El Salvador gangs enforce coronavirus lockdown with baseball bats

While Australians face steep fines for breaking social distancing measures introduced to stem the spread of coronavirus, the residents of one Central American nation are being kept indoors through more brutal means.

Baseball bats are among the weapons of choice for the organised crime gangs in El Salvador, who have been enforcing the government's lockdown with ruthless force.

Other tactics employed by the gangs include circulating recordings on messaging applications threatening people who break the rules and producing videos showing masked gang members hitting people for breaking quarantine rules.

A mass outbreak of COVID-19 would be especially devastating in the small nation of six million people, due to widespread poverty and low investment in public health.

The nation-wide lockdown, issued last month by the country's President Nayib Bukele, has seen the murder rate drop dramatically, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The street gangs that have long terrorized El Salvador have now turned their attention from extortion and killing to a more pressing matter: enforcing social distancing restrictions.

El Salvador had the highest per-capita homicide rate in the world for years, but during the month of March, President Bukele reported just 65 homicides.

In some months in previous years, that figure would be nearly 1,000.

The street gangs that have long terrorized El Salvador have now turned their attention from extortion and killing to a more pressing matter: enforcing social distancing restrictions.

El Salvador is not the only country to see a downturn in murder rates thanks to COVID-19 measures designed to keep people off the streets and inside their homes.

In Colombia, guerrilla leaders have ordered a month-long ceasefire to correspond with a nationwide quarantine, seeing murder rates drop by half.

Homicides in Guatemala and Honduras have also fallen by around one third.