El Salvador - Too Cool for Human Rights?
By Rodrigo Ayala and Cesar Chavez
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| The Salvadoran people and Salvadoran gangs, Nayib Bukele, Human Rights NGOs | Salvadoran gang crackdown | El Salvador | March 27, 2022 - present | Firm government rebuttal to a rise in homicide and years of gang impunity |
‘Human Rights? F**k that!’ says Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s current president. Maybe he didn’t say that, but while it’s universally agreed upon that we must all be guaranteed our natural rights, it seems that the opposite is true for the criminals and gangs of El Salvador.
In March of last year, El Salvador’s congress moved forward to grant Bukele 'emergency powers’, which he has been using to arrest thousands of gang members and expand the presence of security forces in a nation-wide gang crackdown. El Salvador’s gangs —namely MS-13 and Barrio 18— have been perceived as operating with impunity from authorities for years now, a predicament similarly observed occuring in neighboring Latin American countries. If the crackdown was formulated to end the gangs, then what’s the problem? Well, Bukele’s emergency powers restrict the rights to assembly, the rights to free expression, and the right to legal counsel, only a handful amongst others that have sparked outcry in a number of NGOs concerned with Human Rights. The question now is, who is in the right here? Do gang members with violent pasts of killing deserve the same rights as the average citizen? What about those wrongfully swooped up, what happens to them? Is El Salvador’s president, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator”, also way too cool to be upholding basic human rights?
MS-13 is the more infamous of the two gangs; they originated here in our city of Los Angeles as a self-defense group for the neighborhoods with a prominent Salvadoran population, people who moved over to the United States for the purpose of escaping a war back home. However, when the government began the process of deporting gang members back to their original countries, MS-13’s influence and most violent members made their way back into El Salvador. Fresh out of a civil war, El Salvador lacked critical infrastructure and firm law-enforcement, meaning MS-13’s simplistic yet rewarding lifestyle of killing and extorting would gain a foothold on the Salvadoran youth who had nowhere else to turn. In the years following, MS-13 has been increasingly present throughout the country, taking the shape of the widespread terror that it was before Bukele’s crackdown.
MS-13’s rule over El Salvador is inexplicably barbaric. In their home country, MS-13 is notorious for their senseless brutality and for how they morphed whole communities into their strongholds. In the span of three days, MS-13 murdered 87 people, a number of which had zero ties to a criminal organization. In another instance, a 15-year old girl was believed to be shot dead simply for living in one gang’s territory, but selling tortillas in the territory of another. In the neighborhood of Las Margaritas in the city of Soyapango, gangs have infiltrated everyday life by being the sole distributors of goods like gas, bread, and unfortunately drugs, while also overseeing all means of leaving the neighborhood; people can only leave by paying a gang-owned taxi or by coughing up the money if their bus is extorted. In the Primero de Diciembre neighborhood, residents could not leave their homes for fear of being caught-up in the war between Barrio 18 and MS-13, whilst those who did and set up shop for money would have to deal with a ‘rent’ imposed on them by the gang. MS-13 ruled through intimidation tactics, being recognized by many for their violent killing of rivals with machetes, and the fatal consequences that come with opposing their rules and extortion fees.
On March 27th, 2022, El Salvador’s president successfully convinced the nation’s Congress to grant him emergency powers in what the Congressional president described as confronting crime head-on and protecting the Salvadoran populace. The effects of it were felt immediately. After 2 months, the government reported that over 34,500 suspected gang members were already rounded up, and a resident of the previously mentioned Primero de Diciembre neighborhood spoke of banks, businesses, and vendors flowing into the community within that same time window - all things that could have never been possible, were it not for the crackdown. In all parts of the nation, Salvadorans feel safer in public spaces, market owners no longer have to pay monthly extortion fees, the country’s soaring murder rates plummeted by half, bus companies are said to have saved millions from the lack of extortion on their routes, the people can fearlessly be out during the night hours, and Nayib Bukele has exceeded an 85% approval rate for it.
The suspension of certain constitutional rights made the process of catching criminals easier - now gang members couldn’t consult their lawyers and the police could arrest anybody they deemed suspicious without having to provide a reason, but those two factors, alongside a president centering the government on himself, has aroused concerns from Human Rights activists who cite several wrongful detentions, and believe that Buekele’s motives with the crackdown go beyond philanthropy alone.
Nayib Bukele, though praised as a hero by the people, has been encroaching Salvadoran democracy in the same way gangs were encroaching the country. The Legislative Assembly of El Salvador, which is predominantly controlled by Bukele’s political party, would remove all of the country’s Supreme Court magistrates and the attorney general before instilling individuals who worked in his favor. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court would then rule that Bukele’s reelection was permitted, despite it being in violation of the Salvadoran constitution. It doesn't help either that the Human Rights NGO Cristosal analyzed 139 detainee deaths and found that not only were the people who died not even been found guilty of their suspected crime yet, but that their bodies were also found with injuries that suggest mistreatment and torture.
The mistreatment and denial of Human Rights for captured gang members wouldn’t be so bad if only ALL of those arrested were truly criminals. The gangs of El Salvador and their constituent members are responsible for heinous and cowardly acts towards the people they were formed to protect, so if anything, they are deserving of feeling the full might of the Salvadoran people and their elected government. However, there have been several occasions where those entirely uninvolved with crime are being apprehended and imprisoned. Outside of a prison in El Salvador’s capital, a woman exits the premises in tears - her son with autism was arrested while she was out running errands, and she learned he was moved into a maximum security prison. In a small community, a 17 year old girl was left alone to raise her 8 year old brother after her parents were detained. She hasn’t heard from them since.
Despite entering office as a presidential candidate advocating for an end to corruption and gangs, Nayib Bukele is not truly better than any of the country’s previous presidents who are notorious for malfeasance and corruption. For sure, gangs in El Salvador are at their all-time weakest while public welfare and safety see exponential growth, there's absolutely no denying that. But the wrongful detention of innocents and possibly critics, surrender of essential rights, and the infiltration of government across all three branches of the government by Bukele and his party could devolve into one of the most oppressive and draconian regimes of the globe — one comparable to that of Myanmar’s ruthless military junta or even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un at worst. The sight of long-exploited families and communities finally living in peace without the threat of gang violence is heartwarming, but they could very easily be subjected to worse treatment and hostility from their own government, something that is scarily coming true as Cristosal reports the arrest of the country’s youth simply for their appearance or impoverished status. El Salvador may have resolved the problem of gangs, but bolstered that of corruption.
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