San Salvador.- The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele warned the gangs on Monday that if they increase homicides in the country, they will remove food from prisons where, according to the president, some 23,000 members of said structures are imprisoned.
“I’m going to take the opportunity to send a message to the criminals (…) you unleash a wave of crime and we take away the food in the prisons (…) so you better stay calm and let yourself be arrested,” Bukele said during a graduation event for 205 students from the National Academy of Public Security (ANSP) that was broadcast on social networks.
The president pointed out that “rumors are out there that they want to start taking revenge on honest people at random”, “do that and there will be no meal time in prisons. Let’s see how long your homeboys (gang members) last in there “, he warned.
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“I swear to God that they don’t eat rice,” he stressed.
And he added: “I don’t care what the international organizations say, that they come to protect our people, that they come to take those gang members away if they love them so much, we hand them all over.”
The president also said this Monday, during the military graduation, that the gangs are the “armed wing” of humanitarian organizations, the international community and opposition parties.
On Sunday he also launched this accusation and published that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and journalists are also “partners of the gang members.”
“There is no doubt that their attacks will intensify as they feel that they lose their armed arm,” Bukele said.
El Salvador completed a week under an emergency regime on Sunday after an escalation of murders that claimed the lives of more than 80 people.
Congress suspended, at the request of Bukele and without any study or discussion, various constitutional rights, including the defense and inviolability of telecommunications.
The government has carried out massive arrests of alleged gang members, in what it has called a “war against the gangs,” as did its predecessors.
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The security forces have captured 5,747 alleged gang members, while relatives of the detainees seek information and have reported attacks.
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