Over a weekend in March 2022, Salvadoran gang members launched a rampage that killed 87 civilians. After midnight on the second day, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele tweeted that the legislature had passed a state of emergency, suspending key civil liberties. Over the past three years, this has enabled the arrest of 2% of the adult population and made El Salvador the world's most incarcerated country.
The international press has covered some implications for civil liberties, but no one has looked into more troubling questions. This project sets out to find what prompted the gang killings or how the government was able to muster such a sweeping response to a crisis that had plagued the country for three decades, ever since Washington began deporting members of gangs like 18th Street and MS-13 that had been refugees from El Salvador’s U.S.-backed civil war.
