El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador's police and security forces were burying eight of their own this week. The director of the National Civilian Police, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, and seven other members of the police and armed forces were killed last Sunday night when the helicopter they were flying in crashed in eastern El Salvador. They died along with a fugitive banker wanted in a corruption case who was being returned to face justice in El Salvador. From the Associated Press report  of the event: El Salvador’s military says the national police director, other high-ranking police officials and a fugitive banker were among nine people killed in a military helicopter crash in a rural part of the country. The cause of the crash on Sunday night is under investigation. It occurred after the banker, Manuel Coto, was captured in Honduras over the weekend and handed over to Salvadoran authorities at the border. Coto, the former manager of the COSAVI savings and loan cooperative, had been the subject of an Int...

Screenshot of leaked data Cyber-security experts have been evaluating the distribution on the dark web of the personal information of more than five million Salvadorans, including high resolution ID photos, names, addresses, and national identity (DUI) numbers.   The cybersecurity company Resecurity wrote : [T]his data leak is significant because it marks one of the first instances in cybercrime history where virtually the entire population of a country has been affected by a compromise of biometric data....Beyond the massive scale of Salvadorian PII records, threat actors also obtained a headshot of each victim, which represents a crucial biometric data marker – particularly in the golden age of generative AI. Notably, the vast scale of this biometric and PII data breach places most of El Salvador’s population at significant risk for identity theft and fraud. Armed with modern deep fake technology, threat actors can leverage victim headshots and related PII to stage more conv...

September 2023 parade in Tonacatepeque I do not often write in the first person in this space, but as I develop this series of posts at the start of the third year of the State of Exception, it feels important to describe how I have seen El Salvador change during that time. I have spent more than twenty years visiting and getting to know well a small community in the municipality of Tonacatepeque, northeast of San Salvador.  This collection of small houses, with water which arrives some of the days, with chickens and dogs and small children roaming the streets, is dear to me. And for most of the time I have known it, the community has been under control of the MS-13 gang. Two years into the State of Exception, the "muchachos" are no longer present, and the difference it makes in people's lives is real and observable. Residents now cross gang boundaries from one territory to another, no longer fearing deadly retribution as a consequence.  New little businesses have opened ...

The current State of Exception in El Salvador with its war on the country's maras has resulted in the arrests of some 63,000 persons since March 27, 2022.  That wholesale imprisonment of anyone suspected of a connection with a gang, which has also swept up thousands of innocent persons according to rights groups, may now have broken the chokehold which gangs have long had on El Salvador.     For months statistics have shown a sustained and significant drop in the homicide rate in El Salvador.  As journalist Roberto Valencia  enumerates , the average daily homicide rate has dropped below 1.  In January 2023 there were 13 homicides in the country, compared to 750 in January 2016. Various journalists who are independent of the Bukele government have now gone into formerly gang-controlled areas across the country, have spoken with sources formerly connected with the gangs, and are writing that homicides are down not because gangs are simply not killing,...

President Nayib Bukele has proclaimed that El Salvador is the safest country in Latin America and now enjoys a historic level of security as a consequence of the State of Exception which has been in place since March 27.  He regularly tweets about dramatically lower homicide rates and the number of days without homicides the country has enjoyed this month and this year.    On August 18, he retweeted a post from the National Civilian Police (PNC) which stated there were zero homicides on August 17 and showing daily homicide counts for the month: The most important news of the century in our  country is not material for a single report of the "journalists" and the "important communications media" Strange? No, we already know that they are just political activists. We continue.. #GuerraContraPandillas In light of the president’s invitation here for us to discuss the homicide statistics, this post will take a serious look at these numbers.  In fact, we can agree wi...

Let me start this post by saying that gangs have been a terrible scourge in El Salvador.  I have known too many men and boys gunned down by their obscene violence over the past two decades.  I have heard the stories of too many individuals and families who have fled their homes for fear of being the next victim.   They don't always succeed.  El Salvador will never have peace until the root causes of gang violence are addressed.   At the same time, I also know the stories of police abuses of people living in the marginalized communities throughout El Salvador, including those who spent days. months or years in prison before charges were found to be unsubstantiated.  We have seen  cases of the army disappearing youth from marginalized communities.  Nayib Bukele has tweeted orders to send suspects to solitary confinement in maximum security prisons, only to have them exonerated.       So confronting gang violence in El...

Too often lost in the news cycle are the victims.   They should be at the center. Sixty-two people were murdered on Saturday, March 26, in the deadliest day in El Salvador since the end of the country's civil war.   According to  El Faro , 57 of the victims were men and 5 were women.   They ranged in age from 18 to 66, with an average age of 38.   They were fathers, sons, mothers, daughters, sisters and brothers.   They had names like Oscar, Carlos, Maria, Nestor, Maritza and Jose.   They worked as laborers, street vendors, farm workers, and builders.  According to initial police reports, only 13 of the victims were linked to gangs. El Faro published a list of the names of the victims who had been identified: ➡️Esta es una cronología del sábado 26 de marzo, recreada a partir del informe policial al que este periódico tuvo acceso, que reconstruye cinco de los 62 crímenes cometidos ese día. https://t.co/ezt7MCaAg7 — ...