The courts of El Salvador, where hardline President Nayib Bukele is waging a war against gangs, have sentenced dozens of members of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) to hundreds of years in prison, including one to more than a thousand years in prison, the public prosecutor’s office reported this Sunday (21).
Since March 2022, the president has faced gangs under an emergency regime, which authorizes arrests without a court decision. More than 90,000 people were arrested and around 8,000 were released as innocent, according to official sources.
Humanitarian organizations criticized, this Monday (22), the convictions handed down against nearly 250 gang members, considering these decisions as a propaganda operation by Bukele to demonstrate his severity.
The maximum prison term in El Salvador is 60 years, so the huge number of sentences announced on Sunday are in practice only symbolic, according to activists interviewed by the AFP news agency.
“Seeing convictions dating back thousands of years is more propaganda than anything else, because there is no life sentence in the country, and it serves the government to tell the world that the law is harsh here,” declared Ingrid Escobar, director of the NGO Humanitarian Legal Aid, from exile.
“These old convictions are a spectacle of the government amid the pain of many innocent people who remain imprisoned. We have reached a time where justice is obedient and unjust,” declared Samuel Ramírez, leader of the Movement of Victims of the Regime (Movir).
The public prosecutor’s office reported on his profile on
One of the members of the gang, classified as a terrorist by the United States, received a sentence of 1,335 years in prison. Ten others were sentenced to 958, 880, 739, 745, 739, 702, 639, 543, 530 and 463 years in prison, according to the release.
The judicial body explained that among the crimes committed by these MS-13 members between 2014 and 2022 are the murder of a university student and a football player, multiple cases of extortion from merchants, home invasions and drug trafficking.
The public prosecutor added that the gangs “created bases in different sectors” of the province of La Libertad, which “were used to plan all criminal acts in this jurisdiction.” The group extorted “victims who had businesses, demanding different amounts of money in exchange for not committing attacks on their lives,” added the organization, aligned with Bukele. “Some people have had to close their businesses for fear of threats.”
Bukele’s offensive against gangs has reduced homicides to historic levels in the Central American country, but human rights groups criticize the strategy and highlight abuses by security forces. According to the Humanitarian Legal Aid organization, 454 Salvadorans have died in prison since 2022.
Despite criticism, other governments in the region have announced they will adopt similar measures against crime. Bukele recently agreed to share his experience with Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves, who is facing an increase in crime in the country and plans to build a prison similar to Cecot, a Salvadoran mega-unit symbol of the fight against gangs.
About The Author
