El Salvador President Bukele Plans Early Release for Some Gang Collaborators

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele dropped a plan Tuesday night that could unlock conditional early release for up to half of the people locked down under his state of emergency. Authorities used this measure to detain more than 90,000 individuals in just four and a half years as they tried to crush violent criminal gangs.

The move targets those labeled gang collaborators. That label is broad enough to cover lookouts for gangs or anyone who pays extortion money. "There are many people who have indeed committed crimes, but their crime was collaborating with gangs," Bukele stated. "They deserve to be in jail, but we come from a country where collaborating with gangs wasn't so unusual, and if we were to arrest everyone who collaborated with gangs, we would have to arrest 20% of the population."

The president did not offer specifics on how cases will be reviewed yet. He said officials will analyze them to decide on potential early release with monitoring. This could apply to roughly half those held during the emergency declaration.

Bukele declared the state of emergency in March 2022 after a spike in violence killed more than 60 people in one day. The rule started for 30 days but has been extended repeatedly since then. It brought down the nation's homicide rate and made El Salvador look better to tourists. But it also suspended or restricted certain constitutional protections, such as the right to know why someone is detained, the right to legal counsel, and the right to visitation.

The president insists the measure was needed to rein in rival gangs MS-13 and Barrio 18. Human rights groups denounce the emergency, arguing it sparked widespread arbitrary arrests. They have demanded Bukele scrap the rule entirely. These organizations recorded more than 6,000 complaints during the declaration and documented at least 575 deaths in government custody.

Some say releasing thousands of prisoners cannot fix the damage caused by their long imprisonment. "The victims of arbitrary detentions don't just deserve to recover their freedom, but they also deserve to be compensated for the harms caused by the State of El Salvador: the physical and mental harm that imprisonment causes, family suffering, loss of work or studies, reputational damage, among others," exiled Salvadoran lawyer Bertha Deleón wrote on X.

Bukele brushed aside criticism from national and international human rights groups, suggesting they should support victims of gang violence instead. He defended keeping the emergency in place while saying his goal is to end it eventually.

Government figures claim El Salvador's homicide rate has fallen dramatically over the past decade, including during Bukele's presidency. The rate dropped from a peak of more than 100 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015, four years before he took office, to 1.3 per 100,000 in 2025. But the government narrowed the definition of homicide to exclude killings by police, murders in prisons, and bodies found in unmarked graves.