Same Murder Rate, Different Count: El Salvador and France

Opinion. Every figure below is sourced in the box at the end; the conclusions are the author's.

In El Salvador, the government counted 82 homicides in 2025. In France, the interior ministry's statistics office counted 975 victims of homicide the same year. The gap looks like a factor of twelve. Divide by population and it nearly disappears.

The arithmetic

El Salvador's 2024 census counted 6,029,976 people. 82 divided by 6.03 million is 1.36 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The Salvadoran security ministry announced 1.3.

France had 69,082,000 inhabitants on January 1, 2026, according to INSEE (provisional figure). 975 divided by 69.08 million is 1.41 per 100,000.

So the two official rates are 1.36 and 1.41, within four hundredths of each other. In daily terms, France recorded about 2.7 homicide victims a day, El Salvador about 0.22.

Counted the same way?

Not quite. InSight Crime, the organized crime research outlet, says the Salvadoran government uses a much narrower definition of homicide than other countries. Bodies found in unmarked graves, people killed by police, and murders in prisons are excluded from the official data. The exclusion of confrontations with security forces and of bodies in graves dates back to 2019.

The French figure is a count of victims recorded by police and gendarmerie, published by the SSMSI. It is not a perfect mirror either: the two countries do not measure the same thing in the same way. That is the point. A rate is only as comparable as the rule used to produce it.

None of this says the Salvadoran drop is fake. InSight Crime's own fieldwork confirms that the gangs have nearly disappeared and that killings have plummeted. It says the number is real and narrow.

Verdict

Two governments publish almost the same rate. One counts everything it can. The other counts what its definition leaves in. Before saying which country is safer, ask which one publishes the rule along with the number.