Aerial view of the Terrorism Confinement Center, the mega-prison that the Salvadoran government has built to house some 40,000 gang members, and about which very little is known because the information was classified as confidential by the Nayib Bukele administration. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Feb 13 2023 (IPS)

The construction of a mega-prison, in which the government of El Salvador intends to imprison some 40,000 gang members, is in line with President Nayib Bukele’s tendency to hide public information on public projects, classifying them as “reserved.”

The Bukele administration thus continues to bypass accountability and transparency procedures, building a huge prison about which no one knows important details, as in the case of other government projects.

Construction work on the prison began last year, under a blanket of total secrecy.

The only information available was that the prison was being built on a 165-hectare rural piece of land, in the El Perical hamlet in Tecoluca municipality, in the central department of San Vicente. It was finished in seven months.“There is a policy, I would dare to say public, because it is a decision of the Salvadoran State to keep everything under wraps. No matter what, there is always something that they want to keep secret.” -- Wilson Sandoval

It was Bukele himself, in a televised program on Jan. 31, who formalized the start of prison operations during a tour of the facilities, accompanied by four officials.

The jail was still empty of inmates, and it was not announced when they would begin to be transferred there.

Cloak of secrecy

Despite the magnitude of the mega-project, the public does not know how much was spent on it and, above all, what criteria were taken into consideration to award the project, or which company built it, among other aspects.

Critics question Bukele about this veil of secrecy, the same one that has previously surrounded issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, or the construction of other public works.

“There is a policy, I would dare to say public, because it is a decision of the Salvadoran State to keep everything under wraps. No matter what, there is always something that they want to keep secret,” Wilson Sandoval, head of the Anticorruption Legal Advice Center of the National Foundation for Development, told IPS.

Although Salvadoran legislation allows some aspects of government programs to be classified as reserved, out of national security concerns for example, the Bukele administration keeps almost everything shrouded in secrecy.

In the case of the new prison, Sandoval said they were not demanding that sensitive or confidential information be revealed, such as the penitentiary’s internal security protocols.

He said the issue was basic aspects that should be available to the public, such as the cost of the prison and the bidding processes, since it was built with public funds.

The official secrecy surrounding the prison was announced in December 2022 and will be in force until 2024, according to the local newspaper La Prensa Gráfica.

But it is very likely that before the deadline expires, the classification will be extended, as has happened in other cases, added the expert.

The abuse of government secrecy can lead to embezzlement of funds, he said.

“I would say that more than a doubt, it is rather almost a certainty (that there may be mismanagement) because there is a basic formula in public management: discretion plus opacity will normally result in corruption,” Sandoval argued.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele listens to an explanation from an official about how the X-ray scanners operate, located at the entrance of the mega-prison that has been built in the center of the country. Bukele made the opening of the facility official on Jan. 31, during a tour of the facilities. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

The largest prison in the Americas

The government has boasted of building the prison, which it has described as the largest in the Americas, as if it were inaugurating a public university or a state-of-the-art hospital.

“It is logical to think that the government needs prisons, because otherwise it would have nowhere to put criminals in jail,” an Uber motorcycle driver, who was driving along one of the avenues in San Salvador and said his name was Carlos, told IPS.

The mega-prison, called the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (Cecot), will hold a good part of the almost 63,000 people held under the state of emergency that the government declared in late March 2022.

The state of emergency suspended several constitutional guarantees, such as extending the term from three to 15 days for filing charges before a judge.

The war on gangs led at first to massive arrests of people suspected of belonging to the gangs or “maras”, in many cases without due process.

The maras took root in El Salvador in the early 1990s, when young Salvadorans who became part of gangs in the United States were deported to this impoverished Central American nation and brought their gang affiliation with them.

The mega-prison has several security rings, the main one being a concrete perimeter wall, 11 meters high and reinforced at the top with a 15,000-volt electrified fence. It also has 19 watchtowers.

Another security ring has been set up on the outskirts of the compound, made up of 600 soldiers and 250 police officers.

Modern X-ray equipment will fully scrutinize the body of whoever enters, to keep out prohibited objects.

Standing in front of one of the X-ray screens, Bukele told one of his officials: “You can see everything here, even the lungs, the bones.”

On Feb. 3 Amnesty International tweeted against the prison saying it would mean “continuity and escalation of the abuses” committed during the massive raids, documented by local and international organizations.

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele tours one of the cell blocks of the prison built in the center of El Salvador. International human rights organizations have criticized the project, with Amnesty International saying it would mean “the continuity and escalation of the abuses” committed under the state of emergency. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

Machiavellian style: does the end justify the means?

The new prison is the most recent move by the Bukele government, in its fight against gangs.

That fight, at least until the state of emergency, had been thrown into doubt when an investigation by the online newspaper El Faro revealed in 2020 that the Bukele administration had negotiated with the gangs to reduce the number of homicides in the country.

Bukele began his five-year term in June 2019, at the age of 38, with an air of modernity that led him to be described as the millennial president.

But after he gained a majority in Congress two years later, he took control of the Judiciary and the Attorney General’s Office, taking steady steps towards authoritarianism.

Since the government announced the state of emergency in March 2022, human rights organizations have denounced more than 4,000 cases of arbitrary detentions and abuses by soldiers and police officers emboldened by Bukele’s hard line against the gangs.

In fact, the government itself has reported that around 3,000 detainees have already been released, as their participation in the maras was not proven.

That has been read by opponents as evidence that innocent people have indeed been arrested.

But the government gives it a positive spin, saying it shows that the cases are being investigated, and that if there is no conclusive evidence, people are released.

Carlos, the Uber driver, pointed out that since the state of emergency began, the neighborhoods of San Salvador are safer, and he himself has seen this because he can now enter areas that were previously too dangerous to visit, as they were controlled by the maras.

