By: Insight Crime
March 18, 2025
In the latest of a series of academic articles, two scholars add to mounting evidence that gang truces may provide a short-term reprieve from violence but over time can add to the total death toll.
The scholars – Cree Jones and Preston Lloyd, writing in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies – tackle the case of the gang truce in El Salvador. To facilitate the empirical analysis, they break the truce into three time periods: the truce itself (March 2012-April 2013); a “piecemeal revocation” period during which the government began to roll back the truce (May 2013-January 2015); and a post-truce period (February 2015-December 2016).
Using a difference-in-differences design, they estimate the truce and the “piecemeal” truce “prevented” 1,681 homicides, while the post-truce period saw 2,250 more homicides. In other words, according to their calculations, there were 569 more homicides than there might have been if there had never been a truce.
The Jones and Lloyd article follows a series of others that have studied truces in the Americas and come to similar conclusions, including a 2013 Wilson Center report by Ed Maguire that determined a truce in Trinidad and Tobago had resulted in short-term gains, followed by a longer-term spate of homicides; and a paper from 2020 by Charles Katz, Anthony Harriott, and Eric Hedberg on Jamaica that determined that, while no statistically significant change occurred in homicides of the area studied, other areas saw spikes in homicides. Several studies of US gang truces have come to equally disheartening conclusions.
There are other studies, however, that say the lives saved far surpassed what Jones and Lloyd say. Among them is a 2016 study by Katz, Hedberg, and Luis Amaya on the same Salvadoran truce, which concluded the truce had saved some 5,500 lives, and the time period analyzed was a year less than Jones and Lloyd. However, that study did not delve into what happened after the truce, and other studies have similarly limited longitudes, which can be a problem.
In 2015, post-truce El Salvador was the most violent country on the planet not at war. And in their paper, Katz, Hedberg, and Amaya acknowledge that post-truce violence, and the fact that, with truces, “The potential for long-term negative consequences might outweigh any potential short-term benefits.”
The Problem With Gang Truces
It is impossible to disaggregate all the motivations behind gang violence. Gangs have their own internal dynamics, and individuals make decisions based on a number of economic, social, and personal factors. Determining how the collective influences the individual and vice versa is doubly difficult, especially considering that Salvadoran gangs often operate more like a collection of sub-groups than a monolithic supergroup.
In some ways, the truce made this analysis simpler. The gangs were, at least for a time, operating as a collective and negotiating as one. In fact, the truce began after the gangs’ top leaders were transferred from maximum-security prison so they could reestablish control over the rank and file. In return for the transfer, they promised to lower homicides, and they delivered.
But Jones and Lloyd argue that moment also changed the gangs’ incentive structure. Once the tradeoff had been made – lower homicides for a different prison and a series of other incentives that may have included, depending on who you ask, direct payments to the leaders – then that became the new baseline for any negotiations going forward.
“We hypothesize that the increase in homicides in the post revocation period was driven by gangs attempting to create leverage in anticipated future negotiations (i.e., using killing as a means to create political capital),” they write.
Our reporting and that of others corroborated that the gangs did meet with officials of the two top political parties at the time to negotiate another round of concessions. But while logical, and reiterated to varying degrees in other scholarship and our reporting, it is a contentious assertion. The notion is that gangs use homicides of civilians as leverage in the same way that insurgencies might use attacks on military barracks or police stations.
Jones and Lloyd, however, ground this assertion in empirical data. They claim that municipalities they determined were “non-rival” municipalities – where one gang held sway – had higher rises in homicides than those that were in dispute in the period following the end of the revocation period. This finding, they argued, “suggests that a primary driver of the increase in homicides is an attempt by the gangs to create leverage and is not the result of a cycle of violence driven by gang rivalry.”
In sum, gangs were targeting civilians to squeeze the government. The authors were careful not to say this exactly, and when asked in an interview with InSight Crime, Jones said they did not have access to information to determine a clear profile of the victims, so determining this random targeting with any precision is difficult.
“We don’t have good visibility on victim affiliation in the data that we have,” he said. “We rely on data that’s at the homicide level. So there is gang attribution: Was this a gang killing, and what gang perpetuated the killing.”
What’s more, it’s not clear how many of the homicide victims were killed by security forces themselves, as they ramped up their crackdown, and the two sides began a brutal tat-for-tat that included extrajudicial executions of alleged gang members.
Still, the finding is reinforced by other gang truce studies. Most notably, Katz, Harriott, and Hedberg note that gangs in Jamaica have long played significant roles in politics in that country, and that “peace was consistently seen by them as a bargaining tool.”
These gangs, however, did not use homicides as leverage. They used their involvement in the truce to gain political and social capital with the community. And for Katz, Harriott, and Hedberg, this may have contributed to the truce’s ultimate failure.
“It was more a vehicle for rhetoric rather than for reality,” they write.
And as it relates to El Salvador, other academics who have studied the country agree with Jones and Lloyd’s overall findings.
“I think it makes sense that they learn,” Michael Paarlberg, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth who has long studied El Salvador, told InSight Crime. “They see themselves as political actors.”
Should Truces Be Abandoned?
The logical conclusion from these and other studies might be to abandon truces altogether. In an interview, Katz told InSight Crime he would avoid gang truces, unless the government and others had the capacity to change the incentive structure for the gangs in a short time period.
“It’s like putting a tourniquet on the problem,” he said. “Sometimes you are going to make things worse, and gang truces appear to be in that category.”
To be sure, it is important to note that these truces had intrinsic problems and were devoid of large-scale political buy-in required to undermine gang violence. The government of El Salvador, for example, never formally recognized the truce, and there was no legal framework for the ongoing talks or subsequent efforts to create social, education, and economic programs related to it. The ambiguity allowed for political top-cover should the plan go astray. But it also put those who participated directly in legal jeopardy and ultimately led to the prosecution of the truce’s top mediator, among others.
That ambiguity also appeared to keep others, among them business owners, international aid agencies, and non-governmental organizations, from helping the effort at the scale necessary to affect deep shifts in motivations. Even in a truce that lasted as long as that of El Salvador, Katz noted, it would be difficult to put in place meaningful programs. The result was that negotiators themselves were forced to scramble for any meaningful support to facilitate the maintenance of the truce, and the only logical pressure point for the gangs to push became political.
Other truces were even more difficult to implement, since they were partial. In the cases of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, for example, there was no national truce, just truces in specific parts of the country. So while a truce may have been holding in one space, in another area the fighting continued. Indeed, gangs in Jamaica may have used the truce to regroup and attack other gangs in other areas, the researchers found. And in Trinidad and Tobago, gang members who participated in the truce were targeted by others.
Still, the core problem appears to be that truces are not accompanied by any sustained efforts to address the root causes of gangs and gang violence, the researchers repeatedly say. Truces, in other words, may be able to create a temporary space for more concerted social, education, and economic interventions. But if those efforts are not going to be implemented in conjunction with the truce, you may have been better off not launching the truce in the first place.