1 / 3Photo: El Salvador’s presidential office/AP/TT
One percent of the country’s population has been locked up – in just one year.
El Salvador’s war on gangs has made authoritarian President Nayib Bukele the most popular leader in Latin America.
But the critics raise the alarm about massive legal abuses.
The turning point came on Sunday, March 27 last year.
After a weekend with 87 recorded murders – extremely bloody even in a country that had long topped the world’s violence statistics – Nayib Bukele declared a state of emergency.
Until then, the president had already been able to boast of a reduced murder rate since he took office in 2019. Successes that are suspected to have been achieved through a secret pact with gang leaders.
With his trust on the line, Bukele declared an all-out war on the gangs.
Police were given powers to arrest anyone they suspected of links to organized crime. On several occasions, security forces have surrounded entire communities, going door-to-door in search of suspected gang members.
So far, over 71,000 people have been arrested.
That corresponds to one percent of the country’s population – or around seven percent of all Salvadoran adolescent boys and young men.
Calmer on the streets
The government has had a new prison built with a capacity for 40,000 prisoners. Parliament has approved mass trials where hundreds of detainees can be tried as a group. The maximum sentence for gang membership has been increased to 45 years.
The stated goal is to crush the gangs.
“We will cleanse our country and eradicate this plague,” wrote the 42-year-old Bukele, who has a background in the PR industry, on social media in May.
And the hard-line tactics have – at least so far – paid off.
The gangs “are no longer active on the streets of El Salvador – at least not like they used to,” the investigative news site El Faro found after visiting 14 locations in the country in February. Residents who previously lived under constant threat can now walk freely and small business owners can run their businesses without being forced to pay patronage fees.
High price
The change comes in time for next year’s election.
According to the constitution, a president may serve a five-year term in power. But the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, filled with pro-Bukele judges, has ruled that the president can still stand for re-election.
Basic rights are out of whack in El Salvador. Experts warn that the authoritarian president – who jokingly called himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and who became famous abroad for introducing bitcoin as the official currency – has begun a dismantling of democracy.
But the war on the gangs has given Bukele popularity figures of between 80 and 90 percent.
At the same time, many pay a high price for his success. Thousands of complaints have poured in about people being arrested on false grounds, citing a tattoo, an anonymous tip or being in the wrong place. Desperate women have had to search in vain for answers about what happened to their abducted sons and husbands.
“Don’t bother us”
Over 150 people have died since they were arrested, according to the human rights organization Cristosal. In many cases, the bodies bore signs of torture, according to the report.
Latin America has bitter experience from previous “wars” against organized crime. Iron hands have ultimately lost their grip on the situation when the root causes of crime, such as poverty, inequality and corruption, have been neglected and continue to drive people into crime. At the same time as mass incarceration and legal abuses hardened new groups.
Bukele dismisses all criticism.
“‘Human rights’ organizations should know that we will wipe out these satanic killers and their collaborators, we will throw them in jail and they will never come out,” he writes on X, formerly Twitter, adding:
“We don’t care about your pathetic reports.”