The funeral of Justo Germán Gil, a member of the police Maintaining Order Unit killed by gang members in the town of San Juan Opico in eastern El Salvador on Jan. 10, 2015. Credit: Vladimir Girón/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Apr 23 2015 (IPS)

The resurgence of violent crime in El Salvador is giving rise to a hostile social environment in El Salvador reminiscent of the country’s 12-year civil war, which could compromise the country’s still unsteady democracy.

After recent attacks by gangs against police and soldiers, there is talk in the legislature of declaring a state of siege in the most violent urban areas, and the government ordered the creation of three quick response battalions, similar to the ones that operated during the 1980-1992 civil war.

These military units were responsible for a number of massacres of civilians, such as the 1981 mass killing in the village of El Mozote in the northern department of Morazán, where more than 1,000 rural villagers were killed by members of the Atlacatl battalion.

Meanwhile, police and local residents are openly discussing the creation of groups to exterminate gangs, along the lines of far-right paramilitary death squads active in the country from the 1970s until the end of the armed conflict in 1992.“This escalation of violence could have been avoided if an attempt had been made to hold talks including the gangs.” -- Félix Arévalo

“It is extremely dangerous to be talking about a state of siege and all that, because it could affect the country’s democratic process,” the coordinator of the ecumenical Pastoral Initiative for Peace and Life (IPAZ), Félix Arévalo, told IPS.

IPAZ brings together leaders from different religious faiths seeking a negotiated solution to the problem of gang violence plaguing this impoverished Central American nation of 6.3 million.

If approved by parliament, the state of siege would suspend constitutional guarantees such as freedom of assembly and free passage, while militarising areas with high murder rates.

The last time a state of siege was declared in El Salvador was during the November 1989 guerrilla offensive known as “To the limit”, in the midst of the armed conflict that left 75,000 people dead and 8,000 “disappeared”.

The country is now governed by one of the former guerrilla leaders, Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which became a political party after the 1992 peace accords and has been in power since 2009.

His government says the new wave of violence is part of a backlash by the gangs against the Feb. 14 transfer of their leaders from a medium to a maximum security prison known as Zacatraz, located in the city of Zacatecoluca, 41 km east of San Salvador.

The transferred prisoners included several of the heads of the MS13 and Barrio 18, the two gangs that reached a truce in March 2012 which led to a sharp drop in the number of murders.

Raúl Mijango, who helped broker the truce, told IPS that as a result of the decision to isolate the leaders, younger, more fanatic members who have made violence a way of life now lead the gangs’ activities.

“The last thing these young men are thinking about is stopping this conflict,” he said.

The truce collapsed in May 2013, when then President Mauricio Funes (2009-2014) of the FMLN was forced to remove the minister of justice and security, General David Munguía, one of the main drivers of the talks from within the government, over a technicality.

As of Monday Apr. 20, the gangs had killed – besides civilians – 20 police officers, six members of the military, one prosecutor and six prison guards in an undeclared war also fuelled by the police and military response that has left dozens of gang members dead in clashes.

On Apr. 18, nine gang members were shot by a military squadron in Uluapa Arriba, in the city of Zacatecoluca.

Some police have even openly talked about killing gang members.

“When they (the gang members) run into us, we’re going to kill them,” one police officer wearing a face mask told a local TV station.

And circulating on the social networks are amateur videos of police and locals urging people to kill the “mareros” – members of the gangs or “maras” as they are known in Central America – the same way death squads killed left-wing opponents during the war.

In March, the number of homicides shot up. That month was the most violent so far in the last decade, according to police figures: 481 homicides, an average of 16 murders a day, 56.2 percent more than in March 2014.

If that tendency holds steady, by the end of this year more than 5,000 murders will have been committed, for a homicide rate of 86 per 100,000 population, far above the already high 2014 rate of 63 per 100,000.

El Salvador is one of the world’s most violent countries, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The average Latin American murder rate is 29 per 100,000 inhabitants and the global average is 6.2.

The driving force behind the call for a state of siege are lawmakers from the right-wing Great Alliance for National Union, which holds 11 of the 84 seats in the single-chamber legislature whose term begins May 1, after the March elections.

“This escalation of violence could have been avoided,” said Arévalo, “if an attempt had been made to hold talks including the gangs” – an idea that is staunchly opposed by most political factions, due to society’s outrage against the gangs, which have an estimated combined total of 60,00 members.

In January the government of Sánchez Cerén cut off any possibility of dialogue with the gangs.

Roberto Valent, resident representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), told IPS that the scaling up of gang activity was in part a response to the state’s attempt, through a stepped-up police presence, to reassert control over territory in the hands of gangs.

