Alleged gang members are transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison built by the government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to house 40,000 detainees accused of belonging to organized crime. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

By Gustavo González
SANTIAGO, Apr 17 2023 (IPS)

Violence involving organized crime has made Latin America the most dangerous region in the world and has helped paved the way for a repressive kind of populism with a dangerous future, whose most visible symbol is Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador.

According to United Nations reports, Latin America, home to eight percent of the global population, accounts for 37 percent of the world’s homicides. (These statistics do not include deaths in wars, accidents and suicides.)

Observers talk about a generalized security crisis, and the Salvadoran president boasted of a 56.8 percent decline in the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, while Ecuador, at the other end of the spectrum, showed an increase of 82 percent.

But comparisons in percentages from one year to the next are misleading if the absolute numbers are not taken into account. For example, the homicide rate in Chile increased 32.2 percent in 2022, although in actual numbers that meant 4.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. In El Salvador, the figure for the same year was 7.8 per 100,000.

Statistics in percentages, magnified by the media and by the rise in the degree of violence in the crimes committed, spread a sensation of insecurity and fear among the public.

The terrain of politics

Politics have seized onto the insecurity crisis, which serves in some cases for the opposition to question the government, or in others for those in power to seek to neutralize their opponents. Both sides come up with shortsighted measures that do not attack the roots of the problem and can actually aggravate it in the medium to long term.

The most common reaction is to beef up the police force while providing it with greater means and authority to crack down on criminals. Police officers are given a greater margin of discretion to size up the danger and shoot – in other words, to become “trigger-happy”.

The expression is not new in the region. It became widespread in various countries between the 1960s and 1980s, under military dictatorships, when the law enforcement and armed forces murdered opponents in staged shootouts or brutally cracked down on social mobilizations.

The revival of these practices in the 21st century has required legitimization through laws, such as the so-called “law of privileged legitimate defense”, passed in Chile on Apr. 10, or broader norms that involve the police, the military and the powers of the State, as Bukele has pushed through in El Salvador.

Bukele, the leader of El Salvador’s Nuevas Ideas party, used his majority in the legislature to allow him to be re-elected as president. And on Mar. 22, 2022, he declared a state of emergency, accompanied by various legislative reforms that in practice gave him a free hand in his fight against crime, namely gangs known in Central America as maras.

More than a year after the state of emergency was declared, Amnesty International denounced widespread violations of human rights in the small Central American country:

“This policy has resulted in more than 66,000 detentions, most of them arbitrary; ill-treatment and torture; flagrant violations of due process; enforced disappearances; and the deaths in state custody of at least 132 people who at the time of their deaths had not been found guilty of any crime,” the human rights watchdog said in a statement released on Apr. 3.

“Key to the commission of these human rights violations has been the coordination and collusion of the three branches of government; the putting in place of a legal framework contrary to international human rights standards, specifically with regard to criminal proceedings; and the failure to adopt measures to prevent systematic human rights violations under a state of emergency,” it added.

A member of the carabineros, Chile’s militarized police, is photographed while opening fire on a street in Santiago. CREDIT: Courtesy of El Desconcierto

Repressive populism

Bukele replaced prisons with virtual concentration camps. A total of 1.5 percent of Salvadorans are currently deprived of liberty, which means the Central American country has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

However, opinion polls show that eight out of 10 Salvadorans are satisfied with the current president and want him to be reelected, while some dissident voices warn that the State is replacing the gangs as an agent of intimidation and concentration of power.

The temptation to imitate Bukele with repressive populism that feeds on showy measures is present throughout Latin America. While the “privileged legitimate defense law” was being debated in Chile, Rodolfo Carter, mayor of the municipality of La Florida, in Santiago, demolished houses registered as belonging to drug traffickers, in front of the television cameras.

In Ecuador, President Guillermo Lasso, threatened by impeachment, announced in early April that he was authorizing the “possession and carrying of weapons for civilian use for personal defense” as an urgent measure against the “common enemies: delinquency, drug trafficking and organized crime.”

