SALVADOR
Salvadorian Gang Member
President Nayib Bukele
SALVADOR DRAWS A LINE IN THE SAND
On March 27, following an explosion of violence that resulted in 62 homicides in a single day, reportedly due to the rupture of negotiations between the government of El Salvador and gang leaders, President Nayib Bukele requested, and the national assembly approved a state of exception that suspended the rights to freedom of expression, association and due process. Initially authorized for 30 days, the state of exception has been renewed five times and remains in force.
THE PURGE. According to official sources, as of August ‘22, more than 50,000 individuals, whom Salvadoran officials have variously referred to as criminals & terrorists, had been detained under the state of exception.
Of these, 44,000 had been placed in indefinite preventive detention in overcrowded prisons with little or no access to counsel or evidence presented against them.
CAPTURED GANG MEMBERS
THE JOURNALISTS. Also as of August, at least 9 prominent Salvadoran journalists have fled the country after being harassed, threatened and surveilled in the aftermath of a new media law penalizing some reporting on criminal groups. The ongoing situation reinforces concerns over growing authoritarian tendencies and deteriorating rule of law in El Salvador and the Central American region.
Producer Don Sikorski has gained access to this team of journalists and their cache of secret government documents.
MS-13 MEMBERS
Representatives of the executive branch and MS-13 agreed to the reduction in homicides, prison privileges, and long-term pledges tied to the results of 2021 congressional elections.
The proof that Nayib Bukele’s administration is negotiating with the Mara Salvatrucha13 (MS-13) is in its own internal documents. Sikorski obtained copies of hundreds of prison
reports confirming dozens of covert meetings between government officials and gang leaders since 2019, as well as intelligence reports detailing the outcomes of the encounters.
All through the 1980’s, El Salvador was a place of obsessive U.S. interest. Ronald Reagan said that it was “on the front line of the battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere, and eventually at us.” When fighting broke out between the country’s right-wing government and leftist guerrillas, the U.S. sided with the government; it armed the military, trained and advised its officer corps, and covered up their worst abuses.
For 12 years, the guerrillas fought the U.S.-backed government to a stalemate, and some 75,000 civilians died. 85% of the killings were committed by the military and the security forces, which massacred large numbers of the rural poor for sympathizing with guerrillas.
AMERICAN HISTORY X
WHY NOW The Story of the new SALVADOR is a defining narrative of the relationship between American and the ever-evolving politics of Latin America, the story of SALVADOR not only defines issues inside our country, these are issues facing EVERY NATION.
“They consumed everything in their path, Piecemeal neighborhood gangs saw no choice but to join one of the two for their own survival. The alternative was complete annihilation.” the anthropologist Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson
After thousands of Salvadoran youths were arrested, the Clinton Administration saw an opportunity to demonstrate its toughness both on immigration and on crime.
It deported violent offenders without telling the Salvadoran gov’t who they were. Cliques from Southern California arrived in El Salvador, bringing their rivalries and their turf wars with them. By 2015, there were some 60,000 gang members in El Salvador, and 70% of the country’s businesses were being extorted, leading to annual losses of four billion dollars, according to estimates by the Salvadoran Central Reserve Bank.
Gangs have dominated life in El Salvador since the late 90’s, but they didn’t originate there.
MS-13 and Barrio18 both began in LA, at least a decade earlier, as hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled the civil war. Many of the teen-agers, adrift when they arrived, turned to crime in the inner city, where Mexican and Black gangs enforced a brutal racial hierarchy.
The homicide rate was higher than it had been during much of the civil war.
A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL & MS-13
“The UNITED STATES lets these dangerous types out and tells them, ‘Go back to where you came from, But we have no way to try them or jail them . . . and so we must not only let them in but let them go free.” the President of El Salvador 1997
A WAR ON TRUTH
ThereBatman.are references to two years of secret talks, and the official takes pains to describe everything he’s done for the gang to prove his “loyalty and trustworthiness.”
What caused the killing spree in March, according to 3 gang members, was the arrest of a group of gangsters who were travelling in a gov’t vehicle. They felt betrayed because they’d been promised “safe passage.”
In June, ‘22, Patrick Ventrell, the American Chargé d’Affaires, gave a press conference in San Salvador at which he said, “The best way for the gov’t of El Salvador to show that it is serious” about fighting the gangs “is to extradite the most dangerous leaders.”
Carlos Martínez
Recently, journalist Carlos Martínez published a story in El Faro based on 7 audio recordings of conversations between members of MS-13 and a government negotiator close to Bukele. The code name they use for the President is
Later that summer, Bukele extradited two of them with little fanfare. This news was eclipsed by the construction of a prison to hold more suspected gang members, which he was calling the Terrorism Confinement Center.
One of them, a reporter named Bryan Avelar, who works with the New York Times,was the target of a viral campaign that claimed his brother was a prominent gangster. Last year, 35 journalists and human-rights advocates discovered that their cell phones had been infected with the surveillance software Pegasus.
Told thru-the-lens of journalists working for EL FARRO, and the secret cache of government documents that have put many lives at risk. Journalists had to leave the country after being falsely accused by the President and members of his party of conspiring with the gangs.
The Salvadoran government secretly released some of the men from prison, and they are now at large. The problems of all of Latin American, are America’s same problems, defining gangs, the war on drugs, politics, immigration and the rule of law heading in to the future.
SALVADOR is a 3 Part premium documentary series & podcast that explores the new EL SALVADOR and a sinister pact between the Presidential administration of Nayib Bukele and MS-13 that has altered Latin America.
DOCUMENTARY SERIES & ACCESS
The government could deny press reports, but certain facts remained. Last year, Bukele refused a U.S. request to extradite 14 top-ranking members of MS-13.
Gabriela Cáceres is an investigative journalist based in El Salvador reporting on a diverse range of topics, from corruption to violence against women and migration. Her work is published in El Faro, a digital newspaper, where she has been working since 2018. Her career as a journalist began in 2015 as a reporter at La Prensa Gráfica, where she wrote about the justice system and gang violence. Since then, she has had a deep interest in explaining the situation of women outside of gangs. Gabriela is part of the second edition of Periodismo Situado, a training project for 20 journalists from Latin America. She has a Degree in Social Communication at the Central American University “José Simeón Cañas” (UCA).
Juan José Martínez is a sociocultural anthropologist from Universidad Nacional de El Salvador. He has studied violence and gangs since 2008. He has been a lecturer at Universidad Mónica Herrera and has worked as a consultant for institutions, such as Action on Armed Violence, UNICEF, Soleterre, and American University.
Óscar Martínez is an award-winning Salvadoran investigative journalist and writer for el faro. net, the first online newspaper in Latin America covering migration, violence, and organized crime in Central America. In 2008, he won Mexico’s Fernando Benítez National Journalism Award; in 2009, he was awarded the Human Rights Prize at in ‘16 the José Simeón Cañas Central American University;the Committee to Protect Journalists awarded him an International Press Freedom Award. he was also awarded the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, which honors journalists for their outstanding coverage of the Americas. He also authored The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail as well as, A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America.
