El Salvador's Minister of Justice and Public Security, Gustavo Villatoro, talks to AFP in an exclusive interview at the Ministry of Justice and Security headquarters about the tough measures taken by the Nayib Bukele government to combat the gang violence that once terrorized the Central American country. "What we knew as the parallel criminal state that the terrorist gangs had set up in this country has basically been destroyed," he says. The country's homicide rate reached 106 per 100,000 population in 2015 and dropped to 2.4 in 2023, below the world average of 8, according to the United Nations. EXCLUSIVE IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES