I chuckled to myself because this seemed like such an odd greeting. But the more time I spent mingling with locals in El Salvador, the more it made sense.

The transformation that has taken place in the country over the past five years cannot be overstated.

Five years ago El Salvador had one of the highest murder rates in the world. It was basically a war zone. Gangs such as MS-13 and Barrio 18 were far more powerful than the government, and they enforced their own laws in their respective territories, sort of like the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The country's young president, Nayib Bukele, put an end to all that when he was elected in 2019.

Bukele invoked emergency powers and arrested more than 100,000 suspected gang members, then shipped them off to a special prison far away from the rest of society. In a country of 6.3 million, that amounts to over 1.5% of the entire population that's now locked up.

It was a controversial move to say the least… and I wonder about innocent people who may have been wrongfully imprisoned.

But El Salvadorans seem quite happy with the results; today their country boasts a lower homicide rate than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere aside from Canada.

Simultaneously, El Salvador also put itself on the map by being one of the first countries in the world to get behind crypto; they even made Bitcoin legal tender and passed a number of pro-crypto tax incentives.

Those are pretty much the two things that El Salvador is known for these days– putting tens of thousands of criminals in jail, and Bitcoin.

But I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the country has so much more going for it.

This was a place that was scraping the bottom of the barrel just a few years ago. Even aside from the crime problem, the economy was in the dumps. Corruption and bureaucracy ruled the day, and debts were rising.

In just a few short years, however, El Salvador has managed to turn itself around, and the economy has taken off.

It's not an accident. The government has slashed bureaucracy and established a number of incentives to bring in foreign capital and businesses.

One is the recently passed International Services Law, which offers significant tax incentives to service-based businesses, similar to Puerto Rico's famous Act 60.