How States of Emergency Impact Urban Violence: Lessons from El Salvador and Honduras

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Abstract

States of exception have become increasingly common tools deployed by political leaders across Latin America to reduce gang violence. Despite their growing popularity, however, we know little about how states of exception impact violence in targeted gang territories. To answer this question, this paper draws on over 150 interviews and three years of participatory, ethnographic field work by researchers from gang-dominated territories in El Salvador and Honduras, which have both been under states of exception since 2022. In El Salvador, we found that gang violence decreased significantly, while state violence spiked due to increased police arrests, incarceration, and political repression. In Honduras, the state of exception had very little impact: residents observed a brief increase in police presence but no meaningful change in state or gang violence. In both countries, gender-based violence and ‘common’ crimes like robberies remain rampant and unaddressed. These findings lead us to two important conclusions. First, we argue that we cannot generalize about states of exception, as these measures can be deployed quite differently in legal changes, practical applications, and actual impact on different populations. Second, we find that, in some cases, states of exception can reshape the landscape of gang and police violence, not by reducing violence but by transferring perpetration of violence from gangs to the state’s security apparatus. Third, we argue that their narrow focus on gangs make states of exception incapable of addressing other forms of violence, like gender-based violence and common crime. We conclude that states of exception do not reduce violence, but at best reconfigure it, thereby creating new challenges that citizens must confront.

Author

• Anjuli Fahlberg, Tufts University