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El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced Thursday that more than 20,000 gang members had been detained since a state of emergency was declared across the country a month ago. Bukele’s decision came after a bloodbath took place in just two days: from March 25 to 27, more than 80 people were killed across the country. The crimes are attributed to gangs that have been terrorizing the small Central American nation for years.
“As of 7pm this day, the total number of captured terrorists is 20,290, in just 33 days”, this was the announcement by President Nayib Bukele in his favorite medium, Twitter, a month after he decreed a state of emergency in the entire territory to curb gang violence, giving broad powers to the police and the army.
On March 26, the right to freedom of assembly and association was suspended, in addition to allowing telephone tapping without judicial authorization and police custody for fifteen days.
The 40-year-old president, who has the support of 91% of the population according to a recent poll, then had the powerful Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs under his sights, whose members are identifiable by the tattoos that cover their bodies.
The streets of El Salvador were taken over by the military while police controls, especially in poor neighborhoods, increased.
The National Assembly, led by the president’s New Ideas party, passed laws to quintuple penalties for belonging to a criminal group and allow children as young as 12 to be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.
A president who has made the fight against gangs his trademark
Bukele has bet everything on reducing crime and 2021 was the year with the lowest number of homicides in thirty years, with 1,147 deaths reported. The president, who attributed this achievement to his Territorial Control Plan, which consists of a massive deployment of soldiers, considered the two days of violence in March an affront.
But many analysts refute that the decrease in the homicide rate is due to this Control Plan.
The maras – gangs – are the aftermath of the civil war of #The Savior which ended in 1992. In 30 years they were able to imprison 16,000 gang members, not to mention that @nayibbukele in the past month he put 20,000 more prisoners.
– Andrés Suárez Jaramillo (@AndresSuarezJ) April 28, 2022
In August 2021, an investigation by the media outlet El Faro It showed that the decrease in homicides was the consequence above all of a secret negotiation between the Executive and the main gangs in the country; Mara Salvatrucha 13 and Barrio 18.
Even at the end of 2021, the US State Department had imposed sanctions on two members of the Salvadoran executive branch for “secret negotiations” with organized crime.
Today, no one knows for sure the exact reasons for the massacre at the end of March. At the beginning of April, Bukele affirmed that “curing” the country of gangs “is like curing a body with cancer”, since the gangs form “a social fabric that is difficult to break” because they involve entire families.
Bukele also stated that belonging to the gangs “only has two results: jail or death” and announced the construction of new detention centers.
The limits of Bukele’s hard line
Extortion and drug trafficking are the main sources of income for the “maras”, whose members are estimated at 70,000, of which more than 34,000 are now in prison, including recent arrests.
But as the president responds by stepping up the crackdown, many wonder if the police and judicial response will be enough to curb the violence in this country, where inequalities remain deep.
The academic Carlos Carcach analyzed for the AFP news agency that the government is managing to “neutralize a large number of active criminals, and (that) there are indications that it is possible to completely neutralize these structures.”
But it is a “long-term” fight to discourage young people from joining these gangs, he added.
In a country that registers a poverty of 33.3% of its population and in which many unemployed try to emigrate to the United States, it is also about “changing the reasons” that push young people to join the “maras”, according the comments to AFP, by José Miguel Cruz, a specialist in the gang phenomenon.
The country must go through “a serious process of disarmament, demobilization and reintegration,” added the specialist.
with AFP
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