under a exception regime which is about to turn half a year, the government reports daily on the drastic decrease in homicides Y extortion in the country after the massive arrests of what the authorities say are gang members.
The Association of Distributors of El Salvador (ADES) recently stated that extortion in retail stores has been reduced by 80%.
“The results of the emergency regime have been overwhelming, we have had a strong impact on these terrorist structures“, said on Tuesday the Minister of Justice and Security, Gustavo Villatoro.
deterrent effect
The war against the gangs “has a deterrent effect“, says the researcher from the Higher School of Economics and Business (ESEN), Carlos Carach. “It takes individuals who are presumably very criminally active out of circulation.”
All this under an exceptional regime, which allows warrantless arrestsdeclared in response to an escalation of violence that claimed the lives of 87 people from March 25 to 27.
This system has been extended month by month by the Salvadoran Congress, controlled by President Bukele’s allies, and will continue until at least the end of September.
A survey of the José Simeon Cañas Central American University In June, it revealed that 89.3% of citizens consider that the exceptional regime promoted by Bukele helped “a lot or somewhat” to control crime in the country.
Arbitrary arrests?
But organizations like Amnesty International (AI) either Human Rights Watch (HRW) and even US diplomacy have called on the Salvadoran government to respect human rights, in the face of reports of detentions of innocents.
Of those detained, 85% are men and 15% women, according to official figures. 68.9% are accused of belonging to the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)the one with the greatest presence in El Salvador, followed by the factions southerners (17.7%) and revolutionaries (12.7%) of the 18th neighborhood gang.
With the exception regime, prisoners accused of belonging to gangs have gone from 16,000 to 66,000. According to the latest government estimate, those gangs have 76,000 membersbetween prisoners and free.
For the director of University Observatory of Human Rights (OUDH)), Danilo Flores, “not all the people who have been detained are gang members, there are innocent people who have been captured and their personal freedom has been affected.”
strong hand laws
In April, at Bukele’s request, Congress reformed the Penal Code to punish gang members with up to 45 years in prison.
But Villatoro announced that they will soon present other reform proposals to ensure that they do not get out of jail. Most of them are still under preventive detention, without trial or sentence.
The reforms will cover Laws of Organized Crime, Telephone Interventions and the Judicial Branch. The idea “is to create procedural rules precisely so that society wins against these terrorists (gang members),” the minister stressed.
To house part of the detainees, Bukele ordered the construction of a gigantic prison for 40,000 gang members in a rural area of central El Salvador, which should be ready before the end of the year.
El Salvador has been hit by a bloody civil war of more than a decade, which culminated in 1992. Burdened by poverty, thousands of its citizens have migrated in recent years.
Source: Ambito
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