El Salvador troops seal off city to hunt gangs
El Salvador’s increasingly dictatorial leader has sent heavily-armed soldiers and police to surround an entire city in the latest chapter of his offensive against street gangs.
Wielding machine guns and wearing body armour, 8500 troops and 1500 elite police officers laid siege to Soyapango, a satellite city on the edge of San Salvador with 300,000 residents.
The area has long been notorious as a no-go area for law enforcement but President Nayib Bukele, said “extraction teams” are entering the city to detain individual gang members.
The swoop comes as part of a controversial state of emergency first declared by Bukele, 41, after a spike of murders in the poverty-stricken nation of 6.5 million people.
Bukele has suspended a range of El Salvador’s constitutional freedoms, including the right to assembly, while allowing minors to be tried as adults, detainees to be held without charge for up to 15 days and the warrantless wire-tapping of citizens’ communications.
The mara street gangs are known to routinely murder, rape, torture and forcibly recruit children. But Bukele’s tactics have been widely condemned by human rights groups as another authoritarian power grab for a leader who has already limited the power of the courts and parliament.