From March 2012 to May 2014, the Salvadoran government, the Catholic Church, and the country's two largest criminal gangs, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the 18th Street gang (Barrio 18), came to a truce, known in El Salvador simply as the Gang Truce (), to lower the country's rate of homicides and extortions in exchange for improved prison conditions and certain visitation privileges. The truce's principal negotiators were Minister of Public Security David Munguía Payés, former deputy Raúl Mijango (es), and Bishop Fabio Colindres (es), and the negotiations were overseen by President Mauricio Funes. The existence of the truce was alleged by the online newspaper El Faro in early March 2012, after 30 gang leaders were transferred from a maximum-security prison to a lower-security prison, and confirmed after representatives from the gangs and the Catholic Church admitted that they negotiated a truce with the government. However, the government initially denied that they had negotiated with the gangs and that any truce existed; as the truce resulted in a decrease in crime, the government began to acknowledge its existence, but continued to attribute the decrease in crime to its security policies. The government formally recognized its role in negotiating the truce in September 2012. Although fractures in the truce began to manifest in July and August 2012, in November 2012 an effort to establish "peace zones" in Salvadoran municipalities helped restore the truce and reaffirm the gangs' commitments to reduce their criminal activities. Although the gang surrendered its weapons and the government removed soldiers from the designated peace zones, the truce again began to break down in February 2013 following an increase in homicides; the truce continued to fall apart throughout 2013 as homicides continued to rise. In May 2014, as the homicide rate reached 14 per day, Funes stated that "the truce has failed". The truce received criticism from journalists, religious figures, and politicians, who claimed that the truce gave the gangs political legitimacy, that it failed to produce any benefits for the population, and that it failed to solve the overall problem of gang violence in the country. Additionally, the truce became a major issue during the 2014 presidential election. In 2016, the gangs revealed that members of both the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) secretly negotiated with the gangs prior to the election to persuade them to vote in the election. The