(San Salvador) El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced on Sunday that he had deployed 6,000 soldiers and police to surround gang members still active in the north of the country after the deaths of two people.
“At this moment, 5,000 soldiers and 1,000 police officers have surrounded the districts of San José Cancasque, San Antonio Los Ranchos, Potonico and San Isidro Labrador to completely dismantle this clique,” Mr. Bukele wrote on the social network X.
Two homicides occurred recently in this region, located some 90 km north of the capital San Salvador, where “two culprits”, members of the Barrio 18 Sureños gang, were captured, said the Salvadoran president, very popular for his war against criminal gangs and largely re-elected last February.
“We will not stop until we have eradicated the few remaining gangs,” he warned in his message, accompanied by a video showing the impressive deployment of law enforcement. and two inmates kneeling and handcuffed.
“We are going to completely clean the area, we are going to extract every last vestige of the gangs,” Defense Minister René Francis Merino Monroy also posted on X.
El Salvador has been living under a state of emergency decreed by the current head of state for two years, during which nearly 76,000 people were arrested without a warrant and more than 7,000 were released because they were innocent.
Salvadoran gangs, born in the streets of Los Angeles in the United States, are held responsible by the government for some 120,000 homicides in nearly three decades, a figure higher than the 75,000 deaths during the twelve years of civil war (1980 -1992).
After the war ended, Salvadorans began living under the terror of the MS-13 gang and its rival Barrio 18 with its two factions, Sureños and Revolucionarios, which together have some 100,000 members.
Human rights organizations criticize the emergency regime established by Mr. Bukele, denouncing “arbitrary detentions”, “torture” and “deaths” in prison.