El Salvador and Honduras, next-door neighbors in Central America, have some of the highest crime rates in the world. In 2022 their governments declared what are called states of exception—like a state of emergency, suspending some constitutional rights and deploying additional police and soldiers—in an effort to curb gang-related violence that is pervasive in urban areas in both countries.

Now sociology associate professor Anjuli Fahlberg, A07, is trying to find out if those efforts in fact brought down crime rates and curbed violence, and how the results differed between the two countries. 

The implications of what she finds could play out in areas far beyond those two small countries, as other nations facing similar problems seek solutions to criminal violence. The “iron fist” approach taken by El Salvador president Nayib Bukele, for example, is often portrayed as successful, but that has been shadowed by growth in police violence and imprisonment of tens of thousands of Salvadorans, she says.

Fahlberg, who previously did research into gang violence and social movements in poor urban neighborhoods in Brazil called “favelas,” began working on this project in 2022, visiting both El Salvador and Honduras three times and conducting over 100 interviews with public officials, residents living in gang territories, and representatives of civil society organizations. 

Now she’s moved on to the next stage of research, thanks to a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, which funds work that seeks to understand the causes, manifestations, and control of violence. She has hired and is working with local people in her participatory action research—a method that actively involves people affected by what’s being studied, as opposed to exclusively relying on outsiders to do the studies.

The gang-related violence in El Salvador and Honduras is focused in urban areas, especially the respective capital cities, San Salvador and Tegucigalpa, where large portions of the countries’ population are concentrated. 

After more than 60 people were murdered in El Salvador on a single day in March 2022, Bukele announced a state of exception in the country, which “relied very heavily on the military and on his police forces to target gang-dominated neighborhoods, putting thousands of people in jail,” says Fahlberg.

In Honduras, Xiomara Castro became president in January 2022, and in December that year her government issued a state of exception that targeted dozens of gang-controlled neighborhoods in the capital, Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula, the country’s second-largest city.

“There are a lot of international human rights organizations who are saying Central America is going in a very right-leaning direction, embracing these regimes of exception, violating human rights,” says Fahlberg. “But on the ground, what I was finding were very different realities.”

In El Salvador, the regime of exception “was implemented in a very strong, full-throttle way. Thousands of people were being detained, in most cases without any kind of due process, without any meaningful investigation, often without any information about where they were being held, how long they were going to be there, or if and when they were ever going to get out,” she says. 

Meanwhile, in Honduras, “almost nobody was being arrested, and most of the people who were being arrested were let go within 24 hours.”

Taking a Local Approach

Based on her preliminary research, she found in El Salvador that people “were reporting that they felt much safer from gang violence, but many were now reporting that they were very scared of being detained arbitrarily by the police,” Fahlberg says. “In Honduras, people were reporting that there was really almost no change at all. Many people said they didn’t even notice that there was a regime of exception in their neighborhood, and they still have a very high fear of gang violence, which is still a very prominent threat in their lives.”

To learn more about these differences, Fahlberg enlisted local research assistants to interview public officials and people in the neighborhoods most directly targeted by the states of exception to “systematically compare how states of exception have impacted eight different gang territories, four in each capital city,” she says. Working with local people helps get access to gang-controlled areas, and “ensures that our analyses include the experiences and perspectives of those most directly impacted by the states of exception.”

To help keep her local researchers safe, their notes and interviews do not identify specific residents, and they avoid interaction with potentially violent people, talking instead to trusted acquaintances. The identities of local researchers are also protected.

As Fahlberg explains, the research won’t just examine how states of exception impact gang and police violence, but will also look at their impacts on random crimes like muggings and gender-based violence, which are often ignored in analyses of states of exception. Her preliminary findings indicate they have not been reduced, even when gang-related violence declines.

She will also be looking at how local organizations work to combat violence. “In Latin America, it is so dangerous to mobilize against gang violence,” Fahlberg says. “It’s also very dangerous to mobilize against police violence and state violence. People have to be incredibly creative, strategic, and innovative.” Many people doing that work “fly under the radar because it’s sometimes too dangerous to talk about them in the media. This felt like a place where I could start to shed some light around these strategies.”