Police action is important, he said, to pave the way for prevention, rehabilitation and socioeconomic reinsertion in those areas.

“It’s clearly a reaction to what the state is doing,” said Valent, who was technical coordinator of the National Council for Citizen Security and Coexistence.

The Council, set up by the president in September 2014, was tasked with setting forth proposals for fighting crime, with the participation of different segments of society and technical support from international donors.

In January, the Council proposed 124 measures that the government plans to adopt to fight the wave of crime and violence. Part of the two billion dollars needed to implement a five-year plan have been obtained.

The programme will include educational, healthcare and recreational initiatives, while creating 250,000 jobs for at-risk youngsters.

But in practice, the government has demonstrated more interest in stiffening its policy of cracking down on crime by stepping up police and military action.

The president has announced a restructuring and strengthening of the police, as well as the creation of more elite units to combat the gangs.

IPAZ’s Arévalo said it should be the other way around: “less police action and more prevention and reinsertion.”

“We have stirred up a hornet’s nest; the government acted mistakenly, you can’t implement a plan with corpses falling every which way,” he argued.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Thousands of suspected marxist youth were 'disappeared' in the late 1980s and never seen again. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Feb 19 2013 (IPS)

It was almost four o’clock in the morning on Feb. 18, 1990, when Dr. Manorani Saravanamuththu pulled into the driveway of No. 42 Castle Street, an old Portuguese-style home located in a suburb of Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.

“They’ve taken Richard,” she said, when her niece and her husband opened the door. “The Black Cats have taken him.”

The young couple needed no further explanation. Both were intimately aware of the plain-clothes death squads that drove around in black jeeps, arresting, abducting, abusing and assassinating at will.

Their quarry – members or suspected sympathisers of the left-wing People’s Liberation Front (the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna or JVP) – were usually poor university students, whose bodies would either be found the next day, burning in rubber tires atop piles of other corpses, or would never be seen again.If you have no answer except to meet indiscriminate killings with equally brutal reprisals…you will build up a monster no one will be able to control.

And although this period in the country’s history was even then referred to as the ‘bheeshana kalaya’, or the reign of terror, no one expected that one of its victims would be Richard de Zoysa: the progeny of two powerful Colombo families, star of the English-language stage, a well-known newscaster and bureau chief of the Rome-based Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, whose dispatches on Sri Lanka throughout the 1980s earned him a reputation at home and abroad as an exceptionally prolific writer.

The days following de Zoysa’s abduction were – for his family, his comrades and, especially, for the government of then-President Ranasinge Premadasa of the ruling United National Party (UNP), which was engaged in what has been described as a war to “root out” the JVP – marked by utter uncertainty.

Day and night, phones rang: desperate calls to police stations and influential lawyers, urgent offers of asylum and amnesty from abroad, incessant requests for government statements from international media, all essentially asking the same question: where is he?

On the third day after de Zoysa had been bundled into a jeep by six armed men (one of whom his mother would identify as a high-ranking police officer in the president’s detail), wearing nothing but a sarong around his waist, a fisherman bobbing about on the Indian Ocean just off the coast of Moratuwa, a seaside suburb south of Colombo, hauled a floating corpse into his narrow boat and rowed it ashore.

And although bullet wounds and three days in salt water had eaten away at the handsome 30-year-old, his mother, called in by a magistrate defying government orders to “dispose” of bodies without due process, recognised him.

The news sparked a massive public outcry among Colombo’s elite: louder, even, than the collective fury over the roughly 40,000 deaths that had preceded de Zoysa’s in that black decade.

Just days after the funeral, the media received a directive from the government: no more mention of Richard de Zoysa — not in print, not in pictures, not on the radio. If murder would not suffice to silence him, then censorship would have to be the next best thing.

A life in writing

Though speculation about the reasons behind de Zoysa’s murder ran a wide gamut – from his artistic involvement in theatre to his sexual involvement with members of the JVP — IPS has maintained that de Zoysa’s greatest contribution was in the field of journalism, awarding him, posthumously, its annual International Achievement Award “for his news accounts of the killings of students by death squads (in Sri Lanka).”

In fact, de Zoysa was corresponding for IPS during possibly one of the most complex moments in Sri Lankan history – a time of total war on more than one front.

According to de Zoysa’s report entitled “Pride Stalks Beneath a Full Moon”, published on the IPS wire on May 22, 1989, “Pride stalks Sri Lanka today, in a variety of guises. There is the racial pride of the Sinhalese, who make up 70 percent of the island’s 17 million people (mostly Buddhist), as well as the pride of the 1.4 million-strong Tamil minority.

“There is also the pride of two fierce militant groups, one Sinhalese and one Tamil; the pride of two armies, one Sri Lankan and one Indian; and the political pride of their governments in Colombo and New Delhi.”

