El Salvador Perspectives

Today the world is paying attention to Nayib Bukele, the president-jailer who cut a deal with the US to imprison persons the US sought to deport.  Now the world may learn more of Bukele's back story since  the journalists at El Faro have released video interviews of two leaders of the 18 Revolucionarios gang, one of three gangs which long controlled neighborhoods throughout El Salvador.  They describe how Bukele's team has made deals with gang leaders throughout the Salvadoran president's political career, up to the rupture with the gangs marked by Bukele's imposition of the State of Exception in El Salvador. The interviews were conducted by Oscar and Carlos Martinez, journalist brothers who have been reporting on the gangs and their dealings with politicians and government officials for more than a decade.  They published the interviews in a series of long video segments here . One of the two gang members is Carlos Cartagena López, aka "Charli de IVU", a lead...

Sharing a series of short takes on some recent events in El Salvador. Ex-president Mauricio Funes and his former Minister of Justice and Security, David Munguía Payes were  sentenced to prison  this week for making deals with gang leaders in prison in  2012 gang truce .  Funes is living in exile in Nicaragua after fleeing there to avoid prosecution.  Munguia Payes who claims the prosecution was politically motivated is in custody in El Salvador.  Military and security forces are going out in a new offensive in the State of Exception.  The office of president Bukele  announced  that although the country was decisively winning its war on gangs, it needed to launch an enhanced offensive to round up remnants of the gangs. Nayib Bukele has appointed a new Commissioner for Human Rights and Freedom of Expression, Colombian lawyer  Andrés Guzmán Caballero . A profile in El Pais  describes the new commissioner as a specialist in cyberc...

Saturday, March 26, was one of the bloodiest days in recent memory in El Salvador.   62 homicides were reported just that day, a total never before seen for a single day in this violent country of 6.3 million people.  This came on top of 14 murders the day before.  There were murders committed in 12 of El Salvador's 14 departments.  In contrast, during the entire month of February, there were only 79 murders.  Since 2020, El Salvador had been averaging fewer than 4 homicides per day. There was one message from the weekend's violence:  El Salvador's street gangs maintain the capacity and the numbers to wreak havoc across the country when it suits them.  The relative calm of the past few years meant that the gangs had decided that homicides were not in their interest, whether that decision was the result of negotiating with the government or otherwise, and the relative calm was not the result of Nayib Bukele's militarized "Territorial Control Plan...

This article originally appeared on December 9, 2021 on the website of InsightCrime under the title  US Blacklists El Salvador Officials, Bolstering Accusations of Gang Pacts By Seth Robbins In what appears to be a shot at El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s administration, the United States has imposed sanctions on two officials with close ties to the president, accusing them of corruption and having secretly negotiated with the country’s deadly street gangs. Osiris Luna, El Salvador’s vice minister of security and head of prisons, and Carlos Marroquín, the head of the government’s Social Fabric Reconstruction Unit (Unidad de Reconstrucción del Tejido Social), are accused of engaging incarcerated gang leaders in talks to lower killings in exchange for privileges, such as access to cell phones and prostitutes, according to a December 8 Treasury Department statement . Luna and Marroquín also allegedly negotiated with gang leadership to provide political support to Bukele’s party, N...

Last week, El Faro published a  new report  providing evidence of negotiations between high level members of the government of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele and imprisoned leaders of the country's major street gangs. In an 8500 word by-lined investigation, the El Faro team disclosed new information about negotiations occurring during 2019-2020 which El Faro had first disclosed in September 2020.  The new information, gathered from an investigation by the office of El Salvador's recently deposed attorney general, included: Evidence that the government had negotiated not just with MS-13, but also with the two factions of Barrio-18. Documentation, including several photos, of Director of Prisons Osiris Luna and other government officials, including Carlos Marroquin, Director of "Reconstruction of the Fabric of Society", entering the prisons accompanied by gang members.  The role of these outside gang members was presumably to take information and instru...

This post first appeared on the website of InsightCrime with the title  Report: Soaring Disappearances in El Salvador Linked to Gang Pacts April 21, 2021 By Katie Jones A new report by an El Salvador watchdog group warns that pacts between gangs and public officials to lower homicides in El Salvador are promoting the wider use of forced disappearances, showing how gangs are still using violence to maintain political and territorial control. Using data from the Attorney General’s Office and the National Police, investigators examined some 20,000 disappearances from 2014 to 2019, according to the report published in April by the Foundation of Studies for the Application of Law (Fundación de Estudios para la Aplicación del Derecho – FESPAD), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting rule of law in El Salvador. Municipalities with the highest number of disappearance cases correlated with the strongest gang presence and the highest crime rates, according to the report. “Empiric...

