War on gangs forges new El Salvador, but price is steep
For the family of 44-yearold Maritza Pacheco, opening a corner shop outside their home four months ago was a small miracle.
Pacheco had lived like many in El Salvador’s capital: in constant panic. Warring gangs — MS-13 and Barrio 18 — would send gunfire ringing out over flimsy tin-sheet homes, terrorizing and extorting poor communities like hers.
Her family isolated themselves, determined not to get sucked into the lawlessness around them until the gangs began closing in on her teenage son. Early last year, Pacheco paid to have him and a sister smuggled to the U.S.
But over the past year, El Salvador has undergone a radical transformation since President Nayib Bukele — the self-described “world’s coolest dictator” — suspended constitutional rights and started an allout offensive on the gangs.
Bukele has imprisoned over 65,000 of the nation’s 6.3 million people, packing thousands inside a “megaprison.”
Gang presence has dwindled, and bloodshed across the country has faded away.
Pacheco and her daughter no longer sell produce in secret to avoid gang payments. Fruit vendors and food deliveries that wouldn’t dare to enter their neighborhood started rolling through. Then came banks, one which gave them a loan to open their shop. Selling candies, sodas and pastries to neighborhood kids, the family went from subsisting to saving for the future.
“People come and stay sometimes until 12 or 1 in the morning,” she said. “And it’s so safe that we can stay open.”
Salvadorans cherish small new freedoms: traversing the capital at night, ordering pizza delivery, doing aerobics in a park.
For others, the transformation comes at a steep price.
Large swaths of San Salvador remain militarized, and officers push into homes to strip-search families. Tens of thousands of children have been separated from their parents. The crackdown has fueled a flood of reports of human rights abuses. And for many, fear of the gangs has been replaced by fear of the very government claiming to protect them.
“The long term question, and what I fear, is: Is this going to become a police state?” said Michael Paarlberg, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University researching El Salvador.
Bukele’s government declined requests by The Associated Press for interviews, comment or access to the prisons.
Bukele’s administration has wielded a robust disinformation machine, suppressed critics and journalists. Nowhere is that more evident than with prisons, likened to torture chambers by two government officials and a former prisoner who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity, fearing retribution by the government and gangs.
At least 90 have died in custody, the government said in November. Since, it has been tight-lipped about death counts.
Little is known about the facilities outside highly produced videos with action-movie soundtracks that Bukele plasters on social media showing images of tattooed men filling his “mega-carcel.”
“This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, mixed together, unable to do any more harm to the population,” Bukele tweeted.
Security officials are under great pressure to boost arrests, which can earn extra Christmas vacation days, said one of the officials who spoke to AP — who has worked for decades in gang-controlled zones.
“Many innocents were detained,” said the officer. “We’ve committed crimes.”
Nearly one in six people who have been imprisoned are innocent, estimates the country’s police union tracking detentions. Local rights group Cristosal documented 3,344 cases of human rights violations in the first 11 months of the gang crackdown.
Yet the president’s approval rating has soared to 91%, according to a March poll by LPG Data. So, too, has approval for the crackdown.
“The president is doing what no one has been able to. You know there are a lot of innocent people caught in the middle,” said Jorge Guzmán, a pastor in Pacheco’s neighborhood. “But you accept what’s happening as something that had to happen.”
“People come and stay sometimes until 12 or 1 in the morning. And it’s so safe that we can stay open.”
— Maritza Pacheco, shop owner in San Salvador
Bukele has harnessed his approval to further consolidate control. “It’s a model that sells a kind of punitive populism to gain popularity and stay in power,” said Abraham Abrego, a leader of Cristosal.
The government has extended Bukele’s state of emergency a dozen times. In September, he announced a run for reelection despite El Salvador’s constitution banning presidents from consecutive terms.