The President of El SalvadorNayib Bukele, announced this Tuesday that the “war” against the gangs will intensify after the murder of three policemen during an ambush, presumably perpetrated by these organizations.
(Read: They sentence a gang leader in El Salvador to 1,090 years in prison)
“This is not going to stay like this and they are going to pay dearly for the murder of these three heroes“, declared the president during a press conference in which he blamed the Barrio 18 gang, of the so-called Sureños faction.
(You are interested in: The United States regrets the murder of three police officers in El Salvador)
Among the riddled agents are the head of the 911 emergency system section and two police officers (a man and a woman) who were attacked in the La Realidad neighborhood, in Santa Ana, the second largest city in the country, about 60 km west of San Salvador.
Gang members are fools, because we are not going to back down. We are going to intensify this war against the gangs. Now you are going to see, for real, what it means to unleash this security force.
In response to an escalation of 87 murders committed between March 25 and 27, Congress accepted a request from Bukele to decree an exceptional regime, which has allowed the arrest of 43,086 suspected gang members.
This exceptional regime, extended until the end of July, allows arrests without a court order. It has been considered “unsustainable” by the charge d’affaires of the US embassy in San Salvador, Patrick Ventrell.
“It is an unsustainable policy, which has already left tens of thousands of detainees and numerous complaints of human rights violations, arbitrary arrests and deaths of detainees as well,” said Ventrell.
For Bukele, “saying that the emergency regime is unsustainable was probably an unfortunate opinion.” “If you mean it can’t be forever, we agree, it can’t be chemotherapy forever,” she said.
But “if it means that chemotherapy is stopped before the cancer is eliminated, then it is totally absurd because the only thing that we are going to achieve is that the cancer kills us all.”
Organizations such as Amnesty International and the NGO Human Rights Watch They have called on the Salvadoran government to respect human rights. The gangs MS-13 and Barrio 18 mainly operate in El Salvador.
Until before the government onslaught, some 16,000 of its members were imprisoned. But with the arrests of the last three months, 59,086 members would be behind bars, 84% of the 70,000 members officially considered to exist in the country.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from EFE and AFP
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