Like him, the majority of the population of 6.7 million inhabitants of this small Central American country approve of Bukele’s measures to dismantle the gangs, as can be seen when people are asked on the streets of towns and cities, and as all opinion polls confirm.

“Only he has put on his pants against the gang members,” Carlos said.

But the impression is that the public backs the crackdown on gangs even when human rights violations are involved.

The problem of murders and insecurity in El Salvador was so severe that most people back the measures, as long as their own family members are not arbitrarily detained and subjected to police brutality.

When the murder rate peaked in 2015, El Salvador had a rate of 103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, making it the most violent country in the world

At the end of 2022, three and a half years into the Bukele administration, the homicide rate had plunged to 7.8 murders per 100,000 population.

But not everyone agrees with the Machiavellian principle that the end justifies the means and that gangs should be fought at any cost.

Despite agreeing, in general, with Bukele´s fight against gangs, Álvaro, who draws portraits in downtown San Salvador, told IPS that it does not seem right for abuses to be committed in the persecution of gangs.

“It is obvious, what is being done (against the gangs) is a good thing, but we must remember that there are cases, perhaps not a large percentage, of people who are innocent,” he added, sitting outside the National Theater waiting for customers.

“They are people who have been victims of an unfounded complaint. This has happened and from what I see it will continue to happen,” he said.

“The key is how to make legal and police work more efficient, without detaining everyone who is reported,” he argued.

A couple participate in the gay pride parade in San Salvador, held before the state of emergency was declared on Mar. 27, under which the government is carrying out massive raids in search of suspected gang members. Members of the LGBTI community are among those arbitrarily detained, victims of police homophobia and transphobia. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Nov 21 2022 (IPS)

Police raids against gang members in El Salvador, under a state of emergency in which some civil rights have been suspended, have also affected members of the LGBTI community, and everything points to arrests motivated by hatred of their sexual identity.

Personal accounts gathered by IPS revealed that some of the arrests were characterized by an attitude of hatred towards gays and especially transsexuals on the part of police officers."Cases like this, which reveal hatred towards gay or trans people, are happening, but the organizations are not really speaking out, because of the fear that has been generated by the ‘state of exception’.” -- Cultura Trans

“Cases like this, which reveal hatred towards gay or trans people, are happening, but the organizations are not really speaking out, because of the fear that has been generated by the ‘state of exception’,” an activist with Cultura Trans, a San Salvador-based organization of the LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex) community, told IPS.

Hatred of homosexuals and transgender people

The activist, who asked to remain anonymous, said that another member of his organization, a gay man known as Carlos, has been detained since Jul. 13, after he complained about the arrest two months earlier of his sister Alessandra, a trans teenager.

The authorities have accused them of “illicit association,” the charge used to arrest alleged gang members or collaborators, under the state of emergency.

“The case against Carlos was staged, it was invented,” said the source. “He is a human rights activist in the trans community, we have documents that show that he participates in our workshops, in our activities.”

A police officer stops a young man in San Salvador and checks his back and other parts of his body for gang-related tattoos, one of the elements used by authorities to track down gang members in El Salvador. Since the state of emergency was declared, 58,000 people have been detained, in many cases arbitrarily, among them members of the LGBTI community. CREDIT: National Civil Police

The state of exception, under which some civil rights are suspended, has been in force in El Salvador since Mar. 27, when the government of Nayib Bukele launched a crusade against criminal gangs, with the backing of the legislature, which is controlled by the ruling New Ideas party.

Gangs have been responsible for the majority of crimes committed in this Central American country for decades.

According to the constitution, a state of exception can be in place for 30 days, and can be extended for another 30. But a legal loophole has allowed the government and Congress to renew the measure every month, under the argument that this was already done during the 1980-1992 civil war.

This interpretation could only be modified by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice. But Bukele, with the backing of the legislature, named five hand-picked magistrates to that chamber in May 2021, in what his critics say marked the beginning of a shift towards authoritarianism, two years into his term.

Since Mar. 27, the police and military have imprisoned some 58,000 people.

In most cases no arrest warrants were issued by a judge, and the arrests are generally based on gang members’ police files.

In addition, anonymous tips by the public to a hotline set up by the government have gradually expanded the number of people arrested.

“The state of emergency exposes you to an inefficient prosecutor, incapable of investigating and linking people to crimes,” William Hernández, director of Entre Amigos, an LGBTI organization founded in 1994, told IPS.

He added: “If a police officer decides to detain someone and make a report of the arrest, they go out to look for them, but there’s no record of who reported that individual, where the information came from, and no one knows who investigated them.”

Among the 58,000 detainees are some 40 people from the LGBTI community, according to a report made public in October by Cristosal and other human rights organizations that monitor abuses committed by the Salvadoran authorities under the state of exception.

These organizations have collected some 4,000 complaints of arbitrary detentions and other abuses, including torture, committed against detainees. Some 80 people have died in police custody and in prison.

Carlos is a gay man who spoke out against the arrest of his younger sister Alessandra, a trans woman seized in May by Salvadoran police, accused of belonging to a gang. In July he was also arrested and so far little is known about their situation, under the state of emergency in El Salvador, which has led to the imprisonment of 58,000 people. CREDIT: Courtesy of Cultura Trans

Police homophobia

In the case of Carlos, 32, and his sister Alessandra, 18, the information available is that she was arrested in May in one of the police sweeps, in a poor neighborhood in the north of San Salvador.

She was arrested for not having a personal identity card. She had recently turned 18, the age of majority, and she should have obtained the document, which is needed for any kind of official procedure.

The police officers who arrested Alessandra told her mother that she was only being taken for 72 hours, while the situation was clarified.