Delinquency, drug trafficking and criminal organizations are recurring terms when talking about insecurity, but a dangerous drift is often observed where ‘trigger-happy’ laws and measures give way to repression against social protests or empower political persecution under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Criminalizing the poor

Javier Macaya, president of the Unión Demócrata Independiente, a far-right Chilean party that vindicates the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), accused the United Nations of supporting “political violence” when its High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned of the dangers posed by the “law of privileged self-defense”.

The authoritarian scope of “trigger-happy” laws also includes the criminalization of immigrants and poor neighborhoods, classified as gang territories that shelter drug trafficking rings, although large drug traffickers and drug users from high-income sectors are rarely prosecuted in the cities of Latin America.

Political persecution is often disguised as security, as in Nicaragua in February when 222 dissidents were expelled and stripped of their nationality. The government of Daniel Ortega accused them of “treason”, described them as “terrorists” and “mercenaries” and justified the measure in the name of national peace.

Security has been instated as Latin America’s most pressing issue. The latest Amnesty International report documents arbitrary acts in Venezuela that include forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. Haiti, mired in ungovernability, is another country where human rights are a victim of insecurity.

The complexities of the fight against crime involve strengthening the police and also growing vigilante justice on the part of citizens. In Brazil, the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) authorized the police to kill criminals and loosened restrictions on gun ownership for civilians. His successor, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, suspended the measures after taking office on Jan. 1.

Latin America has become a kind of arsenal, with more powerful weapons for the police, and also with the illegal trade that feeds organized crime. A third of the firearms seized in 2017 in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama came from the United States.

Mexican journalists silently march in Mexico City in 2010, protesting violence and intimidation against the press. Credit: Knight Foundation / CC BY-SA 2.0

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 27 2015 (IPS)

Organised criminals in Mexico are forcing the media to stop reporting on crime, by turning their violence against journalists.

With the Mexican state offering journalists little protection, the resultant drop in freedom of information has contributed to a heightened sense of insecurity in the country."People are saying 'we are not going to cover certain areas', fearing revenge and not trusting that the state is going to be able to protect them.” -- Claire San Filippo

Claire San Filippo, head of Reporters Without Borders’ Americas desk, told IPS that journalists in Mexico are self-censoring due to threats and violence, but also because violence against journalists is rarely punished by the state.

“It is of tremendous concern for information freedom because people are saying ‘we are not going to cover certain areas’, fearing revenge and not trusting that the state is going to be able to protect them.”

San Filippo says that the state bears the primary duty under international law to protect journalists.

“The state obviously has a responsibility to protect the journalist, and to make sure that they can guarantee their security,” she said.

“There is a mechanism to actually protect human rights defenders and journalists and unfortunately, the mechanism hasn’t been working in a very efficient manner and hasn’t really helped the situation overall.”

The first two months of 2015 have already seen marked violence and intimidation towards journalists, including kidnappings and threats.

Reporting for Journalism in the Americas Mariana Muñoz wrote last week, “An increase in organized crime-related violence has terrorized the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas over the past week. Conflicts between rival cartel factions in the neighboring border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros have left dozens dead, escalating the present danger for journalists practicing in the region.​”

The newspaper El Mañana reported on a gunfight that killed nine people. Although they did not name any cartel individuals involved, their editor, Juárez Torres, was kidnapped and warned “We are going to kill you.”

Torres later “fled the country, half of the staff did not return to work the following day, and at least four journalists at the publication immediately announced their resignation,” Muñoz reported.

El Mañana has since avoided reporting on violent crime in Tamaulipas.

Speaking about Torres’ kidnapping and other similar incidents, San Filippo said, “When you look at the beginning of this year, it’s obviously dramatic and extremely preoccupying because we have journalists who say ‘we are not going to cover the issues of insecurity, violence and it’s consequences on people’ or we’re actually going to leave the country to go to the United States because we feel so unsecure.”

She says that Reporters Without Borders calls on the Mexican government to take the threats against journalists seriously and “not try to either diminish them or try to discredit the journalists by saying that they are actually not journalists and saying they are not related.”

