Bukele suspended a range of constitutional rights, 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 warrantless wiretapping of citizens’ communications.
The “mara” street gangs who have long ruled parts of El Salvador 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 already limited the power of the courts and Parliament.
The president’s sincerity regarding ending the violence has also been called into question. Last year, the United States sanctioned key members of his administration for allegedly agreeing to an illegal, secret ceasefire with the maras by providing jailed leaders with mobile phones and prostitutes.
Many of the more than 50,000 people arrested since March have had nothing to do with the violence, Human Rights Watch has alleged, and were simply targeted because of their appearance, including gang tattoos — without distinguishing whether individuals were still members or known to have left the maras years previously.
The prisoners are then held in inhumane and humiliating conditions, with dozens in a single cell and some stripped to their underwear and forced to crouch handcuffed before the media. Authorities routinely refuse to tell relatives the fate of their family members and dozens are thought to have died in custody in unresolved circumstances.
There were limited reports from inside the town targeted by police, but some accounts appearing to be linked to the president praised the operation on social media, Bukele’s preferred medium.
“Today everything is safer. People are daring to do business,” Fruit-seller Etelvina Rosas, 36, said, adding in reference to the gang members: “You don’t see the young guys in the streets.”
Juan Pappier, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, accused Bukele of using the gang warfare as a pretext to concentrate power in his own hands and curb civil rights.
“He is claiming there is a trade-off between democracy and security,” Pappier told The Telegraph. “But that is just an excuse to dismantle human rights protections. You can’t tackle violent crime without a strong judiciary and the rule of law.”
The crackdown is hardly the first time Bukele, Latin America’s first millennial president, who typically likes to sport a baseball cap backwards, has used the military in polemical circumstances. In 2020, he sent soldiers into the national assembly in an apparent attempt to intimidate legislators into backing an anti-crime package.
He is also flagrantly flouting a constitutional ban on presidential re-election by running for a second five-year term, is suspected of using Pegasus software to spy on critical journalists, and has used taxpayers’ money to recruit an army of online trolls to eulogise him and attack his enemies on social media.
