San Salvador. Some 2,500 uniformed officers, including soldiers and police, surrounded a neighborhood on the outskirts of San Salvador this Monday to arrest gang members, President Nayib Bukele reported.
The siege began during the early hours of the morning “with 2,000 soldiers and 500 police officers, to extract every last gang member found in the area,” the president wrote on the social network X.
The “intelligence” section of the police, according to Bukele, “has determined that in the 10 de Octubre neighborhood, in [el distrito de] “San Marcos, San Salvador Sur, there is a group of hidden gang members.”
In the streets of the community located at the foot of a hill and which has homes of about 50 square meters, the uniformed officers requested documents from people who entered or left in their vehicles.
“We are after these criminals, we have indications that they want to establish themselves in this sector” and that is why the president ordered the siege, declared the Minister of Defense, René Francis Merino.
The Minister of Justice and Security, Gustavo Villatoro, told state channel 10 that the deployment of troops seeks to “continue destroying the criminal economy” of the gangs and weaken the remnants of those groups that are trying to reorganize.
The police and soldiers were preparing to search house by house in this neighborhood of San Marcos.
On March 27, 2022, Bukele began a “war” against gangs protected by an exceptional regime that allows arrests without a court order and under which some 83,000 alleged gang members have been detained.
Since then, the president has imposed some fences in neighborhoods and municipalities in the country.
The anti-gang crusade has dramatically reduced homicides in El Salvador, and last February encouraged Bukele’s re-election for a second five-year presidential term.
Human Rights entities such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have denounced “indiscriminate arrests”, prison overcrowding and numerous deaths in state custody, but Bukele and his officials deny this.
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