SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – Hundreds of Salvadoran gang members handcuffed were exposed to accumulated hounds on Saturday, a demonstration of President Nayib Bukele’s policy of confronting them, and the violent crime they are accused of committing.
Some 600 members of El Salvador’s Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang and its rival Barrio 18 made up the bulk of the arrests announced Friday, following a weeklong raid of subsidized Central American gangs across the United States, which they also arrested neighboring Guatemala and Honduras.
Detainees who marched in front of the press on Saturday, a non-unusual tactic that preceded Bukele, were charged with murder, kidnapping and human trafficking, among other crimes, authorities said.
In April, Bukele provoked the wrath of human rights teams by posting shocking social media images of piles of semi-naked imprisoned gang members, hued in rows, despite the terrible pandemic.
At the time, inmates punished for an outbreak of violence.
Security Minister Rogelio Rivas called most new detainees “terrorists” after being accumulated in an outdoor square through heavily armed soldiers, almost all masked and face-faced, many tattooed, down.
Government figures show that the homicide rate has fallen almost in part so far this year until the same time last year, which Bukele says is due to a greater presence of the army and police on the streets and in supposedly gang-controlled prisons.
In September, the online news site El Faro published an investigation revealing an alleged negotiation between the government and the MS-13 over cutting homicides in exchange for other benefits, adding the election of Bukele, a rate that the president denied.
The most recent raid may intend to refute the concept that the government is negotiating with gangs, security analyst Jeannette Aguilar said in an interview.
(This story passed to the right guy a typo)
(Reporting through Nelson Rentería; written through David Alire García; edited through Nick Zieminski)
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