The  US Department of Justice  has unsealed an indictment against the top leadership group of MS-13 , the " Ranfla Nacional. "   Eleven of the 14 defendants are in prison in El Salvador from where they direct local and international operations of the gang.   Here is the introduction to the US indictment : La Mara Salvatrucha (hereinafter "MS-1 3") was a transnational criminal organization with tens of thousands of members worldwide whose members engaged in "terrorist activity," as defined by Title 8, United States Code, Section I182(a)(3)(B)(iii) and (iv), and in "terrorism," as defined by Title 22, United States Code, Section 2656f(d)(2). MS-13 and its members used violence against law enforcement, military members, government officials and civilians in El Salvador in order to obtain concessions from the government of El Salvador, achieve political goals and retaliate for government actions against MS-13's members and leaders. MS-13's le...

This article originally appeared on the website of InsightCrime with the title  3 Dirty Secrets Revealed by the El Salvador Gang ‘Negotiations’ By Steven Dudley The El Faro media group reported that the El Salvador government is “negotiating” with street gangs to keep homicide levels low, which may come as a surprise to most except other politicians, who also negotiate with gangs. The report – which was published on September 3 and is based on jailhouse intelligence reports, prison logbooks and interviews – says the administration of President Nayib Bukele has been engaged in talks with the gangs inside prisons since at least October 2019. Specifically, the logbooks note 12 visits by Osiris Luna, El Salvador’s director of prisons, to two prisons where he met with gang leaders, mostly from the Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS13) but also from the Barrio 18 Sureños. On three occasions, he was accompanied by Carlos Marroquín, the head of the government’s Social Fabric Reconstruction Unit (Uni...

On September 3, the online periodical El Faro published an investigation revealing how the government of Nayib Bukele has been negotiating with leaders of MS-13 within the country's prisons.   The article, written by journalists Carlos Martínez , Óscar Martínez , Sergio Arauz and Efren Lemus   is titled  Bukele's government has been negotiating with the MS-13 for a year to reduce homicides and electoral support  and relies on hundreds of pages of leaked internal documents from the Salvadoran prison system. The title of the article tells you most of what you need to know.   Starting in 2019 after Bukele took office and continuing to the present, representatives from Bukele's administration, headed by the director of prisons, Osiris Luna, have reportedly been negotiating with gang leaders. An English translation of the report is being produced, but the El Faro English newsletter summarized some of the investigation: Through months of negotiations, Buk...

[This article originally appeared on the website of InsightCrime with the title  El Salvador’s Jailed Gang Mediator: ‘I feel defrauded’ ]. Written by Steven Dudley The former leftist guerrilla and ex-congressman Raúl Mijango is jailed and facing 20 years in prison for extortion — one of two crimes derived from his role in the gang truce in El Salvador — but don’t call him a martyr just yet. Raúl Mijango looked exhausted. He sat slumped in a hard-shell, black plastic chair. His skin had turned a light shade of brown, and his once pronounced belly seemed to be losing air underneath his white, prison-issued T-shirt. “I’m old,” he said after yet another day in court facing down accusations for his role in a controversial gang truce. “Only 30 percent of my kidneys works. I have severe diabetes, thyroid problems, ulcers in my stomach, and lately, because of my diabetes, I have lost 60 percent of my sight.” Still, Mijango remained steadfast. “I’ve always said, ‘I love this country.’ I’...

The judge overseeing the trial of government officials involved in the 2012 gang truce in El Salvador has dismissed the charges against all the defendants.   The judge ruled that the prosecutors had failed to prove their case , and pointed primarily at the Minister of Justice and Public Security, David Munguía Payés, who is now the Minister of Defense in El Salvador.   Munguía Payés initiated and authorized the government's participation in the truce, according to the court, and the judge also pointed at the likely involvement of then president Mauricio Funes.   The defendants in the case were simply implementing a plan created at the top levels of the administration of president Funes. El Salvador's Attorney General announced on Thursday that he will appeal the dismissal of the charges. Beyond the appeal, one open question is whether Attorney General Douglas Melendez will ever pursue  Munguía Payés and Funes?    The other question is wheth...

In 2009, voters made Mauricio Funes the first president of El Salvador from the Left.  His election was a cause of great celebration for those on the left, and throughout most of his presidency, Funes was one of the most popular presidents in all of Latin America. But the years since have not not been kind to Funes' reputation.   A series of investigations and scandals have dogged the ex-president who now lives in self-imposed exile in Nicaragua: The gang truce .  The now-discredited gang truce arose during Funes' presidency, but he always tried to maintain plausible deniability about his role in it.  In the trial of various government officials for granting benefits to gang leaders in prison, then-minister of security David Munguia Payes testified that Funes had authorized and was kept informed of the elements of the truce as it unfolded: From Héctor Silva Ávalos, writing at Insight Crime : Mauricio Funes... was very familiar with the gang truce from ...