El Salvador has decimated their ruthless gangs. But at what price?

SOYAPANGO, El Salvador – When the MS-13 band he managed the neighborhood of Las Margaritas, one of his strongholds The Saviourthere were rules you had to follow to stay alive.

You couldn’t wear the number 8 because it was associated with the rival gang on 18th Street, you couldn’t wear the brand of sneakers the gang members wore.

And you could not, under any circumstances, call the police.

“People couldn’t complain to the police about what the children would say,” says longtime resident Sandra Elizabeth Inglés, referring to the gang members.

“They have become the authority of this system.”

El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, was once known as the hemispherical capital of murderwith one of the highest homicide rates in the world outside a war zone.

But in the year since the government declared a state of emergency to crack down on gang violence and deployed the army on the streets, the country has experienced a remarkable transformation.

Now children play soccer late into the night on fields that were once gang territory.

Inglés collects soil for his plants next to an abandoned building that residents say has been used for gang killings.

Homicides have decreased.

Payments of extortion Taxes on businesses and residents, once an economy in its own right, have also fallen, according to analysts.

“You can walk freely,” said the Englishman.

“Many things have changed.”

El Faro, the leading media outlet in El Salvador, conducted a survey of the country earlier this year and offered a surprising balance:

Gangs, to a large extent, “do not exist”.

But that result, critics say, came at an incalculable price:

mass arrests that wiped out thousands of innocents, the erosion of civil liberties and the country’s descent into an increasingly autocratic police state.

Most Salvadorans seem willing to accept the deal.

Fed up with the gangs that terrorized them and forced so many to flee to the United States, the vast majority of the population supports the measures and the president who supports them, polls suggest.

With some approval ratings around 90%, the president of El Salvador, Nayib BukeleThe 41-year-old has become one of the most popular leaders in the world, winning fans across the Western Hemisphere.

Hondurans chanted Bukele’s name and cheered him at their president’s inauguration last year.

A poll has revealed that Ecuadorians, where violence is on the rise, think more of Bukele than of their own leaders.

While the politicians of Mexico and Guatemala vowing to emulate Bukele’s heavy hand, critics fear the country will become a dangerous negotiating model:

sacrifice the civil liberties for safety.

“I remain incredibly pessimistic about what this means for the future of democracy in the region,” said Christine Wade, an El Salvador expert at Washington College in Maryland.

“The risk is that this becomes a popular model for other politicians to say, ‘Well, we could give you more security in exchange for you giving up some of your rights.'”

The Salvadoran government has arrested more than 65,000 people over the past year, including children as young as 12, which is more than double the total prison population.

According to the government count, more than 5,000 people with no connection to the gangs they were imprisoned and eventually released.

According to the government, at least 90 people have died in custody.

Human rights groups have documented mass arbitrary detentions, as well as extreme overcrowding in prisons and reports of torture by the guards.

The Vice President of El Salvador, Happy Ulloa, She said in an interview that allegations of abuse by the authorities were being investigated and innocent people who had been detained were being released.

“There’s a error rangehe said, defending what he called an “almost surgically flawless” strategy.

“People can go out, buy things, go to the cinema, go to the beach, watch football matches,” he said.

“We have restored freedom to the people.”

In what were once some of the most dangerous parts of the country, lie abandoned houses that belonged to gang members refurbished and reoccupieds for new tenants.

in the streets of The daisiesa neighborhood in the once horribly violent Soyapango municipality in the center of the country, cars now park without their owners paying $10 a month to gang extortionists.

Before the crackdown, no one visited the municipality’s main open-air market without the permission of the gang’s henchmen, according to the vendors.

Now it is overflowing with those who want to be there.

When Inglés told people where he lived, in a cul-de-sac in Las Margaritas, they gasped.

“They told me, ‘Oh, no, if you live in Vietnam,'” recalls Inglés, as he serves mango juice in a bag to a kid at the kiosk that runs in front of his house.

I used to stare across the street at graffiti that read “see, listen and shut up,” says Inglés, a phrase used by the gang to intimidate residents into keeping quiet about their crimes.

The Englishman says he learned to bow his head:

“The less things you saw, the less problems you would have.”

The image of a bird has recently been painted on graffiti.

Juan Hernández, 41, wore 10 years without stepping on a soccer field located a few blocks from his house.

“It was grass,” she said, referring to the gangs’ territory.

“Bullets hit you left and right.”

He now uses the pitch to teach his 12-year-old son to play.

“He tells me I want to learn, I tell him, let’s go,” said Hernández.

The catalyst for the new reality emerging in El Salvador was a weekend of criminal rampage in March of last year that left more than 80 dead.

US officials said that, long before the crackdown, the Bukele government negotiated a deal with the ringleaders to reduce killings in exchange for benefits, including better prison conditions.

Many analysts believed that the increase in violence was a sign of the breach of the alleged pact; Bukele denied reaching such an agreement.

Following the March killings, El Salvador’s legislature, controlled by the ruling party, declared a state of emergency.

The army flooded gang areas across the country and arrested 13,000 people in just a few weeks.

One of them was the son of Morena Guadalupe de Sandoval, who he says he hasn’t seen or spoken to since he was arrested on his way back from work in the capital about a year ago.

She says authorities have accused her of being part of a criminal group, which she denies.

Every three months he visits the Izalco prison, where he says his son Jonathan González López is being held, a center in the west of the country where torture has been reported.

Ask about him. Sometimes he takes his wife and two-year-old son.

The best you hear is that still locked up

“Depression takes over,” says de Sandoval.

“I get awful when I think about how I can’t see him or talk to him.”

In a report released in December, Human Rights Watch and a Salvadoran organization called Cristosal interviewed people detained during the crackdown who were later released, who described the horrors they witnessed within the country’s prison system:

beatings, deaths, starvation rations.

One of them claimed that the guards were holding his head underwater “so he couldn’t breathe,” according to the report.

Another said they fed him two tortillas a day, which he had to share with another inmate.

De Sandoval says the crackdown has improved things in his neighborhood, an area called the Italian District that was once dominated by MS-13.

He doesn’t see young people smoking on the street. He says he no longer sees young people smoking weed on street corners.

“It’s safer,” he says.

“In that sense, it’s a good thing.”

But he can’t separate the bright side from his daily pain. Her son will be 22 “in” this month, she says. She dreams of seeing him only once.

“I just want to see it,” said de Sandoval, “even if it’s from afar.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society