Nayib Bukele Doubles Offense Against Gangs: Are Dark Times Coming to El Salvador?

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has announced a new stage in his fierce fight against gangs: without specifying the date, he announced that police and soldiers will surround the cities to arrest suspects. And he immediately attracted criticism from human rights organizations.

Bukele’s offensive against gang members has already left 58,000 detained since late March, as well as introducing a state of emergency, which allows arrests without warrants. Amnesty International has spoken out against a militarized response which considered purely repressive.

“What we’re basically going to do is surround the big cities and carry out the processes of extracting the terrorists who are inside those cities, without giving them a chance to escape,” El Salvador’s president said in a speech Wednesday.

The president spoke to some 14,000 soldiers concentrated on a patch of land near a military barracks on the outskirts of the city of San Juan Opico, 35km west of San Salvador.

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Bukele said this would not reveal the names of the cities “for security reasons”. that “in the coming days” they will be surrounded by police and soldiers, to carry out a meticulous search for the gang members and arrest them.

At the end of March, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador approved a state of emergency, the moment they registered up to 62 murders in one day. According to official sources, more than 58,000 people were captured in eight months, including members of gangs or people linked to criminal gangs.

The government indicates that measures to eradicate the violence are bearing fruit, given that, for example, there were no homicides this Wednesday.

The security plan applied would be accepted by 95% of Salvadorans according to the president himself, an argument he used to start phase 5 of the so-called Territorial Control Plan, which consists of surround large cities with 14 thousand soldiers.

Dispute​

President Bukele’s security policies are garnering criticism from NGOs. Dura was Astrid Valencia, Deputy Director of Research for the Americas of Amnesty International: “It is not surprising because President Bukele has just shown a militarized response, a response that violates human rights to a historical problem in the country: this environment of violence, of crime, of organized crime”.

Valencia added that the Salvadoran president “has given insufficient, incomplete responses throughout his mandate, which seek to create a false dichotomy and a false dilemma between human rights and public safety, when instead he should be in dialogue with civil society organizations that have many years of experience in the field of citizen security with solid and innovative ideas, eager to build, hand in hand with the state authorities, a new future for the country”.

What some organizations complain about is this there is a lack of global attention to the very serious problem of citizens’ safety.

“He is dealing with a purely militarized response that has been filled with allegations of arbitrary acts, violations of due process and, clearly, victims of violence, gangs and organized crime urgently deserve justice,” adds Astrid Valencia.

In mid-November, hundreds of Salvadorans returned to protest demanding the release of their relatives detained, they say, unjustifiably, under the emergency regime.

Before March and before the emergency regime started, there were 16,000 gang members incarcerated in El Salvador’s jails.

Most of the inmates are gang members MS-13 and its rival Barrio 18 in its Southern and Revolutionary factions.

Source: RFI

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