Saturday, March 26, 2022 will remain in the memories of Salvadorans as the most violent day in the last twenty years. In just a few hours, 62 homicides were reported nationwide in El Salvador.
To deal with the serious emergency, on March 27 the Legislative Assembly approved the Regime of Exception, at the initiative of President Nayib Bukele expressed in the Council of Ministers. This Regime was to last for a period of thirty days but was renewed month by month and is still in effect.
Through this Decree, constitutional guarantees typical of a truly democratic society were suspended, such as: freedom of association and assembly (Article 7 of the Constitution of the Republic, p. 2-3); the right to information (Article 7 of the Constitution of the Republic, p. 2-3); the right to information on the grounds for detention and defense (Art. 12 inc. 2 Cn, p. 3); the 72-hour limit on administrative detention (Art. 13 inc. 2 Cn, p. 3-4); and the inviolability of correspondence and telecommunications (Art. 24 Cn, p. 5).
To try to understand how this rapid escalation of events came about, it is necessary to give an overview of the actors involved.
THE SALVADORAN MARAS
The origins of these organized criminal groups date back to the end of the civil conflict that culminated with the signing of the Peace Treaties in 1992. Within a few years of abandoning violence as a political means, the U.S. government, which had taken a central role in the Salvadoran conflict, initiated a policy of deporting criminals to their countries of origin.
The members of the California gangs who thus returned to El Salvador brought with them the organizational patterns typical of U.S. crime, and these inevitably ended up influencing the criminal groups here, transforming them into a more organized, complex and violent phenomenon. The new gangs, known as “maras” or “pandillas,” grew rapidly, deeply marking the postwar period in El Salvador.
The violence associated with the Salvadoran mara phenomenon flows in four directions: war between rival gangs, gang violence against communities, state violence toward maras, and violent responses of maras toward the state.
Living in a given territory defines membership in one pandilla rather than another, even if it is only a few blocks away. These spaces are out of state control and this is where Salvadoran criminal life develops. Access to the areas is controlled and limited to certain times of the day, punctuated by a strict curfew. The people who live in these areas are forced to pay the constant extortion that fuels the maras phenomenon economically. This coercive power that has gone unchallenged, combined with violence and constant threats, forces thousands of people to leave their neighborhoods, their cities or their countries.
The undeniable impact that pandillas have on daily life in El Salvador has meant, over the years, periodic attempts at negotiation conducted by the government with the aim of countering the phenomenon.
PREVIOUS GOVERNMENTS’ APPROACH
Public institutions address the problem on a daily basis, but have so far failed to solve it definitively.
In 2003, when the ARENA Party – of nationalist, conservative and neoliberal orientation – was in government, repression was first introduced as a strategy to eliminate maras. Thus, for the next five years, leading members of the criminal groups were imprisoned. The political reaction caused, in addition to the overcrowding of prisons, a forced redistribution of power within the criminal gangs, which, right from inside the prisons, reformed their internal system, even to the point of strengthening it.
In 2011, the first government of the FMLN – the current leftist political party inspired by revolutionary Augustin Farabundo Martí, a former guerrilla in the conflict that ended in 1992 – experimented with a new approach to dealing with the problem of the maras: a kind of détente that included, among other interventions, the transfer of leaders to less secure prisons in exchange for their commitment that the murder rate perpetrated by their affiliates would decrease. Although this truce promoted by the then ruling party did indeed lead to an exponential and unprecedented reduction in the number of murders in El Salvador, it was never accepted by the public and the political establishment-including some officials and leaders of the FMLN itself. Distrust also justified by the fact that the politicians who had promoted this strategy never fully clarified the government’s actual role in this arrangement with the maras, thus dispelling once and for all doubts about the total transparency and bonhomie of the operation.
In 2014, another change of government returned the pandillas to maximum security prisons, giving them the status of terrorist organizations. The response of these criminal groups was not long in coming. Indeed, 2015 was marked by major violence and killings, especially of Salvadoran police and military personnel.
In turn, the police and military began to adopt strategies increasingly typical of a country at war, going so far as to perpetrate territorial control procedures that were not entirely legal.
NAYIB BUKELE AND THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM
The 2019 presidential elections saw the victory of Nayib Bukele, an independent candidate of the Nuevas Ideas party – promoter of a social conservatism diametrically opposed to the political system that had been established so far among the previously mentioned parties. The overwhelming victory, also won thanks to his promise to fight hard against the violence of the maras, allowed Bukele to change Salvadoran politics from within, implementing economic reforms – very famous, also and especially for the criticism he drew on his presidency, is the one related to Bitcoins – but also judicial and pertaining to the national security sector.
Last 2021, on the occasion of the debut of the new Legislative Assembly, Bukele ordered the dismissal of five magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber and the Attorney General’s Office through what has been dubbed a “Self-Coup.” In their place were inserted trusted officials from Nuevas Ideas.
In general, the political strategies undertaken so far by Bukele have proven to be imprudent, reckless, and characterized by a strong authoritarian bias – which is being exacerbated even more every day due to the non-existence of an opposition capable of countering government choices. Two concrete facts that perfectly explicate the current authoritarian political situation are that:
– in just two years, military spending has doubled
– last September 2021, El Salvador’s highest court ruled that the president can serve two consecutive terms, paving the way for Bukele’s possible reelection in the 2024 elections
STATE OF EXCEPTION IN EL SALVADOR…
Although publicly the President categorically condemns the Salvadoran maras, he negotiated with them in great secrecy and then made sure that, with the connivance of the Prison Authorities, everything was covered up.
