In May, at a meeting with mayors, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, assured that Soyapango was the safest municipality in the country, safer than Costa Rica, the country in the region with the lowest crime rates.
However, a few months later, on December 3, the Salvadoran president announced that Soyapango was completely surrounded by military personnel and the National Civil Police (PNC), due to the high presence of gang members and the increase in crime.
Militarization or siege?
Bukele announced in statements that “8,500 soldiers and 1,500 agents have surrounded the city, while police and army extraction teams take it upon themselves to remove one by one all the gang members who are still there”. According to official spokespersons, this was not a case of militarization of the municipality, but a siege to prevent the escape of criminal elements still present.
Since the beginning of the operation, groups of ten to twenty soldiers and police have been seen circulating in the streets of the municipality asking passers-by for documentation and arresting those they consider suspicious, mainly young people.
Soyapango, with a population of 258,000 people, is one of the most populous municipalities in the country, according to official data from a few years ago, and a center of intense economic and industrial activity. Therefore, operations are also affecting the normal flow of commerce and the economy.
According to Bukele, this is the fifth phase of the government’s Territorial Control Plan, announced last November. This phase would consist of capturing gang members and other criminals hiding in places hitherto considered safe for gangs. A spokesman for the Defense Cabinet indicated that the intervention forces have lists with the names of criminals hidden in Soyapango, so the search is becoming more personalized.
staging
For the numerous opponents of the government, this massive mobilization is a new staging by the president, who is very fond of effect coups, which, although attracting attention, do not guarantee an improvement in the insecure situation in which a large part of the Salvadoran population lives.
According to the opposition, these coups would have the hidden objective of recovering the weakened popularity of the president among the population. Although for the –not very credible– research firm CID-Gallup, Bukele is the politician with the highest level of acceptance in Latin America, the truth is that, from the very high rates he had at the beginning of his term, he now reaches 58%, of according to data collected by other research companies. Although it is a high level of approval, the support persistently decreases, according to these same sources.
But, despite the contradictory nature of the measures, taking into account the official statements made a few months ago by the president, some of his ministers and the mayor of this municipality, Nercy Montano –who guaranteed that her municipality was the safest in all of Central America–, Defense Minister René Francis Merino Monroy assured that this strategy of military sieges will be implemented in other municipalities in the country.
Faced with these new announcements, and as usually happens with every controversial decision made by Bukele, criticism immediately arose from various sectors of the opposition, who consider that this measure not only has little chance of success, but also violates the human rights of the majority. of the population.
The FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) criticized the measure for violating the regulations on citizen security agreed in the Peace Accords. Leaders of other opposition spaces have expressed the same, such as the Vamos Party, which has branded Bukele as an authoritarian leader and compared him to Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
In the face of criticism, the Minister of Defense assured that “there are no complications for the honest population”, and that the degree of error is zero. However, Soyapango residents were not consulted on the measures applied.
It was not only from the political opposition that the reproaches came, but also from the police forces themselves. The MTP (Movimiento de los Trabajadores de la Policía) –a kind of union– has complained to the government and the media, indicating that the welfare of the police participating in the siege is not being taken into account. As they expressed, the police, after intense night patrols, must sleep on the floor and lack adequate food and basic conditions of personal hygiene.
Despite numerous criticisms of the government’s security policy, it is unlikely that Bukele will back down at this stage of the Territorial Control Plan. The president never backtracks and always finds a way out of trouble. When things don’t go well, he resorts to lies and deceit, but fewer and fewer citizens believe them.
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