A cacophony of right-wing commentators now believes that El Salvador, under Nayib Bukele’s dictatorship, is the “safest” country in the Western Hemisphere. Bukele himself certainly wants us to believe it’s because he’s gone to war with the gangs. They’re all wrong — and disastrously so.

According to El Faro, the country’s most respected investigative outlet, the relative peace in El Salvador is not the result of a decisive war on gangs, but rather, of a secret pact negotiated directly between Bukele’s own Director of Prisons Osiris Luna and his head of the Social Fabric Reconstruction Unit, Carlos Marroquín, and gang leaders, starting in late 2019. He also took on similar negotiations with gangs as a mayor of San Salvador, from 2015 to 2018.