Returning to the events of last March 26 – when some 87 members of the criminal gangs were murdered in two days – in order to give an immediate government response, Bukele convened the Legislative Assembly, thus having it approved the state of exception for 30 days (later extended and currently in effect) consisting of:
– the suspension of the freedom of meeting;
– the possibility of intercepting the communications and correspondence of the population without the need to obtain the Court’s authorization in advance;
– the possibility for the Authorities – military and police – to detain for 15 days anyone deemed to be a suspect.
Since the signing of the 1992 Peace Treaties, it does not appear that such a restrictive measure of the population’s individual freedoms has ever been adopted. In fact, the only “similar precedent” that can be discerned in Salvadoran policies is the Special Decree issued during the pandemic to restrict, among other things, the right to free transit.
Further inflaming the climate, which is increasingly taking on the appearance of a civil war, are the findings of a landmark journalistic investigation. The pool revealed that the unprecedented wave of murders that bloodied the streets of El Salvador for two days was triggered by an alleged violation of a pact between the government and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) gang. On the point, however, President Bukele’s government has yet to clarify the situation. In the meantime, national and international organizations report that a number of human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests by the security forces, are being committed during the period of the exception regime: in fact, to date, more than 43,000 people are in detention as a result of the application of this regime.
As if that were not enough, the president declared that the exception regime will be extended as long as necessary, calling it the “chemotherapy to eliminate the cancer of maras from the country.“
Three aspects are frightening in this tense situation:
1) the large number of mass arrests and conducted entirely arbitrarily and, often, using force by the police and military. Estimates speak of some 3,000 cases of arbitrary arrests which, following the abolition introduced by the exception regime of the 72-hour limit on administrative detention, can force innocent people into detention for days, perhaps months;
2) the uncertain duration of the exception regime. The President recently stated that “clearly the exception regime is exception, it will not last forever” and “we do not expect it to last a decade, but neither do we expect it to be removed in two, three months before the war against the gangs is over.” Seeing the first concrete results in terms of social dissent and human rights violations directly related to the same in fact, the longer this regime is in place the more we risk moving toward civil revolt of a population already greatly tested by the social and economic effects of the pandemic
3) the resilience of the Salvadoran social fabric in the immediate future. Prison, in fact, has proven to be a place of radicalization for Salvadoran criminal organizations, so it may not be the most suitable solution to counter the spread of violence in the country, in addition to involving the detention of innocent people given the arbitrariness of the strategy. What is more, it is shaping up to be necessary to find alternative sources to sustain the massive increase in funds for the armed forces and defense realized following the adoption of the exception regime. This threatens even more the social and economic resilience of El Salvador’s interior.
… AND THE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE POPULATION
A very strict censorship mechanism was also adopted with the exception regime, which makes it impossible to draw up accurate estimates of the concrete impact on the Salvadoran population of the extraordinary measures adopted by the government.
The NGO Cristosal in its Information Report on the Status of Respect for Human Rights mentions, among other violations: arbitrary arrests, inhumane conditions inside prisons that resulted in at least 40 deaths (some of which showed typical signs of extra-legal executions), torture and mistreatment by the armed forces. The NGO also sends a message to the international community that El Salvador is creating a scenario conducive to the perpetration of crimes against humanity, in accordance with the standards set by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
A direct consequence of this new climate that we might call “dictatorial-like” is the exponential increase in migration, both internal and extra-frontier. Despite the lack of records monitoring the flows, Cristosal herself, has collected the following figure, which must, however, be read as a downward estimate: at least 85 people were forced to migrate internally between March 26 and June 15, 2022.
Also on the rise are young people dropping out of school, especially those living in areas controlled by the pandillas, for fear of looming in raids by the armed forces.
Significantly, extortion, the main economy of the criminal gangs, has not stopped under the exception regime, a sign that the pandillas continue to be active.
However, a large segment of the population supports the president, who immediately prior to the March events enjoyed 85 percent of citizen support. Nayib Bukele’s communication strategy is based on a strong dialectic whose key to success is leveraging what he calls the war on terrorists, the “chemotherapy against El Salvador’s cancer.” This choice is key in pushing young people to enlist in the military and police forces-which is also why, as seen above, funding for them has been doubled in the past two years.
The climate of civil war hovers strongly in Salvadoran society since the constitutional guarantees that have been suspended by the regime allow: strong control over telephone lines; home invasion even without a warrant; and invasion of citizens’ privacy and freedom. The population – devastated by the various activities of criminal gangs, many years of past conflict and the pandemic – has reached the limit of endurance.
Today, the state of exception poses a serious threat to the democratic process that El Salvador initiated after the signing of the 1992 Peace Treaties and that has been the model for years for other South American states to emerge from the civil wars that characterized many of these territories in the 1980s.
Indeed, with this new regime and the resulting repression and restriction of many of the people’s democratic freedoms, there is a risk of plunging El Salvador once again into a full-blown civil war.
The current events in El Salvador-which are also occurring in other countries-are a direct emanation of an internecine war that survives latent changes of government but is ready to resurface when the balance of power shifts. The failure to reintegrate criminal gangs has caused a situation of inherent violence that is self-perpetuating and leaves the population exhausted, desperate, and without hope of a dignified life.
This situation goes to aggravate the already complicated situation in the region. The total lack of security and stability, in fact, is a problem that has always affected the entire Central American Region, which is largely controlled by criminal groups and run by corrupt governments.
This, moreover, has always been one of the main causes of migration of tens of thousands of people who decide to flee this area in order to seek a better and more stable future. Over the past century, Salvadorans, in fact, have moved all over the world to escape violence, although today most live in the United States.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates that ¼ of Salvadorans (about 2 million people) are outside their country – many of them in Italy – which gives us the idea that in the face of a tragic socio-historical past, the present is no less and continues to plague the Salvadoran exile community who, although safely out of the country, are in constant contact with their family members still in El Salvador and are greatly concerned about their current living conditions.
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