She said the state should also provide timely and effective protection to journalists and their families when the journalists request it and importantly, must hold perpetrators of violence against journalists accountable.

San Filippo said this was important so that “journalists can feel secure and feel that they can carry out their job without risking their lives or lives and physical integrity of their loved ones.”

“This is the only way that you can make sure that you can ensure that there is no self-censorship and journalists don’t feel that they have to go to another country to feel safe.”

Home of organised crime

According to In Sight Crime, a foundation that studies organised crime in the Americas, “Mexico is home to the (Western) hemisphere’s largest, most sophisticated and violent organized criminal gangs.”

“They traffic in illegal drugs, contraband, arms and humans, and launder their proceeds through regional moneychangers, banks and local economic projects. They have penetrated the police and border patrols on nearly every level, in some cases starting with recruits for these units. They play political and social roles in some areas, operating as the de facto security forces.”

Steve Killelea, executive chair of the Institute for Economics and Peace, wrote last year that since “the start of the calamitous drug war in 2007” Mexico has dropped 45 places on the International Peace Index – down to 133 of 162 countries on the most recent (2013) index.

Killelea says that although Mexico does well in terms of development indicators such as life expectancy and youth empowerment, its poor overall rating in peace is partly due to the consequences of violence against journalists and poor freedom of information.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant heading to the U.S. Credit: Wilfredo Díaz/IPS

By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Aug 29 2014 (IPS)

“Survival migration” is not a reality show, but an accurate description of human mobility fuelled by desperation and fear. How despairing are these migrant contingents? Look at the figures of Central American children travelling alone, which are growing.

The painful journeys of children and teenagers from Central America to the United States border sounded alarms this year.While Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and parts of Mexico are like hell on Earth, the Refugee Convention is not easily applicable in these cases, and moves to broaden or amend it have failed so far.

More than 52,000 children —mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador— were detained when they crossed the border without their parents in the last eight months, says the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

While it is an unprecedented crisis, Gervais Appave, special policy adviser to the International Organisation for Migration’s director general, frames it “within a more general global trend”, which could be defined as “survival migration”.

Children travelling from the Horn of Africa to European countries, through Malta and Italy, or seeking to reach Australia by boat from Afghanistan, Iran and Sri Lanka, are just two examples.

The European agency dealing with borders, Frontex, reported an increase in the “phenomenon of unaccompanied minors claiming asylum in the European Union (EU)” during 2009 and 2010.

According to Frontex, the proportion of children migrating alone “in the overall number of irregular migrants that reach the EU is worryingly growing.”

Appave told IPS it is impossible to identify a single cause for the spread of this child migration. But he pointed out there is a “very effective and ruthless smuggling industry”. There is “a psychological process that kicks in if you have a critical mass of people moving. Then others will try to follow because this is seeing as ‘the’ solution to go forth,” he said.

The muscle of smugglers and traffickers is apparent in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. But nobody flees without a powerful reason.

According to a report published in July by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, 85 percent of the new asylum applications received by the United States in 2012 came from these three countries, while Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize registered a combined 435 percent increase in the number of individual applications from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

While in recent weeks there have been fewer children crossing the U.S. southern border, “this phenomenon has been here since years ago,” Adriana Beltrán, WOLA’s senior associate for citizen security, told IPS.

Criminal gangs, mafias and corruption are major drivers, agree Beltrán and José Guadalupe Ruelas, director of Casa Alianza – Honduras, an NGO working to promote children’s rights.

Killings, extrajudicial executions, extortion and fear “have grown dramatically” in Honduras, Ruelas told IPS.

The country has 3.7 million children under 18, and one million do not attend school; half million suffer labour exploitation; 24 out of 100 teenage girls get pregnant; 8,000 boys and girls are homeless, and other 15,000 fled the country this year, according to official statistics.

