For the president of El Salvador, there is no doubt that the policeman was murdered by “pandigeros”, members of one of the gangs, or “maras”, against whom he declared a merciless “war” more than a year ago.
Its president El Salvador Naguib Bukele announced on Wednesday that he had ordered the army and police to surround Nueva Concepcion, a city in the north of the Central American country, where a policeman was murdered a day earlier.
For Mr. Bukele, there is no doubt that the policeman was murdered by “pandigeros”, members of one of the gangs, or “maras”, against whom he declared a merciless “war” more than a year ago.
“We set up a security perimeter around the community of Nueva Concepcion, (in the province of) Chalatenago, with over 5,000 members of the armed forces and 500 of the police,” as part of an operation to arrest the perpetrators, the head of state said via Twitter, his preferred social networking site.
Soldiers and police cordoned off the town in the early hours of the morning, going from house to house to conduct searches and check the identity documents of residents and passers-by, according to media reports.
Maximino Antonio Vazquez was killed while “on patrol with other police officers” in the city of about 30,000 people about 80 kilometers north of the capital San Salvador, authorities said.
He is the fourth police officer to be killed by alleged “mareros” since a state of emergency was imposed in El Salvador in March 2022, allowing tens of thousands of arrests to be made without warrants.
“They will pay very dearly for the murder of our hero,” said Mr. Bukele, who on Tuesday vehemently attacked “human rights NGOs” who, according to him, are “only for the rights of criminals.”
“Let all the ‘human rights’ NGOs know how we are going to clean up these bloody murderers and those who work with them. We will send them to prison, from which they will never come out,” hammered the head of state via Twitter.
Although the action of thugs is “reprehensible”, the encirclement of Nueva Concepción by thousands of soldiers and police is causing “fear and anxiety to the innocent population of the area (…) who suffered from the inhumanity of the civil war”, which has been raging in El Salvador since from 1980 to 1992, Miguel Montenegro, coordinator of the Salvadoran NGO Human Rights Commission, told AFP.
Source :Skai
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