However, something that could have been easily investigated and resolved turned into an ordeal for her and her family, especially her mother, who was facing several health ailments, said the Cultura Trans activist.

“She was in the ‘bartolinas’ (dungeons) of the Zacamil (a police station in that poor neighborhood),” the source said. “We went to leave food for her, then they sent her to the Mariona prison. We realized that she had been beaten and sexually abused, because she was being held in a men’s facility.”

He added: “When they took Alessandra, her mother told us that the police told the girl ‘culero, we are going to take you to be raped, to be f**ked,’ which is what actually did happen. ‘We’re going to take you so that you learn not to dress like a woman’.”

Culero is a pejorative term used in El Salvador against gays.

Meanwhile, her brother Carlos spoke out against Alessandra’s arrest, during activities carried out by the LGBTI community.

In May, in a march against “homo-lesbo-transphobia” – hatred of gays, lesbians and trans people – he carried several handmade signs calling for his sister’s release from prison.

The authorities visited Carlos’ house, and threatened to arrest him as well, which they did on Jul. 13.

According to the source, the police and prosecutors put together a case and accused him of illicit association. They are asking for a 20-year prison sentence.

“It’s not because of illicit association, we know that very well. It’s because he’s a human rights activist in the LGBTI community, and because he has been demanding the release of his sister,” said the Cultura Trans activist.

“We want him back with us, and his sister too,” he said.

William Hernández, director of the association Entre Amigos, said that the police and the Attorney General’s Office stage raids against alleged gang members without carrying out proper investigations to substantiate the arrests or to release detainees if they are innocent. The Salvadoran government has been on a crusade against gangs since March, but in the process there have been numerous abuses and illegal detentions, according to human rights organizations. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Underreporting hides the real number of cases

According to reports by the NGOs, while the 40 people from the LGBTI community who have been detained represent a small proportion of the total number of people arrested, there could be an underreporting of undocumented cases, especially in rural areas.

“In this country, although it’s small, there may be cases in remote places involving people who have never contacted an NGO. These are cases that remain invisible,” Catalina Ayala, a trans woman activist with Diké, an LGBTI organization whose name refers to justice in Greek mythology, told IPS.

Ayala said that, although she has not personally experienced transphobia from the authorities on the streets of San Salvador, and her organization has not received concrete reports of cases like Alessandra’s, she did not rule out that they could be happening.

“I think it’s a positive thing that the authorities are arresting gang members, but not people who have nothing to do with crime, or just because they are LGBTI,” she said.

The organization’s lawyer, Jenifer Fernández, said Diké has provided legal assistance to 12 people from the LGBTI community who have been detained, mainly because they were not carrying their identity documents.

In one of the cases, the police said things that could be construed as transphobic, although there was also a basic suspicion, since she was a trans woman without an identity document.

“She was a 25-year-old woman who had never had a DUI, an identity document, because she suffered from gender dysphoria and was afraid to go to register, afraid of being asked to cut her hair or to remove her make-up,” said Fernández.

Gender dysphoria is a sense of unease caused by a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity and has repercussions on their ability to function socially.

“The arrest report said that she was a gang member disguised as a woman, that they did not know who she was, that she gave a name but that it could not be proven without a DUI,” the lawyer explained.

But Fernández added that, in general, with or without a state of exception, trans women suffer the most from harassment, mockery and aggression.

Of the 12 cases, 11 of the individuals were released, and only one remains in custody because, according to the police, there is evidence that the person may have had ties to a gang, although the details of that evidence are unknown.

Call to stop abuses

On Nov. 11, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expressed concern over “the persistence of massive and allegedly arbitrary arrests” by Salvadoran authorities under the state of emergency.

It also reported non-compliance with judicial guarantees, and called on the government “to implement citizen security actions that guarantee the rights and freedoms established in the American Convention on Human Rights and in line with Inter-American standards.”

Among the constitutional rights suspended since the beginning of the state of emergency on Mar. 27 are the rights of association and assembly, although the government says this only applies to criminal groups meeting to plan crimes.

It also restricts the right to a defense and extends the period in which a person can be detained and presented in court, which Salvadoran law sets at a maximum of three days.

On Nov. 16, Congress, which is controlled by the governing party, approved a new extension of the state of emergency, which it has done at the end of each month.

New Ideas lawmakers have said that the restriction of civil rights will be extended as long as necessary, “until the last gang member is arrested.”

In this country of 6.7 million people, there are an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 gang members.

Bukele’s party holds 56 seats in the 84-member legislature, and thanks to three allied parties they have a total of 60 votes, which gives them a large absolute majority.

Leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha gang in the prison of Ciudad Barrios, in the Salvadoran department of San Miguel, in 2012. Credit: Tomás Andréu/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jan 15 2015 (IPS)

The upcoming municipal and legislative elections in March and the hiring of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a kind of anti-crime tzar are not the best equation for bringing down El Salvador’s high murder rate, analysts say.

Hopes that a national council set up by the government to tackle the problem of soaring crime will bring short-term results are waning because the focus on reducing the homicide rate has been overshadowed by the interest in gaining votes, said experts consulted by IPS.

“I am afraid that they are acting more as a result of the pressure generated by the need to win elections than in response to the country’s real need to find a solution to its crime problem,” said Raúl Mijango, one of the two mediators of the truce between gangs in place since March 2012.

On Mar. 1, Salvadorans will go to the polls to elect the 84 members of the country’s single-chamber legislature, as well as the mayors of its 262 municipalities.

In September, the government of left-wing President Salvador Sánchez Cerén created a National Council on Public Security and Citizen Coexistence, as an innovative response to the soaring crime rates, which have mainly been driven up by the gangs.“What Giuliani did in New York is a kind of gringo-style ‘manudurismo' [iron fist-ism], and in El Salvador we shouldn’t be reviving failed initiatives; we need new experiences.” -- Jeannette Aguilar

The main gangs, Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and Barrio 18, have an estimated 60,000 young members in El Salvador’s cities.

