There were two objections I saw to my recent piece on the invisible graveyard of crime. I didn’t see anyone seriously quibble with the back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis. Rather, people raised the question of whether the Bukele crackdown actually worked as advertised. First, some people looked at the graph below and noted that the murder rate had been falling since 2015, when it was at an astronomically high 103 per 100,000.
In 2018, the year before Bukele came into office, it had already dropped to 51 per 100,000. How reasonable would it be to assume the number would’ve continued to fall until it reached something like 7.8 even in the absence of a gang crackdown? We might begin by checking historical trends in El Salvador. Here’s what we find.