Bukele announces military siege of El Salvador towns to arrest gang members

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, announced this Wednesday (23) that he will promote a kind of security cordon in different cities, deploying police and military personnel for this purpose, in order to surround gang members and facilitate the prison of criminals.

This war on drugs led by the populist leader in the country, which takes place amidst an authoritarian shift, has already arrested more than 58,000 people, also accumulating a series of accusations of human rights violations.

Bukele made the announcement in the presence of 14,000 soldiers, concentrated in a field adjacent to a barracks in the region of San Juan Opico, 35 kilometers from San Salvador. “What we are going to do in practice is to surround large cities and withdraw the terrorists who are there, without giving them the possibility of escape,” he said.

He did not reveal, “for security reasons”, the name of the municipalities where these operations will be carried out, but he stated that they will take place “in the next few days”, without specifying a date.

According to Bukele, the proposal is based on the success that would have been seen in a similar action last month in the small town of Comasagua, 30 kilometers south of the capital. On that occasion, after a homicide in the town of 12,000 inhabitants, a police siege allowed, according to the government version, to dismantle a cell of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, known by the acronym MS-13.

The idea is to intercept criminals who try to escape and identify accomplices “who supply them with weapons, ammunition, food, cell phones and everything else they use to frighten the population”, said the president. Without presenting data on the operation or the popular assessment, he said that Salvadorans approve of this type of measure and ask for more operations of the type.

The sieges will be the fifth phase of a government security plan called Territorial Control, which was reinforced with a state of emergency enacted on March 27, in response to an escalation of violence that ended with the deaths of 87 people in an end of week.

Since then, this exceptional regime, which allows, among other things, arrests without a warrant, has been extended by the unicameral Congress —largely dominated by Bukele, as well as the Judiciary. Last time, parliamentarians extended the measure until mid-December.

Prior to March, prison statistics showed 16,000 gang members in detention, most linked to MS-13 and its rivals in Barrio 18 and two related factions, Southerners and Revolutionaries.

The state of emergency is questioned by international organizations, which point to a series of human rights violations, inside and outside prisons. The government even ordered the construction of a prison for 40,000 gang members in the rural area of ​​the city of Tecoluca, in the center of the country, which should be ready by the end of the year.

Since the beginning of the state of emergency, arbitrary arrests have been the most frequent complaint of human rights violations in El Salvador. Of the complaints received by the organization Cristosal, they are present in 97.4%; torture and ill-treatment, at 12.1%. By the end of June, the organization had counted 54 people killed in state custody in penal centers or hospitals.

As shown to Sheetbillboards indicate the number that Salvadorans should call if they want to report a pandilheiro, as members of criminal groups that control part of the territory are called.

Bukele, elected in 2019 on an anti-establishment platform and promising a hard-line policy against crime, has already invaded the Assembly with military personnel since the beginning of his term, removed judges from the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court and harassed journalists. Still, its popular approval is among the highest in the region.

In May, the newspaper El Faro revealed audio recordings showing negotiations between a member of the government and MS-13 criminals. The wave of violence at the end of March would have occurred because of the end of a pact.

The Bukele government’s response to this rupture was more repression.