A total of 3,912 homicides were committed in 2014 in this impoverished Central American country of 6.2 million people – a 57 percent increase from the previous year, after a significant drop in 2012 and 2013 brought about by the truce between gangs.

The surge in the murder rate meant El Salvador returned to its earlier status as one of the world’s most violent countries, with 63 homicides per 100,000 population, compared to a global average homicide rate of 6.2 per 100,000 population in 2012, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

In March 2012, the main gangs agreed a truce which significantly reduced the number of murders for 15 months. In 2012 the homicide rate fell to 41 per 100,000 inhabitants. But the measure ran up against resistance from a society deeply wounded by the gangs, known here as “maras”.

The truce, which in practice has fallen apart, had the backing of the government of former president Mauricio Funes (2009-2014), which saw it as a mechanism to bring down the homicide rate, but never publicly expressed its actual involvement or support. It preferred instead to say it merely helped “facilitate” the agreement, by allowing imprisoned gang leaders to communicate with their deputies outside of prison.

The need for frank analyses of El Salvador’s problems and decisions to address them have been undermined by near continuous election campaigns, in a country which goes to the polls to vote every three years or less.

Presidential elections, which are held every five years, took place in 2014, and legislative and municipal elections are held every three years.

On Jan. 5, Sánchez Cerén, a former guerrilla commander during the 1980-1992 civil war, foreclosed any possibility of the gangs participating in any way in the debates in the new National Council on Public Security and Citizen Coexistence.

Members of the National Council on Public Security and Citizen Coexistence during a meeting in the presidential house in El Salvador. President Salvador Sánchez Cerén is sitting in the middle. Credit: Government of El Salvador

Mijango told IPS that the position taken by the president and his party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) – a former guerrilla group – to reject any participation by the gangs in the Council is purely motivated by electoral concerns, as the majority of the population is furiously opposed to the gangs, according to opinion polls.

To demonstrate that the new position responds to electoral interests, Mijango pointed out that Sánchez Cerén was vice president under Funes and that the FMLN is the party that “facilitated” the truce.

The National Council is made up of a wide range of academic, religious, citizen, business and international cooperation institutions.

The hope is that with input from the different actors, a consensus will be reached around proposals for tackling the country’s violent crime problem.

“In general, the Council is an important platform and will give a boost to national and local programmes and policies,” said Jeannette Aguilar, director of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University Public Opinion Institute.

But Aguilar also insinuated in her dialogue with IPS that she had doubts that the National Council would work, given the failure of similar previous attempts to reach a consensus in other areas, such as the economy.

She cited the case of the Economic and Social Council, made up of trade unionists, members of the business community, political parties and civil society organisations, which failed in its aim to hammer out agreements between labour and business.

It is widely recognised that a large part of the country’s homicides are the result of turf wars between gangs.

The National Council’s Technical Secretariat includes representatives of the United Nations Development Programme, the Organisation of American States and the European Union.

On Jan. 16, the 23rd anniversary of the peace agreement that put an end to 12 years of armed conflict in 1992, the government will announce the first measures arising from the proposals set forth in the National Council.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will be visiting the country at the time to support the government’s anti-crime efforts.

The possibility of reaching agreements in this area has also been undermined by the irritation among some segments of society over the presence of former NY mayor Giuliani, who was hired by the National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP), a powerful business group that also forms part of the National Council.

Giuliani is credited for the major drop in crime in New York City while he was mayor from 1994 to 2001. His team is set to arrive in the Salvadoran capital in the next two weeks.

ANEP is close to the right-wing National Republican Alliance (ARENA), which governed the country from 1989 to 2009, when the FMLN first won the presidency.

The decision to hire Giuliani to make recommendations to the government in the context of the National Council has triggered controversy.

“What Giuliani did in New York is a kind of gringo-style ‘manudurismo’ [iron fist-ism], and in El Salvador we shouldn’t be reviving failed initiatives; we need new experiences,” Aguilar said.

“Mano dura” is the description of the “zero tolerance” policies against crime adopted by the ARENA governments during their two decades in office, based exclusively on repression. The policies were not successful.

Luis Cardenal, who belongs to one of ANEP’s member organisations, told the local media on Jan. 6 that if the government did not accept the proposals set forth by Giuliani and his team, it would be an indication that “it’s hiding something,” with its National Council initiative.

“ANEP’s stance is blackmail, pure and simple,” Aguilar said.

For his part, Mijango said the business community plans to use Giuliani to boycott the work of the National Council. With the large media outlets on its side, ANEP will try to ensure that media coverage is only given to the former mayor, in order to delegitimise the work of the National Council and the government, with the aim of hurting the FMLN’s performance in the elections.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Rosa Nelly Santos arranges photos of missing Honduran migrants on a sort of shrine to ensure they are not forgotten, at the premises of the Committee for Disappeared Migrant Relatives in El Progreso. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
EL PROGRESO, Honduras, Sep 18 2014 (IPS)

United by grief and anxiety, the grandmothers, mothers and other relatives of people who disappeared on the migration route to the United States formed a committee in this city in northern Honduras to search for their missing loved ones.
Founded in 1999, the Comité de Familiares de Migrantes Desaparecidos de El Progreso (COFAMIPRO – El Progreso Committee for Disappeared Migrant Relatives) is now one of the most highly regarded migrants’ rights organisations in Honduras.

For the past 14 years, COFAMIPRO has aired a radio programme on Sunday afternoons called “Abriendo Fronteras” (Opening Borders) on Radio Progreso, a station run by the Society of Jesus (a Catholic religious order) in Honduras.

