El Salvador’s Gang War
President Nayib Bukele is imprisoning children and criminalizing journalists
So first, I want to thank everyone who has supported me, donated and subscribed. It is currently helping me get on my feet as I navigate my job loss.
I want to address what’s happening in El Salvador. The country is currently under a 30-day state of emergency after 62 homicides occurred in a single day late in March. And the Salvadoran government’s response is to commit human rights violations. President Bukele is cutting food for people in prisons and arrested at least 600 people in the days following the spike in homicides. To achieve this, President Nayib Bukele’s administration is arbitrarily detaining people and profiling working-class neighborhoods. This is not so much a war on gangs as it is a war on the people.
This is also mano dura [iron fist] AKA tough-on-crime practices that expand criminalization of Salvadoran youth, which in the past has allowed for arbitrary detentions and extra judicial killings (meaning police killing suspects without any sort of trial or due process). El Salvador has been trying this on-and-off (mostly on) for at least a couple decades. It hasn’t lead to any long term results and has been repeatedly condemned by human rights organizations. One could argue it worsens the problem. Very often calls for mano dura policies often act as fascist dogwhistle for conservative politicians throughout Latin America.
Mano dura is also product of our war and all the inequality and unhealed wounds that linger. This style of militarized policing is a product of death squads from our civil war. Death squads were propped up by the U.S.-sponsored right-wing authoritarian government in the 1980s. They disappeared peoples, carried out genocidal massacres (El Mozote) and killed beloved social justice figures like San Óscar Romero. If you don’t believe me, check out the official U.N. report from the war that states that 85% of war atrocities were committed by state agents.
And yes, they are currently rounding people up randomly who may fit the profile of a gang member. Here is a clip below by FocosTV that shows a mother talking about how her son was beaten by police and detained in the current raids:
Children aren’t exempt from these gang sweeps, in fact they are prime targets. President Bukele is imprisoning children as young as 12 and treating them like adults. This is despicable and it also evokes our 12-year civil war where 12 was the age children were recruited to war. This isn’t conjecture. Salvadorans whether we realize or not, know someone (usually an adult man), that was either recruited at this age, feared being recruited at this age or was sent to migrate to to avoid recruitment. That’s whole plot to the film Sin Nombre (2009), which is arguably the most watched film about the Salvadoran Civl War. (Please no comment’s about all the Mexican accents in that film. I’m tired of defending it.) Really in many ways the war has never ended, it has just morphed into whatever this decades-long gang war that is happening. I’m often told to stop focusing so much on the war and focus on the current gang problem instead but the two, especially the part police and military play, cannot be divorced from each other.
And to top it off, El Salvador is criminalizing journalists who report on the gang war. The Salvadoran government passed a new law that would punish journalists with up to 15 years of prison time. Salvadoran digital newspaper El Faro shut down its website for a day to protest the censorship. El Faro has extensively reported on how current and past governments secretly collaborate and negotiate with gangs.
Don’t forget that this problem is also transnational. The U.S. has it’s own brand of MS-13 hispanic panic. Here’s a video refresher by me:
Anyways before your creepy Salvadoran tío comes into my inbox to call for my head because I am being critical of their papi Bukele. Here’s my disclaimer:
Lastly if you wan’t some education resources about what is going on in El Salvador I recommend CISPES for analysis and ways to get involved: https://cispes.org/
Stay safe out there,
Danny