Chapter Eight: Latin America

Throughout 2015, corruption and organised crime caused severe security problems and political instability in Central America’s ‘northern triangle’, comprising El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The resignation and imprisonment of Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, who was implicated in a corruption scandal, caused a shift in his country’s political environment. Meanwhile, criminal violence assumed troubling new forms in El Salvador, where the gangs intensified their coordinated armed campaign against the government. As a consequence, the country recorded 6,670 homicides in the year, or more than 18 per day. This was a rise of 70% from 2014, and the largest increase in El Salvador’s homicide rate in recent history. There were also 106 registered cases in which three or more people were killed in 2015, more than had taken place there in the preceding three years. In January 2015, the most prominent leaders of El Salvador’s two dominant maras (territorial gangs formed predominantly of young men) were returned to Key statistics 2014 2015