“Five years ago, there were 43 monthly murders and arbitrary executions of children and under-23 youths,” he said. Now the monthly average is 88, according to Casa Alianza’s Observatorio de Derechos de los Niños, Niñas y Jóvenes.

Moreover, the perception of security is altered. When people in the “colonias” (poor neighbourhoods) see an ambulance, they “immediately presume a murder or a violent death, instead of a life about to be saved or an ill person to be cured,” and if they see a police or a military patrol, “they think there will be heavy fire and deaths.”

These terrified people mistrust state institutions. Only last year, 17,000 families left their homes following gangs’ threats, “and the state could do nothing to prevent it.”

“They are displaced by the war,” Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández said in June.

The 1951 U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol establish that a refugee is a person who fled his or her country due to persecution on the grounds of political opinion, race, nationality or membership to a particular social group.

While Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and parts of Mexico are like hell on Earth, the Convention is not easily applicable in these cases, and moves to broaden or amend it have failed so far. Instead, the 1984 Cartagena Declaration (see sidebar) offers a more flexible refugee definition for the region.

Through a 10-point plan of action, the UNHCR asks governments to include refugee considerations in migration policies, particularly when dealing with children, women and victims of trafficking.

According to a 2008 law, U.S. authorities must screen all cases of children under 18 who crossed the border alone to determine whether they are victims of trafficking or abuse, to provide them with legal representation and ensure due process. But the agencies in charge are overloaded and lack adequate resources.

“Some sectors want to change this law and, despite the fact that there have not been deportations, Washington has not clearly indicated yet which stance will take,” said Ruelas.

With elections set for November, it is highly unlikely the political parties will keep this issue out of the electoral fight, he added.

Beyond the urgency of this refugee crisis, underlying causes are a much more complicated issue.

It is not just violence or poverty, but “incredibly weak criminal justice institutions penetrated by organised crime,” said Beltrán.

Ruelas points out the “wrongful” militarisation of Honduras, which will further erode the state’s ability to control its territory. “Despite more soldiers patrolling the streets, criminals feel free to threaten and murder in the colonias,” he said.

According to Beltrán, the United States’ ad hoc assistance through the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) is excessively focused on the “anti-drug fight”, when the region requires more investment in prevention policies, particularly at the local level.

“Washington needs to refocus its policies toward the region, but Central American governments can’t evade their own responsibility,” she added.

Their fiscal revenues, for example, are among the lowest in Latin America, thus undermining their capacity to provide services and respect human rights.

However, the crisis of migrant children is providing a golden opportunity to reexamine all of these larger issues, Ruelas says. “We need a human security, one which regains the public space for the citizens.

“When people control the territory,” he argued, “because the police protect and support them, they gain the chance to rebuild a more peaceful community life.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at dia.cariboni@gmail.com

Protesters demand that the Mexican government search for their missing relatives. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Diana Cariboni
MEXICO CITY, May 14 2013 (IPS)

When people are forcibly disappeared in Mexico, it does not necessarily mean that the victims are immediately killed. In this country of entrenched violence, forced disappearance is also a method used to feed the markets for sexual exploitation and slave labour.

Mexico has regressed “to the barbarism of Roman gladiators,” lawyer Juan López, a legal adviser to Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desparecidos en México (FUNDEM), a support group for families searching for their loved ones, initially in the northern state of Coahuila and now nationwide, told IPS.

In today’s Mexico, where organised crime is rampant and public security has been militarised, forced disappearances do not follow the pattern seen in past decades in this country and others in Latin America, marked by dictatorships, “dirty wars” against opponents and armed conflicts.

These days “just about anyone” is vulnerable, López said. An unknown proportion of the victims fall prey to “illegal businesses that produce lucrative profits from an unpaid slave labour force,” he said.

This includes the forced recruitment of teenagers and young adults as hired killers, workers in the production of drugs or to serve other needs of the cartels, or for organ trafficking.

“There have been confirmed reports of buses stopped by armed groups who take away all the young men,” López said.

