KEY TAKEAWAYS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
In late 2022, Honduran President Xiomara Castro declared “war on extortion,” imposing a “state of exception” to fight the country’s street gangs. The emergency decree covered high-crime areas in the country’s two largest cities, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, suspending civil liberties, such as freedom of movement and assembly, and allowing police to make arrests and search homes without judicial warrants.
Over the past two years, the Honduran government has extended and expanded the emergency into much of the country, including both urban areas affected by gang violence and less populated regions, such as the Atlantic Coast, used by the traffickers who bring South American cocaine into Honduras for transport across Central America and Mexico en route to the United States.
But the impact has been mixed, at best. The Castro government takes credit for reducing homicides, though murder rates have been falling (albeit unevenly) since peaking at 77 homicides per 100,000 people in 2011. Honduras remains one of Latin America’s most violent countries and suffers the region’s highest rates of femicide. And although extortion is notoriously hard to measure — victims tend to underreport for fear of gang retaliation — it remains widespread. A national survey by the Association for a more Just Society (ASJ), a Honduran NGO, estimated that during the first six months of the state of emergency extortion victimization increased, from 9 percent of households to 11 percent.
Meanwhile in neighboring El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown beginning in March 2022 transformed the country in a matter of weeks. Impoverished neighborhoods that were once under gang control in San Salvador now seem to be largely extortion-free. Official homicide rates have plummeted to about 2.4 per 100,000 people, down from a peak of 100 per 100,000 in 2015. (Although critics argue the government is undercounting murders by excluding those killed in clashes with police or discovered in clandestine graves.)
Why has the impact of emergency measures been so dramatic in El Salvador and seemingly negligible in Honduras? The two countries are both in Central America’s turbulent northern tier, a region that emerged from military rule and civil war in the 1980s only to be overwhelmed by criminal violence in the early 2000s. Both have shared a common threat: powerful street gangs or maras — most notably the Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 and Barrio 18 — that recruited impoverished, disaffected young people with the lure of income, power and identity. And both have sent millions of migrants (authorized and unauthorized) to the United States in search of safety and economic opportunity.
Despite similarities, Honduras faces a more complex criminal threat than El Salvador with less capacity to meet it.
But despite these similarities, Honduras faces a more complex criminal threat than El Salvador with less capacity to meet it. The Salvadoran government’s relationship with the gangs — shaped by years of oscillation between confrontation and accommodation — is unique in Latin America. Moreover, its security and justice institutions were empowered to arrest tens of thousands of suspects and then keep them in prison without due process. This makes the Salvadoran model not only difficult to replicate but incompatible with democratic rule of law that safeguards fundamental rights.
Xiomara Castro took office in January 2022 amid high hopes for social and political change. She had campaigned on a platform promising to build a “socialist and democratic state” that would protect human rights, curb corruption and demilitarize security. But toward the end of her first year in office, her government faced mounting criticism for failing to curb crime. Business leaders warned that extortion was out of control, affecting large and small businesses alike. Among those hardest hit were bus and taxi drivers, who in October 2022 shut down public transportation in Tegucigalpa, displaying coffins in memory of those killed for failing to make extortion payments.
On November 24, the Honduran Security Ministry responded with an “Integral Plan for the Treatment of Extortion,” which included legal reforms, technological and institutional improvements, community programs, prison reforms and mechanisms for institutional coordination. But the plan was pre-empted that same day when Castro announced that she was initiating her war on extortion by imposing a state of exception.
Castro was following the example of El Salvador’s president, who had declared an emergency eight months earlier. She was also reneging on campaign promises to prioritize human rights and reduce the army’s role in domestic law enforcement. Her government doubled down in June 2023, giving the army control over prisons and a year later by announcing plans to construct a “megaprison” with the capacity to hold 20,000 inmates, a smaller version of CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center), which holds 40,000, built by the Salvadoran government in 2022.
Castro’s rhetoric also echoed Bukele’s. The leftist president, who had once stressed the need for community policing and social programs, called gang members “terrorists” and vowed to reform the penal code to institutionalize emergency measures by allowing authorities to detain gang leaders without charges and prosecute them in mass trials.
Despite the government’s increasingly hardline rhetoric, there is little evidence that the state of exception has curbed gang power to intimidate and extort. In some areas, the problem seems to be getting worse as new groups get in on the racket.
“Our sector not only continues paying rent [extortion], but the rates have increased,” Jorge Lanza, a bus owner and transportation sector organizer, told reporters. “Other criminal bands have emerged. The urban transport sector remains the principal victim.”
And gangs still dominate marginalized urban neighborhoods with high rates of poverty and underemployment. “The state of exception has had no major impact in the communities,” said Leo Pineda, who heads JUSIVE, an organization that works with at-risk youth in San Pedro Sula. “There’s no difference in terms of safety or gang control.”
One reason why the crackdown in Honduras seems more rhetoric than reality is the capacity of security forces. El Salvador, the smallest, most densely populated country in Central America, had about 418 police officers per 100,000 people in 2023, according to statistics compiled by the Association for a more Just Society. Honduras, which is four times as large as El Salvador with double the population, has only 184 officers per 100,000 people. President Bukele has also invested heavily in the armed forces with plans to double its size from 20,000 to 40,000 troops by 2026.
