9 homicides per 100,000 in population that Bukele said had been achieved would put it below what any Latin American country had reported in 2023.
The congress granted Bukele’s administration a requested “state of exception” to crackdown on the gangs that included suspending some Constitutional rights and giving police more powers to arrest and hold suspects.
In March 2022, El Salvador’s notoriously powerful street gangs killed 62 people in a matter of hours.