The programme was originally called “Sin Fronteras” (Without Borders), but Rosa Nelly Santos, a member of COFAMIPRO, told IPS that as the committee expanded its activities, “we decided to call it Abriendo Fronteras, because we have indeed opened them. We are listened to by a larger audience than ever before, and not only by migrants but also by governments.”“Every time I heard the rumble of The Beast [the Mexican freight train ridden by migrants] I would shudder because that’s where I discovered how dangerous the migrant route is. For them, the train tracks are their pillow. They sleep on the tracks and when they get on to the roof of the train they wait for it to get going, but some fall asleep from exhaustion and fall off when it moves.” -- Marcia Martínez

The hour-long radio programme fulfills a vital social function. It advises migrants about conditions on the routes, plays the music they request to lift their spirits, and provides a sevice by enabling them to send messages to their relatives in Honduras.

Emeteria Martínez, a founding member of COFIMAPRO, died in 2013 just months after locating one of her daughters , who had been missing for 21 years.

Finding their family members was the driving force that united them, Santos said. “The group was created out of nothing, by discovering that one woman’s grief was the same as another’s. We would meet in the home of one of the group and that’s how we built up courage to go out into the world and search for our relatives,” she said.

Twenty women started the group, and now the leadership group is composed of more than 40 members.

They are unassuming women but they are buoyed by hope, in spite of the pain of not knowing anything about their missing relatives and of facing dreadful tragedies like the Tamaulipas massacre in Mexico. Four years ago, 72 migrants, 21 of whom were Hondurans, were shot at point-blank range by Los Zetas, a Mexican criminal cartel. Their bodies were found on a ranch in the San Fernando district.

The Tamaulipas massacre brought home to Hondurans the suffering involved in migration, over and above the issue of the remittances sent back by those who make it to the United States.

“It was like a defeat for us. You hope that your son or daughter will travel safely on the migrant route and manage to cross the border, but you do not expect him or her to be massacred and shipped back to you in a box. That is really shocking,” said Santos, who together with other members of COFAMIPRO has helped and comforted victims’ relatives.

The women on the Committee are all volunteers who have overcome their fear of the unknown. For over a decade they have taken part in the mothers’ caravans , motorcades organised by the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano (Mesoamerican Migrant Movement), which in September every year travel the migrant routes, looking for clues to the whereabouts of missing relatives.

The migratory route begins in Guatemala and ends at Mexico’s northern border.

“The first time I went on the caravan, three years ago, I understood the importance of my mother’s work. I learned from her grief and I decided to take a full part in the Committee,” Marcia Martínez, 44, another daughter of the Committee’s deceased founder, told IPS.

“I had no idea of the huge number of mothers and relatives who join the motorcade, nor of the epic nature of the journeys my mother undertook. They cover all the routes used by the migrants, asking about them with placards, looking for answers that sometimes never arrive, or arrive too late. When we find someone we were looking for, the joy is indescribable,” she said.

“Every time I heard the rumble of The Beast [the Mexican freight train ridden by migrants on their way north] I would shudder because that’s where I discovered how dangerous the migrant route is. For them, the train tracks are their pillow. They sleep on the tracks and when they get on to the roof of the train they wait for it to get going, but some fall asleep from exhaustion and fall off when it moves,” Martínez said.

COFAMIPRO’s premises are in a shopping centre in El Progreso, one of Honduras’s five largest cities, in the northern department (province) of Yoro, 242 kilometres from Tegucigalpa. Formerly they were housed in Jesuit property, but thanks to donations they were able to rent their own small locale where people can come for support to find their relatives.

In the years since it was founded it has documented more than 600 cases of disappeared persons, of whom over 150 have been found. They continue to seek the rest, although they believe that many must have died on the way or fallen in the hands of human trafficking networks.

Initially the government would not recognise the Committee, but the success of its work with the Mesoamerican caravans led to its voice being heard. It has presented cases of disappeared migrants to the foreign ministry. In June, the group finally acquired formal legal status.

Their struggle has not been easy. Honduran officials dismissed them as “crazy old women” when, years ago, they organised their own march to Tegucigalpa to demand action for their missing loved ones.

Their response was a song they chanted at the foreign office building. Santos sang it with pride: “People at the foreign office call us liars, but we are decent women and we prove it with deeds; what we are here to demand is completely within our rights.”

Their steady, silent work has yielded fruit. When IPS interviewed a group of these women, they had just saved the life of a Honduran man, a relative of a local official in El Progreso, through their Mexican contacts.

He had been kidnapped by a criminal organisation that extorted more than 3,000 dollars from his family before they approached the Committee, which secured his release through an operation by the Mexican prosecution service.

Five years ago, COFAMIPRO issued a warning about the present migration crisis, but no one listened. According to the group, migrants will continue to flee from unemployment and criminal violence.

In the baking hot city of El Progreso, cases have been known of mothers who left town when criminal gangs told them their children would be forcibly recruited into the criminal organisations when they were old enough, and that in the meantime the gangs would provide money to raise the children and pay for their education.

An estimated one million Hondurans have emigrated to the United States since the 1970s, but the exodus has intensified since 1998. As of April 2014, Washington has intensified its deportations of families with children as well as adults.

The Honduran authorities say that 56,000 people were deported back to the country in the first seven months of this year. Of these, 29,000 arrived from the United States by air and 27,000 from Mexico by land.

Honduras has a population of 8.4 million and a homicide rate of 79 per 100,000 population, according to official figures.

In 2013, migrants contributed 3.2 billion dollars to the Honduran economy in remittances, close to 15 percent of GDP, according to the Central Bank.

In COFAMIPRO’s view, the migratory crisis should spur governments to reform their public policies and refrain from stigmatising and criminalising migrants, because “they are not criminals, they are international workers,” Santos said.

