SAN SALVADOR (AP) — More than 2,000 soldiers and 500 police officers surrounded a densely populated neighborhood on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital Monday in an attempt to suppress the remnants of gangs that the president said were trying to set up shop in the area.
“There is a group of gang members hiding. We have set up a security fence throughout the neighborhood… to take out the last gang member in the area,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele wrote in a post on X.
Defense Minister Rene Francis Merino Monroy said police surrounded the San Marcos neighborhood with a military fence and set up checkpoints to prevent gang members from escaping.
The fence was the third of its kind to be installed in parts of San Salvador with the aim of finding and arresting gang members still operating in the country. In March, Bukele ordered similar barriers in the northern part of the country, which he said were aimed at dismantling a faction of the Barrio 18 gang.
The siege is the latest in the populist leader’s war on gangs, which Bukele declared after violence escalated in March 2022. Bukele’s government called for a “state of emergency” and waived constitutional rights to detain more than 1% of El Salvador’s population. Little evidence.
The crackdown has drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups, raised concerns about prison conditions, and said many detainees were innocent or had loose ties to gangs. His other actions, such as seeking re-election despite the constitutional ban on presidents serving two consecutive terms, have raised other Democratic alarms.
But the war on the gangs has also dealt a heavy blow to the Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangs that have long terrorized much of the country, extorting money, killing those who do not pay, and trafficking drugs.
These measures led to a sharp decline in murders and sparked populist enthusiasm for Bukele.
Despite effectively declaring victory in his war, the president has continued to extend the “state of emergency” for more than two years now, claiming that such measures are necessary to eliminate the remnants of El Salvador’s gangs.
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