In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele has led one of the most aggressive anti-gang crackdowns ever seen

In less than a decade , El Salvador has gone from murder capital of the world to having one of the lowest homicide rates in the Western Hemisphere .

Nayib Bukele’s government has been undercounting homicides since its 2022 crackdown, writes Ruben Navarrette .

He says El Salvador was a sick nation, but now that the country is taking its “bitter medicine,” it is finally safe.

In May 2021 , El Salvador’s government formally started changing how it counted homicides.

In April 2022 , the government began excluding figures for persons killed in clashes with the police or military, which include shootings, patrols, and operations by state security forces.

In El Salvador , the inclusion of these killings in the data would increase the homicide rate by 19 percent in 2022 and 20 percent in 2023 .

The data suggests that the real number of homicides in El Salvador last year was 288 , and the real murder rate was 4.5 .

Jeremy Giles is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School and a former commander in the U.S. Army Special Forces .

He says Bukele ’s presidency has hardly been a force for reducing irregular migration to the United States .