She, at least, has the consolation of having found her missing nephew four years ago.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha in the Ciudad Barrios prison in the eastern Salvadoran department of San Miguel, in 2012. Credit: Tomás Andréu/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, May 10 2014 (IPS)

When left-wing president-elect Salvador Sánchez Cerén takes office in El Salvador on Jun. 1, he will find big cracks in the truce between street gangs brokered by the outgoing administration, which has brought crime rates down in the past two years.

The peace agreement is facing its most critical challenge since it was reached in March 2012, and is faltering but has not been broken – at least not yet.

“As the dialogue breaks down, violence is rising, and the new authorities will have to take a decision to make sure that the peace process among gangs continues,” one of the brokers of the treaty, Raúl Mijango, told IPS. The other broker of the talks was Catholic Bishop Fabio Colindres.

Sánchez Cerén, a leader of the rebel group-turned political party Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which has been in power since 2009, has not addressed the recent increase in violent crime. Nor have the other members of his team.

The president-elect was vice president in the outgoing government of Mauricio Funes.

But during the election campaign that ended in Sánchez Cerén’s Mar. 9 victory, the then candidate said he would tackle the problem with what he called a “mano inteligente” – as opposed to a “mano dura” (iron fist) – approach to crime; in other words, an “intelligent” mix of crime prevention and security policies.

Until Funes became president in 2009, the anti-crime strategy followed was based on a “mano dura” approach under the governments of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which had governed the country since 1989.

The new government is under pressure to bring down the murder rate, not only because it is one of the main demands of the population, but also because this year marks the start of the election campaign for the 2015 municipal and legislative elections.

The peace deal signed two years ago by the two main gangs in El Salvador, the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, involves a non-aggression pact between them as well as a commitment to call off all attacks on civilians, the police and the military.

The government, meanwhile, agreed to transfer a number of leaders of the two gangs from maximum-security prisons to others with benefits like family visits.

Since then, the number of homicides has plunged from an average of 14 to five a day. The United Nations Office ont Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported in May that the murder rate was brought down from 69.2 per 100,000 population in 2011 to 41.2 per 100,000 in 2012.

But since February of this year, the rate has been rising again, to the current average of around 10 murders a day.

According to police statistics, which have been questioned from some quarters, over 50 percent of all murders in El Salvador are gang-related and 35 percent of the victims are gang members.

There are an estimated 60,000 gang members in this impoverished Central American country of 6.2 million people.

Mijango said the truce began to unravel when the Justice Ministry, during the presidential election campaign, pulled the government out of its role as “facilitator” of the truce, which had enabled the gang leaders to communicate with their followers outside the prisons, and to hand them instructions.

In addition, anti-gang police operations became harsher, which generated clashes with local communities.

According to political analysts, these measures were aimed at showing that the government was tough on crime, for electoral purposes, after the Funes administration helped bring about the peace deal between the gangs.

The outgoing government argues that the rise in violent crime is due to a turf war in a number of areas between the two factions of Barrio 18: the Sureños and the Revolucionarios.

Funes himself said on a radio programme that the truce had practically fallen apart, while Justice and Security Minister Ricardo Perdomo revealed that the gangs now have high-powered firearms and can outgun the police.

Indeed, the police have not done well in clashes with the gangs.

On Apr. 6, for example, in the town of Quezaltepeque in the central department of La Libertad, one police officer was killed and three were wounded during an attack by gang members.

But the major Salvadoran gangs deny that the pact is dead or that there are internal power struggles like the ones mentioned by Funes and members of his administration.

“Despites the attacks it has received, the truce is still in place,” says a communiqué published on Apr. 29, signed by the leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS), the two factions of Barrio 18, and the Mao Mao, La Máquina and Miradas Locos 13 gangs.

The statement was read out at a clandestine conference in San Salvador to which only four media outlets were invited, including IPS. National spokesmen for the MS and the two Barrio 18 factions – the Sureños and the Revolucionarios – participated in the conference. All three asked to remain anonymous for security reasons.

“Do you think that if our two factions were at war, we would be here now, together?” asked the representative of the Sureños.

The spokesmen acknowledged, however, that the truce is not perfect, and that there are “clicas” or “cliques” that are not respecting the guidelines handed down by the gang leaders.

For that reason, they neither denied nor confirmed that gang members took part in the attack on Quezaltepeque.

But they admitted that there is a conflict with a clica that broke off from the
Revolucionarios in Zacatecoluca, a town in the central department of La Paz, which is apparently provoking unusually high levels of violence in the area.

However, the dispute, which is local in nature, doesn’t explain the rise in murders at a national level, they said.

“We have kept our commitment to society,” said the MS spokesman.

But Catholic priest Antonio Rodríguez, who has been involved in the social reinsertion of gang members in Mejicanos, a poor neighbourhood on the north side of San Salvador, told IPS that the communiqué read out by the three spokesmen did not represent the national leadership of the gangs.

“The Sureños are angry about that statement because it is not representative,” said the priest, pointing to the cracks in the peace agreement.

Rodríguez was initially an outspoken critic of the truce, but later gave it his support, alongside Mijango and Colindres, before he distanced himself once again.

Now the priest, who belongs to the Congregación Pasionista, has joined the effort driven by Minister Perdomo to relaunch the peace process among the gangs, with the participation of the assistant bishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chávez, and representatives of evangelical churches and the United Nations Development Programme, among others.

“It’s a civil society pact, not an agreement among gangs,” Rodríguez told IPS.

In the clandestine conference, the gang leaders said clearly that “There is talk about the existence of two peace processes; we only recognise the one that started in March 2012.”

Gang members in a Salvadoran prison. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Walter García and Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Oct 22 2012 (IPS)

El Salvador has managed to bring down one of the world’s highest murder rates thanks to a truce between gangs that was lauded by the United Nations as an example to be followed in other countries of Central America.