The victims’ profile has changed, according to studies. At first the disappeared were men between the ages of 30 and 45; then the age range fell to 20-25 and again to 17-19. Now younger teenagers are also kidnapped, while the proportion of women has increased to the point where they make up half of all new disappearances, he said.

Human trafficking for labour and sexual purposes is currently flourishing in Mexico, and it is the third most lucrative illegal business in the world after drug and arms trafficking. The central Mexican state of Tlaxcala is the epicentre of networks that kidnap women in more than 20 districts, and also in border areas, and exploit them in cities in this country and the United States.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says that 80 percent of the people trafficked in Mexico are women and girls. Mexico is the second country, after Thailand, for the number of trafficked women smuggled into the United States.

The victims, who are “picked up” in streets, towns and communities, are absorbed into “a human market,” and it is possible that many of them “are still alive,” López said.

During the six-year term of former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), 26,121 people were forcibly disappeared, according to the database published by the government of incumbent President Enrique Peña Nieto in late February.

However, the list does not include several well-known cases, their families confirmed, nor the information, however much or little, that was often gathered by the relatives themselves.

The stories are horrifying: young men forced to fight each other to death, or to dismember a woman alive, as acts of initiation and hardening of recruits. Groups of men forced to undertake training that only the fittest survive. Women tricked, enslaved and forced into submission by threats against their children.

Brenda Rangel, a 35-year-old member of FUNDEM, is looking for her brother Héctor, who was 28 years old when municipal police detained him in November 2009, along with two other men in Monclova, Coahuila.

“But they didn’t hand them over to any authorities,” Rangel told IPS. She found out what had happened to them because her brother managed to call her on his cell phone. “The police handed him over to an illegal organisation.” The next day she went to Monclova, and she has moved heaven and earth to find him. “My brother is alive,” she stated.

Rangel was one of the most eloquent speakers at the march organised by mothers of the disappeared from all over the country on Friday May 10 in the centre of the capital to demand that the government mobilise its resources to find them.

“There is no money available to look for ordinary people who have disappeared,” she declared in her powerful, broken voice.

Dressed in white, the mothers marched several blocks to the monument of the Angel of Independence, shouting slogans like “¡Hija, escucha, tu madre está en tu busca!” (Daughter, listen! Your mother is looking for you!).

Forty-three-year-old Lourdes Valdivia has heard nothing from her husband, 47-year-old José Diego Cordero, or their 22-year-old son Juan Diego, since December 2010 when they went hunting with eight friends and relatives. Municipal police detained them at a checkpoint near Joaquín Amaro, a municipality in the central state of Zacatecas.

On the pretext of checking their hunting permits, they locked them up in the police station, Valdivia said, wiping away her tears. Thanks to an underage boy who was released and an adult who was able to escape, Valdivia learned that “they took them out at night and handed them over to a group, presumably Los Zetas,” a notoriously violent criminal syndicate.

Other people are kidnapped for ransom, or because they have witnessed a crime, or they disappear because they were unwittingly caught in crossfire.

Systems engineer Juan Ricardo Rodríguez met up with his fiancée in September 2011 in a hotel in Zacatecas, where he was working, to finetune their wedding plans. As they were leaving, they saw an armed commando taking three men away. The couple tried to get away, but they were also seized.

Federal police, who spoke to the armed men, watched the entire event, Rodríguez’s mother, Virginia Barajas, who reconstructed the scene with the help of witnesses, told IPS.

There are reports of hundreds of people shut up in warehouses, safe houses belonging to crime syndicates, or isolated ranches in rural areas.

Other sources say it is likely that the disappeared persons are dead, as indicated by the mass graves that have been found. But some families have received remains that do not correspond to their loved ones.

The families of the disappeared always live in hope, said legal expert Santiago Corcuera, a member between 2004 and 2010 of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

But Corcuera described a number of different patterns of disappearances.

When the perpetrators are members of the public security forces, the victim will most likely be killed, he said. But there is “collusion, for instance, with sexual exploitation of women and girls,” or with other kinds of labour exploitation “in support of drug trafficking” and to swell the ranks of hired killers, he added.