The Honduran government promised to increase the number of police officers from 18,920 in 2021 to 28,000 by 2026, which would mean training and incorporating about 1,800 new officers each year. Instead, the number of officers has decreased slightly over the past two years, from 18,047 in 2022 to 17,920 in 2023 to 17,436 in 2024, according to ASJ.
But perhaps the most important difference is that the two countries are confronting different criminal threats. Honduras faces not only street gangs, but also drug trafficking organizations, which have penetrated and corrupted government at the national and local levels. Castro’s predecessor, former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, was convicted in June 2024 in U.S. federal court for conspiring to smuggle tons of cocaine. His former police chief, Juan Carlos Bonilla, was convicted on similar charges in August.
There are also important differences between the nature of the gang threat in Honduras and El Salvador. Some analysts argue that the MS-13 has grown more sophisticated, moving into the drug business from local retail sales to international trafficking, to money laundering. The decline of homicides in some areas may simply be the result of changing criminal tactics.
“The MS no longer extorts stores and small markets in the territories they control because they are more interested in the neighborhood being quiet,” a police official told researchers with ASJ. “It is better to have the citizen as a friend than as an enemy,” adding that the MS was “no longer a street gang. They are more like the Russian mafia.”
Meanwhile new gangs have emerged. Bus and taxi companies are especially vulnerable because they pass through different criminal territories, paying off multiple groups on the way. Nor is extortion in Honduras limited to gangs. ASJ documented cases of gang imitators, such as public security and justice officials or private sector employees who use inside information to extract payments from their employers.
The Bukele model is seemingly straight forward: imprisonment on an unprecedented scale. The Salvadoran government has more prisoners per capita than any country in the world: over 70,000 suspects — an estimated 1,086 prisoners per 100,000 people — far outstripping the second highest incarceration rate in communist Cuba, which holds some 794 people per 100,000, and more than double the rate in the United States, which holds about 531 per 100,000.
How was the Salvadoran government able to rapidly detain tens of thousands of once fearsome gang members with virtually no resistance? Analysts cite a number of advantages unique to El Salvador: Unlike other countries facing multiple criminal threats, Salvadoran law enforcement was able to impose a dragnet around gang strongholds in densely populated urban and suburban neighborhoods. Plus, they had more control of the penitentiary system, which allowed them to isolate imprisoned gang leaders from those still on the streets.
Salvadoran authorities benefited moreover from their secret negotiations with imprisoned gang leaders. This provided them with valuable intelligence, including a database of gang members and collaborators. Political scientists Manuel Meléndez-Sánchez and Alberto Vergara argue that the gang pact drove a wedge between the leadership, who bargained for better prison conditions and protection from extradition, and the impoverished rank and file who remained outside. When police and military forces launched their lightning crackdown in 2022, they encountered almost no opposition from fragmented street gangs without the capacity to mount a coordinated response.
El Salvador’s president also enjoyed almost unchallenged executive power. Well before the crackdown, Bukele, with the help of a compliant legislature, had removed the attorney general, replaced all five judges on the Supreme Court’s constitutional chamber, and forced dozens of lower court judges to retire. That allowed the government to carry out mass arrests, suspend due process and keep suspects in jail without judicial interference.
The economic and social costs of holding massive numbers of prisoners are enormous. The country’s total prison population exceeds 100,000 or about 2.4 percent of the adult population. That deprives the economy of potentially productive workers and deprives hundreds of thousands of family members, most of whom were already living in poverty, of much needed income. The direct costs to the state are unknown because the emergency decrees allow the government to manage security spending without public oversight.
The costs of insecurity are also enormous, however: violent crime in Latin America — a region with 8 percent of the world’s population but a third of world’s homicides — is a drag on economic growth, heightens inequality and fuels corruption. The Inter-American Development Bank estimated in a recent study that the direct costs of crime and violence came to about 3.44 percent of the region’s GDP, as measured in loss of human capital plus state and private spending on security. About half of the homicides in Latin America are related to organized crime and gangs, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, far higher than the estimated share (22%) in the world as a whole.
There are better alternatives to sweeping, unsustainable crackdowns that sacrifice civil liberties and democratic rights.
Citizens throughout the hemisphere want tough action against organized crime. But there are better alternatives to sweeping, unsustainable crackdowns that sacrifice civil liberties and democratic rights. In Guatemala, an international commission helped reduce the country’s soaring murder rates in the 2010s by strengthening the capacity of prosecutors and police to identify and target criminal networks. In Mexico, the capital city — under then mayor, now president, Claudia Sheinbaum — halved homicides by a series of measures to strengthen civilian police forces, including investigative capacity. In Colombia, the city governments in Cali, Bogotá and Medellín reduced violence through a combination of targeted policing, rehabilitating and expanding public spaces, providing opportunities for youth and promoting civic education.
In the face of the powerful transnational groups that threaten countries throughout the region, there must be greater cooperation against the corruption that enables networks to spread from country to country, and protect the security and safety of vulnerable communities.
To wage its “war on extortion,” the Honduran government needs to be tough, but also smart. That means skillfully and strategically partnering with the United States to broadly improve police capacity to confront criminal organizations, investigate their networks, prevent money laundering and curb corruption. It also means helping police gain the trust of local citizens, especially those in gang-dominated neighborhoods, so they can become active allies in the fight against organized crime.