But experts question the sustainability of the truce and call instead for government policies focusing on prevention and social reinsertion.

“Efforts should focus on keeping young people from joining gangs,” said Armando Samayoa, with the Institute of Social Cooperation, a non-governmental organisation in Guatemala that offers non-formal education and provides recreational spaces for youngsters, to help prevent them from falling into gangs.

The activist told IPS that once young people had joined the gangs – known as “maras” in Central America – and were involved in criminal activities, it was a much more complex task to rehabilitate them, one which required a major investment in funds.

“If we look at public spending on the security forces compared to what goes towards prevention programmes, there is a vast difference,” he said.

The truce

The truce between the Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs in El Salvador brought immediate results: the number of homicides in that country of 6.3 million people dropped from 13.6 a day in February to 8.2 in March, when it went into effect, according to a United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report released in September.

The study, “Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean: A Threat Assessment”, reports that the murder rate in El Salvador stood at 69 per 100,000 citizens in 2011, six percent up from 2010.

The homicide rate is also high in the other two countries of the so-called “northern triangle” of Central America: 91 per 100,000 in Honduras and 39 per 100,000 in Guatemala in 2011.

The situation is different in the rest of the sub-region, where the maras are not active, with the exception of isolated incidents, according to the local authorities. In Panama, the homicide rate is 22 per 100,000; in Nicaragua, 13 per 100,000, and in Costa Rica 10 per 100,000.

According to the UNODC, Honduras and El Salvador have the highest murder rates in the world.

The UNODC believes the truce in El Salvador could serve as a model for other Central American countries to follow, as a mechanism to fight crime.

Prevention first and foremost

But Samayoa emphasises that programmes of non-formal education such as the ones offered by his NGO, which include courses in English, carpentry, baking and cooking skills, computer training, sports, and running a small business, help prevent youngsters from falling into the hands of gangs in the first place, while a truce can break down at any moment.

“I remember a case in Villa Nueva, on the south side of the capital, where the gangs reached an agreement,” he said. “But the next day, they came to our organisation to say that they had to feed their families,” which meant that they had to continue committing crimes, he added.

Alma Aguilar, with the Guatemalan organisation Paz Joven (Young Peace), also said public policies in the region should be aimed at preventing youngsters from joining gangs, as well as at fighting crime.

“It is a multifactorial problem, and thus should be approached from many angles,” she told IPS. “As young people, we believe that the important issue is to prevent youths from becoming involved in illegal activities.”

She said governments should guarantee, “at the very least,” education up to the first years of secondary school, and should make an effort to ensure that young people have employment opportunities, “which unfortunately is not happening.”

Aguilar said the Salvadoran truce “is a successful experience to be taken as a case study,” although “the government should guarantee peace and order in conflict-stricken areas with the full weight of the law coming down on those involved in crime.”

The maras originated in the 1970s and 1980s in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities where Central American migrants and refugees became gang members and were later deported to their countries of origin. Thousands of young people in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are now involved in maras, which have morphed from violent youth gangs to organised crime groups.

On Oct. 11, the U.S. Treasury Department announced it was adding the Mara Salvatrucha to its list of the most dangerous Transnational Criminal Organisations “for its involvement in serious transnational criminal activities, including drug trafficking, kidnapping, human smuggling, sex trafficking, murder, assassinations, racketeering, blackmail, extortion, and immigration offences.”

Under U.S. law, this gives the Treasury the authority to target the gang with economic sanctions

The governments of El Salvador and Honduras have unsuccessfully tried to curb the growing power of the maras with tough anti-gang laws, which make it possible, for example, to arrest youngsters merely on suspicion of belonging to gangs.

The controversial truce reached in March by the main gangs in El Salvador was agreed without the participation of the government of moderate left-wing President Mauricio Funes, although the administration was widely assumed to have played an unspecified role as a facilitator.

The government is now taking early steps towards possible negotiations with the two gangs, to get them to put a definitive end to their criminal activities.

“The truce has produced good results in terms of reducing homicidal violence, but that’s all,” lawyer Ismelda Villacorta, with the Foundation for the Study and Application of Law (FESPAD) in El Salvador, told IPS.

The expert hesitated to say she was “absolutely optimistic about its results,” since other kinds of crime “are still as serious and worrisome as they were before the truce, or even worse in some areas.

“This entire situation shows that the reduction in homicides brought about by the truce is balanced on a weak platform that could collapse at any moment, and things could return to the way they were – or the number of homicides could soar even higher,” she said.

She suggested that the starting point to make the truce and the reduction in violent crime a lasting phenomenon should be to promote a programme of prevention at all levels, including the reinsertion and rehabilitation of gang members.

Isabel Aguilar, a human rights defender with the Guatemalan organisation Interpeace, told IPS that “the truce will be sustainable if it helps usher in a broader dialogue in which all segments of society would be involved and would contribute, with determination and commitment.

“The important aspect is that the truce makes possible, or generates the openness necessary for, prevention and reinsertion activities to be carried out in more fluid, sustainable ways, on more fertile ground,” added Aguilar, the coordinator of the multisectorial Central American programme of public policies to prevent youth violence.

In that sense, she was more optimistic, saying the truce “is an example to be followed, especially because it is demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing the high rates of violence.” She said, however, that it would have to be adapted to the situation of the different countries in the region.

But for now, the right-wing presidents of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, and Honduras, Porfirio Lobo, have ruled out the possibility of promoting agreements of this kind between gangs in their countries, or seeking any kind of negotiations between their governments and the maras.

Carlos Mojica, surrounded by other gang members in the Cojutepeque prison. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 25 2012 (IPS)

The two main youth gangs in El Salvador and the government have exchanged the main points they would like to discuss in talks aimed at bringing to an end to two decades of spiraling criminal violence. But the media, legislators and the public at large remain hostile to the possible start of negotiations.

