President Nayib Bukele has been harshly criticized for the alleged violation of human rights.
Salvadoran authorities have arrested more than 9,000 suspected gang members in the last 15 days, President Nayib Bukele announced this Sunday, in the midst of a state of emergency promoted by the president after a spike in homicides that from March 25 to 27 left 87 people dead.
“More than 9,000 gang members (arrested) in just 15 days. We continue the war against gangs,” the president said on Twitter, criticized by humanitarian organizations at the local and international level for alleged human rights violations.
El Salvador, in its fight against gangs, had not arrested thousands of alleged gang members in such a short period of time in the last two decades.
For its part, the National Civil Police (PNC) reported on Twitter that “507 terrorists” were captured on Saturday. Since the beginning “of the war against gangs, we have put a total of 9,120 gang members behind bars.”
In response to gang violence, the police and army began mass arrests on March 26, and a day later the ruling party-controlled Congress passed a state of emergency giving legal cover to warrantless arrests.
In addition, Congress approved, at the request of Bukele, reforms to increase the maximum sentence for belonging to gangs from nine to 45 years in prison and punish the dissemination of gang messages in the media with up to 15 years in prison.
The legislation is also directed against those who “mark” their territories with acronyms, a practice that gang members use to intimidate and threaten with death those who report them to the authorities.
Coordinated by the Directorate of Penal Centers, prisoners in El Salvador began Thursday to erase graffiti that violent gangs use to mark the territory in which they operate.
“We are not going to leave a single trace that the gangs have existed, socially we are going to end them and we are already doing it in numbers because they are being taken to prisons,” declared the director of Penal Centers, Osiris Luna.
The Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs, among others, add up to some 70,000 members, and as of March 16,000 of them are in prison, but according to the reports of the latest arrests, the figure would rise to more than 25,000 private of freedom.
El Salvador closed 2021 with 1,147 homicides (18 per 100,000 inhabitants), while in 2020 it registered 1,341 violent deaths.
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