Salvador: arrest of 6000 gang members, welcomes President Nayib Bukele
Members of the Mara Salvatrucha group, after their arrest in March 2016 (Illustration image).
REUTERS/Jose Cabezas
Text by: RFI Follow
2 mins
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele assured Monday that more than 6,000 gang members had been detained in nine days of an exceptional regime, which responds to a wave of homicides at the end of March.
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With these 6,000 new inmates and the approximately 16,000 gang members who were already incarcerated, the small Central American country has 22,000 members of these criminal groups in prisons.
President Nayib Bukele welcomed the arrests and issued a warning to gang members on Monday evening during a ceremony at the Military School, west of San Salvador, in front of more than 200 young graduates of the police academy, at night, and under the light of blue and red spotlights.
►
To read also
: The Maras, a headache for the Salvadoran government
Amendment of the penal code
During this same ceremony, the president responded to rumors that the gangs could, in the face of these raids, take "revenge" on the population in a random way.
If they commit acts of revenge, "
there won't even be a meal a day in the prisons
(...)
I swear to God that they won't eat a grain of rice, and we'll see how many time they last, and I don't care what the international organizations say
".
Monday evening Nayib Bukele finally announced the construction of a new high security prison, to accommodate up to 20,000 gang members.
After a series of 87 murders between March 25 and 27, the Parliament (controlled by the presidential majority) approved the establishment of a state of emergency for one month.
In particular, it allows warrantless arrests of suspected members of
maras
, the organized gangs, mainly those of
Mara Salvatrucha
and
Barrio 18
, which have some 70,000 members in El Salvador.
Parliament also recently amended the penal code to increase the maximum sentence for gang leaders from nine to 45 years in prison.
"
Anyone who participates in an illicit group, association or organization
", such as a
mara,
"
will be punished with a prison sentence of twenty to thirty years
".
Prior to this reform, membership in a gang was punishable by three to five years in prison.
►Also read: Salvador: 62 homicides in a single day, the state of emergency established
In 2021, El Salvador's homicide rate was 18 murders per 100,000 people, according to official data.
By comparison, it was 64 in Cape Town, South Africa, and just 1.2 in Paris.
(
With
AFP)
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salvador
Nayib Bukele
Crime