The leaders of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, who are in different prisons, made the first move, presenting the government of centre-left President Mauricio Funes with the demands they would want to include on the agenda of eventual negotiations.

In public, the government still rejects the possibility of sitting down to talk with the “maras” or gangs, principally because of the potential political fallout from an initiative that is not widely accepted, say analysts who spoke to IPS.

But the Funes administration has also provided the gang leaders with its list of proposals to be discussed in what would be the second phase of efforts towards curbing the violence in El Salvador – after the current contacts, which are preliminary and indirect, but with facilitators on both sides.

In March, the two maras agreed to a ceasefire between themselves and against the police, the military and civilians. Since then, the number of homicides in this impoverished Central American nation of 6.2 million people, up to then one of the most violent countries in the world, has been drastically reduced: from 12 to 14 a day to five or six.

“We believe the process is moving forward, although there are hurdles, there are obstacles, there are people and entities opposed to it,” the leader of one of the two factions of Barrio 18, Carlos Mojica, told IPS. Mojica is taking part in the preliminary, indirect negotiations with the government from a prison near the capital where he is doing time.

The gangs first emerged in the United States, created by Salvadoran refugees fleeing the 1980-1992 civil war. When many of the gang members were deported, they began to recruit youngsters living in the slums in this country, and the maras grew into violent organisations dedicated to extortion, kidnapping and drug trafficking.

The local media, which are mainly conservative, act as a sounding board for the broad public opposition to negotiations between the government and the maras, as do most of the members of the single-chamber Congress. But the media and the legislature both play a key role when it comes to accepting proposals set forth by the gangs.

The government’s role in the truce between the two maras is not clear. But it was generally understood to have acted as a facilitator. In March, some gang leaders were transferred to medium-security prisons – a move that analysts saw as part of the process that gave rise to an agreement.

Some of the gang leaders’ proposals for negotiations have to do with changes to legislation that currently excludes the members of maras from privileges like parole for inmates who are suffering from terminal illnesses or are over 65 years old.

“Look what they are asking for: changing the laws. That shows the power achieved by these groups,” analyst Dagoberto Gutiérrez told IPS.

According to official estimates, there are some 60,000 gang members in El Salvador, not counting the 10,000 who are in prison.

Other demands are even less likely to be accepted, such as the repeal of the anti-gang law approved by Funes himself in 2010, which outlaws the very existence of the maras.

Experts agree that the law, which focuses on law enforcement approaches to cracking down on gangs, has failed to generate results, just like past legislation based on a “zero tolerance” approach.

For example, it allows the police to arrest anyone suspected of belonging to a gang. However, the suspect must be released if there is no evidence that he or she committed a crime.

“Article 3 of the constitution stipulates that no one can be discriminated against because of race, sex or other consideration. But they do discriminate against us,” Mojica told IPS, surrounded by around 100 gang members held in the prison in the city of Cojutepeque, 36 km east of San Salvador.

“The Ley de Proscripción de Pandillas (anti-gang law) is unconstitutional,” he added.

The gangs are also demanding the repeal of articles that require that gang members classified as highly dangerous be held in isolation in special prisons.

These gang members are concentrated in the prison in the central Salvadoran city of Zacatecoluca, where they are held in total isolation. The facility is popularly known as “Zacatraz”, in reference to the notorious federal U.S. prison on an island in San Francisco Bay, which was closed in 1963. Mojica was held in the Zacatecoluca prison until March.

The mara leaders also want the elimination of the sentence reduction to which witnesses are entitled if they testify against others allegedly involved in a crime.

Prosecutors heavily rely on the sentence reduction mechanism to secure the conviction of gang members, who pack the cells of El Salvador’s overcrowded prisons.

But members of the maras say the mechanism is abused, and cases are thrown together with insufficient evidence.

They also want the suspension of police operations in areas with a heavy gang presence – an idea that is especially resisted by the communities in question and society in general.

“The police have a constitutional mandate to fight crime, and a halt to these operations in those areas cannot be considered,” commented Mauricio Figueroa, executive director of the Fundación Ideas y Acciones para la Paz Quetzalcoatl (Quetzalcoatl Ideas and Actions Peace Foundation).

“This could be an obstacle that could trip up the talks,” he told IPS.

For his part, Raúl Mijango, a former guerrilla commander and former legislator who is acting as a facilitator or mediator in this first preliminary and indirect phase of a possible negotiation process, assured IPS that these suggestions are not seen as “points of honour” by the gang members.

In July, the leaders of the two maras read out their petitions in private to Organisation of American States (OAS) Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza, who visited the country to learn about the pre-negotiation process.

These points were reported by the blog Política Stéreo.

Insulza promised to act as a guarantor of the agreement already reached and any future accords.

On Jul. 31, the Diario de Hoy newspaper published the list of proposals that the government presented to the gangs, which included a complete halt to all crimes in which people are killed or injured, and of kidnapping, extortion, robbery and drug sales.

Studies show that the gangs have been strengthened financially by means of drug trafficking and dealing, and especially extortion, which targets the civilian population indiscriminately, regardless of social class.

Extortion – for example, demands for protection money from bus drivers – was not suspended after March, and this has further dampened any possible public faith in the truce and in eventual negotiations, said the analysts consulted by IPS.

The government also proposes that all members of gangs involved in crimes or wanted by the authorities turn themselves in voluntarily, and suggests the handing over of all illegally-owned firearms or explosives.

In addition, it wants the gangs to reveal the whereabouts of the clandestine cemeteries where they bury their victims to hide all evidence of the murders.

The authorities reported that of the 680 people missing in the first half of the year, only 317 have been found.