Christopher Rufo on crime: what the evidence says · JRE #2113
SUBJECT: CRIME
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
what they did is essentially lock up the 1% of the El Salvadoran population that were the violent, committed gang members and drug runners, and they reduced the murder rate by more than 90%. It used to be the most dangerous country in the world, highest murder rate.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
El Salvador's homicide rate did fall by more than 90% following President Nayib Bukele's 2022 state of emergency: the Associated Press reports 6,656 homicides in 2015 (among the world's highest national totals) versus 214 in 2023 and a record-low 114 in 2024 (1.9 per 100,000), a decline of roughly 97-98%. AP also reports the government arrested more than 83,000-84,000 people under the crackdown, exceeding 1% of the country's population, corroborating the "1%" figure Rufo cites, though that total includes both confirmed gang members and many people whose gang ties were never established in court. El Salvador's 2015 rate made it one of the deadliest countries by homicide rate, a claim frequently repeated at the time as "world's highest," though exact rankings varied slightly by source and year. The reduction has come with substantial due-process costs: AP and rights groups document mass arrests conducted without warrants or evidence, prolonged pretrial detention (often years, with 90% of detainees still awaiting trial as of 2025), hundreds of deaths in custody, and thousands of documented human-rights-violation complaints, alongside prosecution of critics and human rights lawyers. Overall, the core statistics on the murder rate decline and the roughly 1% incarceration rate are well supported, but Rufo's framing omits the scale of due-process violations documented by human rights monitors and glosses over ambiguity in exactly who was detained.