From my new Taki’s Magazine column:

Latinos and the Law
Steve Sailer

February 14, 2024

El Salvador president Nayib Bukele was reelected with almost 85 percent of the vote following his massive crackdown on gangs that saw the Central American republic’s official murder rate plummet to historic lows. Bukele’s success raises interesting questions about Latinos’ propensity toward violence.

Unlike in the United States, where the public has to wait almost nine months for national crime statistics to be published, El Salvador’s government announced on Jan. 3, 2024, that only 154 murders had been committed in 2023, down from over 2,000 in 2019.

I’m no expert on which banana republic crime statistics are trustworthy, but by all accounts the murder rate in El Salvador has declined vastly since the middle of the last decade, with the drop beginning even before Bukele was elected in 2019 and then began rounding up men with face tattoos in 2022. …

El Salvador is only the most vivid example of what appears to be a general conundrum in both Latin America and among Latinos in the United States: that their levels of criminal violence seem to be highly contingent upon current local politics.

Read the whole thing there.