He was referring first and foremost to the thousands of youth in the south and centre of the country who had joined a Marxist insurgency that preached “nationalist revolution for Sri Lanka’s largely-Buddhist Sinhalese peasantry”.

The second group of militants, located in the north and east of the tiny island, were the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a separatist organisation comprised of rebels drawn from the country’s minority Tamil population, demanding independence and a “homeland” for the Tamil people.

Thus the Sri Lankan army, as de Zoysa would report in great detail, was fighting two wars: dispatching soldiers into the “economically-underprivileged southern belt” to crush the JVP and terrorise any possible recruits, while simultaneously ordering troops to the northern jungles to do battle with the seasoned guerillas of the LTTE.

Meanwhile, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), pressed into service by former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, was tasked with dragging the Tigers to the Indian-backed negotiating table to agree on a devolution plan outlined in the 1987 Indo-Lankan accords.

According to de Zoysa’s monthly features, the peace deal itself split the island still further: with the JVP and the shadowy organisation suspected of being its armed wing (known as the Patriotic People’s Movement or DJV) “implacably opposed to Tamil separatism or anything remotely approaching it”; while the LTTE held out for full separation against a tide of Tamil political parties pushing closer to an official agreement with the government for regional autonomy.

On Dec. 21, 1988, de Zoysa sketched a vivid picture of the delicate “triangle of power” that then governed the island, predicting, “(If) Premadasa, a shrewd self-taught professional politician, wants his presidency to get off the ground, he will have to deal swiftly with two men who, like him, have simple origins – Tamil Tiger guerilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and JVP supremo Rohana Wijeweera.

“The actions of this trio,” de Zoysa noted, “will determine Sri Lanka’s immediate future – as well as the fate, in life or death terms, of the country’s 16.4 million people.”

His writings elegantly pieced together the bits of this war-torn story, bringing in a range of voices from government insiders to children in JVP-strongholds who, as a result of curfews and a climate of terror, stayed home from school and played at violent revolution instead.

In this way, he exemplified the IPS ethos of raising the “voice of the voiceless” at a time when testimony in all its forms – whether written, whispered or even insinuated – was deemed worthy of death at the hands of any number of armed parties.

He picked his way across the corpse-strewn island, stopping at coastal towns like Tangalle, 110 miles south of Colombo, to speak with fishermen like Ranjith, put out of work by a thinning flow of tourists; and mothers like Siriyawathi who had traveled hours from her remote village to file a complaint that her brother — “an electrician, not a militant”, she assured De Zoysa – had been blindfolded and led away by the police, not seen or heard of since.

He spent many hours in this town, at the headquarters of the Human Rights and Legal Aid Organisation where Mahinda Rajapakse – then a little known lawyer and secretary of the rights group, now president of the country, wielding an unprecedented degree of power – met with one bereaved woman after another, all begging for news of their ‘disappeared’ sons, husbands, nephews.

“This kind of work is called humanitarian but ultimately makes one inhuman,” de Zoysa quoted Rajapakse as saying back in 1988. “From the time I open my door there are these women weeping and wailing. Eventually one gets desensitised and just concentrates on offering practical advice.”

In uncovering little-known stories, and prying snippets of information from those worst affected but least visible in times of conflict, de Zoysa put his finger on the grisly point the government hoped most would go unremarked: that the late 1980s marked a turning point in military strategy, away from the Tamil “other” in the north and onto the Sinhalese “brother” in the south.

With unwavering accuracy, de Zoysa uncovered how the draconian anti-terror laws – implemented through arbitrary arrests, detention, torture and murder — that had once been used to crush the Tamil rebellion, quickly became the favoured means of stamping out the JVP, a sleight of hand that did not go unnoticed among the Sinhalese peasantry.

His journalism has been described as activism, but a reading of his collected writings for IPS reveals that these stories had no agenda: rather, they are the work of one who wades into murky and murderous waters to fish out the flotsam of stories found floating there.

And while he fitted together the jigsaw of the present, he also – perhaps unwittingly – prophesied the future: his last dispatch for IPS, entitled “Sri Lanka: Nearing a Human Rights Apocalypse”, contained none of the stoic analysis that had hitherto characterised his reports.

Rather, the story flew hastily across a series of killings, with passing reference to “bodies smoldering on public roadways” and the death squads that came knocking “with a licence to kill”, adding that, in the past month, over 1,000 youth had fallen victim to such assassinations.

He ended by echoing the words of former Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who told Parliament shortly before his death, “(If) you have no answer except to meet indiscriminate killings with equally brutal reprisals…you will build up a monster no one will be able to control.”

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