El Salvador police encompass city able to ‘root out and battle deadly gang members’

Thousands of military personnel and law enforcement surrounded an El Salvador town to try and root out “lethal” gang members.

More than 2,000 soldiers and 500 police officers gathered in an effort to quash remnants of gangs El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said were hiding in the area. “There is a group of gang members in hiding. We have established a security fence throughout the neighborhood… to extract every last gang member in the area,” Bukele wrote in a post on X.

Authorities also surrounded the San Marcos neighbourhood with a military fence, setting up checkpoints to make sure no criminals could escape, according to Defence Minister René Francis Merino Monroy.

El Salvador is a country that has grappled with a “gang problem” for decades, with Mara Sulvatrucha (MS-13) being a mainstay on the streets.

The San Marco blockade is the latest in a string of harsh crackdowns enacted by Bukele, in order to try and tackle the very high homicide rates in El Salvador.

Bukele controversially brought in a month-long state of emergency on March 27, 2022, but has regularly renewed it – something which has drawn criticism from human rights activists. “We met with President Nayib Bukele and he pledged to respect human rights. Since then, however, he has repeatedly failed to keep his word,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International, in 2022.

Another part of Bukele’s measures is the “futuristic mega-prison” where thousands of “gang” members are held. The Terrorism Confinement Centre holds more than 12,000 gang members sleeping in four-tier bunks in 80-man cells.

Salvadoran journalist Rubén Díez toured the all-white super-jail. Director Belarmino Garcia told him that there’s no hope of rehabilitation and the prisoners will be kept in the jail for the rest of their natural lives. “This is a maximum security regime,” he said. “There is no visiting time for them.”

President Bukele scrapped human rights legislation in order to bring the gangs under control, and Díez says some of the inmates have been locked up with little or no evidence presented against them.

He explained: “If you have gang tattoos, then you’re a gang member. It’s taken for granted that you have committed murder – no further proof is needed.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, at one point El Salvador had the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 1% of the entire population behind bars.

Some argue Bukele’s strict anti-gang policies are “dystopian” and can lead to innocent civilians getting bundled into prison without a fair trial.

However, homicide rates in the country have dropped off steeply, and Bukele is enjoying huge approval ratings.

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