In his view, the “law on victims” adopted by the Peña Nieto administration is “a beacon,” because it establishes reparations mechanisms. But protocols to search for disappeared victims are lacking; these should be coordinated between different Mexican states and with other countries in the region, he said.

FUNDEM’s López went even further: “The state does not carry out searches or investigations. And it opposes investigations by the families.”

According to Human Rights Watch, in many cases, official investigators have told families that the investigation’s progress depended entirely on the efforts of the families themselves.

Police officers in Honduras are protesting regulatory measures and aptitude tests implemented as part of reforms aimed at purging the police force of corruption and growing links to organised crime.

The rebellious police officers say they do not oppose the clean-up of the force, and insist that they are loyal. But they are complaining about the four new exams: drug tests; lie detector tests; studies to verify their personal and family assets; and psychometric tests to determine their aptitude as police officers and their ability to control their emotions.

The protests broke out after a number of officers failed the tests, which began seven months ago. The authorities are considering dismissing them from the force.

Other officers are to be relieved of their posts because of seniority or other labour-related reasons.

The situation has led to a bitter dispute within the police force, especially against the new police chief, Juan Carlos “El Tigre” (The Tiger) Bonilla, whom many of the purged officers do not recognise as their superior because he is less senior than they are. They also accuse him of being linked with human rights abuses in the past.

Eduardo Villanueva, head of the office of investigation and evaluation of the police (DIECP), told IPS that the tests “are one of several instruments to purge the institution. At present we are investigating the family assets of 150 officers, and no doubt this is causing resentment,” he said.

By law, DIECP is responsible for enforcing controls and testing in the police force and taking action based on the results. It is an autonomous body that does not depend on the security ministry, and its work has drawn on Mexican, Colombian, Chilean and U.S. experts.

Villanueva said the agency he heads is “getting to the bottom of the barrel in the police force, and the reactions against the process merely indicate that we are on the right track.”

One of the leaders of the police rebellion is Aldo Oliva, former head of the National Penitentiary, who publicly challenged the authority of President Porfirio Lobo, calling on him to “be more careful” in reviewing the purging process.

In late October, Oliva and another 150 officers went to court to challenge the constitutionality of the tests, claiming they violated human rights.

When Lobo refused to meet with him, Oliva hinted that in the coming months there would be “a revelation of irregularities of such magnitude that he will have to listen.” But he did not provide details.

Lobo confirmed the tests would continue, as would the purge. “If (the police) feel hard done by, they can go to the courts, but the clean-up process we have started is irreversible,” he said.

Along with Oliva, two other former police chiefs, José Luis Muñoz who was suspended from his post in October 2011, and José Ramírez del Cid, suspended in May 2012, have also expressed discontent.

Muñoz and Ramírez del Cid have been identified as part of a group of officers who are trying to destabilise the administration of Bonilla, a hard-line police officer who enjoys the full confidence of the government of the right-wing Lobo, in spite of doubts expressed about him by human rights defenders and the families of victims of violence.

“At least Bonilla gets things done; he seems to be diligent and willing to clean up the police force, although we still give him a margin of doubt,” Julieta Castellanos, the president of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, whose son was murdered by police officers a year ago and who is now one of the leaders of the movement to reform the police force, told IPS.

“We are living in a time of a police counter-reform. This will not be an easy process, because organised crime mafias have been operating within the force, and they are feeling the effects,” political analyst Víctor Meza, coordinator of the Public Security Reform Commission (CRSP), which includes the attorney general’s office and the judicial branch, told IPS.

In late October Meza presented a package of six bills to the legislature, including a new comprehensive law on the police. All of this, analysts say, is causing jitters among corrupt police structures.

Edmundo Orellana, a former attorney-general, told IPS, “difficult times are coming; they are fighting among themselves, and seeking external allies to put the brakes on the reform.”

The Honduran police force has faced an unprecedented crisis in the past year, with revelations of its links to organised crime, extortion rackets, kidnapping and assault gangs compelling President Lobo to sack a number of police chiefs.