This was one of the main promises made by Naib Buckel in the election campaign: to reduce organized crime and gang violence without declaring war on the world’s most violent country. And he achieves that. Since Buckel took over the presidency of El Salvador in June 2019, homicide rates have dropped to 20 per 100,000 population, when that country of just six million people was twice as registered. But everything collapsed on the last weekend of March. In just 48 hours, 80 people were killed.
Although Buckel attributed the killing cuts to the effectiveness of his government’s plan for territorial control, a journalistic investigation by the Salvadoran media outlet El Faro recently revealed that the current executive branch was in talks with the country’s main gang, Mara. Salvatrucha-13, Barrio 18 Revolucionarios and Barrio 18 Sureños, in exchange for maintaining a low homicide rate.
That is, the Buckle government used the same formula as previous executives: it made secret deals with these criminal structures, as the left-wing Farabundo March Front for National Liberation (FMNL) did, for example, in 2012. And it’s not just a confirmation of this well-known digital newspaper: The US Treasury Department has confirmed that the Buckley government had a covert truce with the gangs and even sanctioned two Salvadoran officials for organizing these meetings with high-ranking members of the gang. .
On Saturday, March 26, 62 homicides were recorded and, so far, it has become the deadliest day of the entire 21st century in El Salvador. This time it was not a crime between gang members, but the killings of civilians who had nothing to do with Mara.
“We received from the police that only 13 victims had a gang connection. We were able to verify that among the dead was a well-known surfer and a popular municipal employee who was not affiliated with these groups. “There is evidence that in this case the gangs, especially La Mara Salvatrucha, did not kill rivals or carry out internal cleansing, but killed civilians who had no connection with these criminal organizations,” Salvadoran journalist Oscar Martinez told todaytimeslive.com.
The editor-in-chief of El Faro claims that his team “with documents and intelligence from the same administration’s penitentiary centers” has shown that negotiations between the current government and the gangs began virtually after Bukelle came to power almost three years ago. .
Like other Salvadoran politicians, they have used gangs as both election tools and political weapons and promise a strong hand in elections, the journalist says. Buckel also took advantage of this now and showed that “gangs are a very effective enemy in order to place in the population the logic of necessary protection, the ransom of a society tired of suffering from these criminal groups.”
While it is still too early to know what happened in the last and deadly weekend of March, the gangs have already acted similarly in other secret negotiations. “When they think something is stuck in these negotiations, they use what they understand to be their greatest political asset: corpses, that is, they kill more to get more attention from them,” recalls Martinez, a journalist for ten years. Has been covering information about these criminal structures for a long time.
Given the failure of all these negotiations, Martinez believes that an important step could be taken in the fight against gangs if governments changed their strategy and informed the public about these dialogues. “If Salvadoran politicians, including this president and his government, have believed for at least the last decade that dialogue is needed to solve the problem of gangs, let them do it in front of the people, hell. Let them stop doing this in a cowardly way and take political consequences to structure well and call on international organizations to oversee them to explain to the population why they think it is necessary to talk to gangs to solve the problem. The problem, he says in a firm voice.
However, what has now changed compared to previous cases is the government’s reaction to the gangs. Following the wave of violence, on March 27, Buquelle declared a state of emergency in El Salvador, restricting civil liberties and extending the powers of the security forces by one month. Police have arrested him in recent days for this measure Approximately 7,000 gang membersAccording to the government, the president even threatens not to feed the arrested gang members if the violence in the country continues.
Excessive use of force by the El Salvadorian government has caused concern among UN and international human rights organizations.
This is a new scenario, says Martinez, in which “there is an autocrat in power who does not depend on anyone to make a decision, who can order the Legislative Assembly in a few minutes to change the criminal code or dismiss a judge because he did not do so.” Like his sentence, ”as happened with Magistrate Godofredo Salazar, who was transferred to another court after acquitting 42 alleged gang members for lack of evidence from the public ministry. “Buckele controls three forces of the state. It has no counterbalance and we have never had it before. “
The penal code reform that Martinez is pointing to is one that was approved by Congress in El Salvador on April 5 at the request of the president and that punishes the release of gang messages in the media by up to 15 years in prison. This is an event that restricts the right to freedom of the press and puts El Faro in a particularly difficult position as it is a media outlet that has deepened the phenomenon of violence and gangs over the last few years. country. However, resignations are not in his plans.
“It puts us in a very difficult situation. We can face up to 10 to 15 years in prison if we post any information, video or photo related to the gangs. This is Geg’s law, so that a different narrative from Bukele is not said. “We will have to spend more time with lawyers and change protocols, but we are not going to stop journalism,” Martinez said. In addition, he explained, they had been trying to attack El Faro for years, “even on charges of money laundering, without providing evidence” and therefore did not stop reporting.
These latest measures taken by the El Salvador government are compounded by others, which have also drawn criticism both inside and outside the Central American country. In May 2021, the Assembly, which is controlled by the Buccaneer Party – Nuevas Ideas – dismissed several judges of the Supreme Court of Justice and Attorney General Raul Melara. In September last year, the same judiciary approved the presidential election, despite being banned by the country’s constitution earlier, leaving the president open to a second term in office.
For all these reasons, Martinez believes that El Salvador is heading for dictatorship: “I’m talking to you not from a democracy, but from a country with a hybrid regime, with democratic make-up and many elements of authoritarianism.” “Buckel has shown that the most essential signs of democracy, such as the separation of powers, freedom of the press or political dissent, hinder him, he sees it as an obstacle to his political plan, which is absolute power,” the journalist concluded.
Source: El Diario
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
