This is a paid article which your subscription is allowing you to read.

In 2015, El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world, at 107 murders per 100 000 people. By 2025, that number had fallen to 1.3, a 99% decline in a decade. Over the same period, its economy managed the beginnings of a spectacular turnaround. There are many parallels and lessons for South Africa.

El Salvador’s murder rate came off sharply following a brutal crackdown by its government on gangs and violent crime. The global benchmark of criminal violence is the murder rate. This measures how many people are murdered in a country in a year for every 100 000 people that are present in a country. The global average is around five per 100 000. The figure in El Salvador was therefore twenty times the global average, but has now been brought down to less than half of that average.

South Africa has a similar problem to what El Salvador had. Its murder rate is near 40 per 100 000, or almost eight times the global average.

The data for the two countries is plotted in the chart below:

As the murder rate fell in El Salvador, economic confidence returned and the investment rate increased (the technical term for the investment rate is gross fixed capital formation). The chart below shows that it rose from roughly 16% as a share of its GDP in 2015 to about 27% in 2025. The average investment rate for emerging markets sits at about 25% and El Salvador’s figure was therefore very low by global standards. South Africa, again, has a similar problem to what El Salvador had in that its investment rate is just 13.5% of GDP.

The investment rate for the two countries is plotted on the chart below.

As El Salvador's fixed investment rate lifted, its economic growth rate lifted from 2.4% in 2015 to 3.7% in 2025. South Africa's lower fixed investment rate has seen its economic growth rate hold at near 1% over the past 15 years.

See the chart that sets out these data:

As El Salvador’s growth rate recovered, its real GDP per capita increased from $3 790 in 2015 to $4 870 in 2026, an increase of 28.5%. In that same period, South Africa’s real GDP per capita declined from $6 112 in 2015 to $5 705 in 2026, a decline of 6.7%.

See the chart that sets out these data:

Central to its success in bringing down the murder rate was a brutal criminal justice regime launched around 2019. The prison system came to define the tenor of that regime and was defined by intentionally severe, punitive conditions designed to permanently isolate gang members, leaving visiting Western human rights activists and international experts horrified by a system that forced inmates to live under 24-hour artificial lighting in massive steel cells holding up to 150 people with no mattresses, blankets, or privacy.

Prisoners are kept barefoot in white shorts, locked down for 23.5 hours a day on a basic diet of rice and beans, and are completely stripped of family visits, recreational spaces, and physical court appearances, which are conducted entirely via video link.

While due process and the rule of law were diluted, the iron-fist approach has earned overwhelming domestic popularity by successfully crushing gang violence and transforming El Salvador into one of Latin America's safest nations. The approach has however, continued to attract condemnation from Western activist groups shocked by evidence of systematic torture, denial of due process, severe malnutrition, and a total lack of medical care.

There are lessons in this for South Africa given the extreme levels of violent crime faced by people in the country and, as in El Salvador, the role of gangs in driving such crime. Certainly, reducing the extent of the violence faced by South Africans is a necessary condition to shore up the investor confidence needed to state an economic recovery. An equally severe criminal justice response to that of El Salvador would doubtless be politically popular in South Africa too – even if it came at the cost of due process and the rule of law.

The balance that must be struck here is an ethical dilemma – and one that liberal and Western thinkers seek to skirt over too easily. Whether there is an effective middle ground that leaves civil liberties fully intact while crushing criminal violence on a scale of that which confronted El Salvador and still confronts South Africa is unclear.