When the MS-13 gang controlled the Las Margaritas neighborhood, one of its strongholds in El Salvador, there were rules you had to follow to stay alive.
You couldn’t wear the number eight because it was associated with the rival 18th Street gang. You couldn’t wear the brand of sneakers the gang members wore. And you couldn’t, under any circumstances, call the police.
“People couldn’t complain to the police about what the boys saidlong-time resident Sandra Elizabeth Ingles said, referring to the gang members. “They became the authority on this system”.
El Salvador, the smallest country in Central America, was once known as the murder capital of the hemisphere — with one of the highest murder rates in the world outside of a war zone.
But in the year since the government declared a state of emergency to quell gang violence, deploying the armed forces en masse on the streets, the nation has undergone a remarkable transformation.
Now children play soccer late into the night on fields that were once gang territory. Ingles collects soil for his plants next to an abandoned building that residents say was used for gang killings. Homicides plummeted. Extortion payments imposed by gangs on businesses and residents also declined, analysts said.
“You can walk freely,” said Inglés. “A lot has changed.”
El Faro, El Salvador’s main news outlet, offered a startling assessment earlier this year: Gangs largely “do not exist.”
But that achievement, detractors say, has come at an incalculable price: mass arrests that wiped out thousands of innocent people, the erosion of civil liberties, and the country’s descent into an increasingly autocratic police state.
Fed up with the gangs that terrorized it and forced so many to flee to the United States, the vast majority of people here support the measures and the President who imposed them, polls suggest.
With approval ratings of around 90 percent, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, 41, has become one of the world’s most popular leaders, winning followers across the Western Hemisphere.
A poll showed that people in Ecuador, where violence is increasing, think better of Bukele than of their own leaders.
As politicians from Mexico to Guatemala vow to emulate Bukele’s heavy-handed approach, Critics are increasingly concerned that the country could become a model for a dangerous deal: sacrificing civil liberties for security.
The Salvadoran government has arrested more than 65,000 people in the past year, including children as young as 12, more than doubling the total prison population. More than 5,000 people with no gang ties were put behind bars and eventually released. At least 90 people died in custody, the government said.
Human rights groups have documented mass arbitrary arrests, as well as extreme prison overcrowding and reports of torture by guards.
Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, said in an interview that allegations of abuse by authorities are being investigated and innocent detainees are released. “there is a margin of error”, he said, defending what he called a strategy “almost surgically flawless”.
In what were once some of the most dangerous parts of the country, abandoned homes that belonged to gang members are being renovated and occupied by new tenants.
On the streets of Las Margaritas, a neighborhood in the once horrendously violent municipality of Soyapango, in the center of the country, cars are now parked without their owners paying $10 a month to gang extortionists. Previously, no one visited the township’s main open-air market without permission from gang henchmen, vendors said. Now anyone can go whenever they want.
Juan Hernández, 41, had not set foot on a soccer field a few blocks from his house for 10 years. “was territoryhe said, referring to gang territory. “they shot you”.
Now he uses the court to teach his 12-year-old son to play. “He tells me, I want to learn, and I tell him, ‘let’s go,’” Hernández said.
*Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Joan Suazo contributed reporting to this article.
Natalie Kitroeff
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6657789, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-12 22:00:07