(San Salvador) A total of 75% of suspected gang members have been arrested in El Salvador, the security minister said Tuesday, two years after President Nayib Bukele declared “war” against these organizations.
On March 27, 2022, Mr. Bukele declared a merciless “war” on the “maras”, the gangs controlling a large part of the country, after a record 87 homicides in a single weekend.
Two years later, Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro reported that 79,184 suspected members of these organizations had been arrested.
“With the record of arrests that we have, we can say that we are at 75% of what we had assessed and that we are missing 25%,” the minister declared on the TCS television channel.
Nearly 25,000 suspected gang members remain to be arrested, he added, emphasizing that not all are in El Salvador.
Since the state of emergency came into force in March 2022, authorities have seized 8,122 vehicles, 3,965 firearms and 20,140 phones, according to an official report.
With the massive deployment of the army and police, the government largely succeeded in dismantling the criminal networks which practiced extortion, drug trafficking, assassinations and terrorized the population.
“In a short time,” Mr. Villatoro insisted, the security situation “transformed” in the country.
An investigation by the specialist site InSight Crime estimated that the small Central American country had nearly 120,000 criminal gang members two years ago.
But human rights organizations criticize Nayib Bukele’s methods, denouncing arbitrary detentions, mistreatment, cases of torture and deaths in prison.
A law adopted last July also makes it possible to try up to 900 suspected criminals during the same trial.
The authorities claim to have freed more than 7,000 innocent people, incarcerated after being wrongly mistaken for members of the “maras”.