On 17 April El Salvador’s justice & public security minister, Ricardo Perdomo, proposed a new broader-scope and more ‘transparent’ agreement with “the gang leaders who still believe in the pacification process”. Perdomo urged them to “stop killing and extorting the population” and join “representatives of civil society” to work out the new pact.
This came after he had accused unnamed gang leaders of having ordered from prison attacks on “police, military and the civil population” which had resulted in the sharp increase in violent deaths in recent weeks.
Perdomo, however, has not ordered the return of the gang leaders to the maximum security prison of Zacatecoluca, from which 30 of them had been transferred in March 2012 to a more lenient regime as a counterpart to their agreement to call a truce.
Perdomo also blamed the judiciary for its resistance to invoke the anti-terrorism law against those responsible for attacks on police officers, prosecutors and judges. Recourse to the anti-terrorism law has been urged by chief prosecutor Luis Martínez and the deputy director of the national police (PNC), Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde.
From 1 January to mid-April there were 16 exchanges of gunfire with the PNC: three officers and 11 of the attackers were killed, 11 of them were injured and 51 were arrested. The institute of forensic medicine (IML) has reported that in the first quarter of the year there were 794 cases of homicide, 44% more than in the same period of last year. IML director, Miguel Fortín, attributes this to the police’s “slightly stronger position of confrontation with the criminals [and] a response from the criminals”.
The PNC reports that during the Easter holiday period (12-17 April), usually a period of increased violence, there were 51 homicide cases — 39% more than in 2013. This took the total since the beginning of the year to 945, an average of 8.9 per day as against six in the comparable period of last year (the average for the whole of 2013 was 6.8 per day).
A communiqué issued by the justice & public security ministry on 6 April said that “The PNC has information and evidence that the gangs have increased their criminal activity, expanded their organisation and presence across the territory, increased their social and institutional penetration, acquired more military-use armament and become more involved in the drugs trade”. This communiqué put the number of attacks against the police in the first quarter of the year at 47, compared with 30 in the same period of 2013.
Minister Perdomo said that the gangs were receiving ‘military training’ and were operating in coordination with the Mexican Gulf drug trafficking organisation (DTO), groups of Guatemalan drug traffickers and one that operates in Acajutla. The police, he said, was paying special attention to 39% of the recent homicide cases because their modus operandi was unusual and the perpetrators could not be readily identified as gang members. “We are investigating”, he said, “because we don’t yet know who is training the gangs”.
The only evidence cited in support of the purported ‘military training’ was the use of Uzis and M-16 rifles in some of the recent homicide cases. Perdomo also said that many members of maras were being hired as contract killers.
Defence minister David Munguía Payés said that military intelligence had detected that in certain parts of the country, such as Guazapa, San Vicente and Morazán, camps had been set up to train gang members. He dismissed claims that gang members had infiltrated the armed forces — but said that the vetting procedures for new recruits had been tightened to prevent any such development.
Rise and fall of homicide stats
Number of cases and rates[1]
Year Cases Rate Year Cases Rate Year Cases
2004 3,897 64.5 2009 4,382 71.1 2014[3] 794
2005 3,882 64.1 2010 3,987 64.4
2006 3,928 64.6 2011 4,371 70.2
2007 3,497 57.3 2012 2,594 41.2
2008 3,179 51.8 2013[2] 2,490 39.6
1Per 100,000 inhabitants. 2Provisional PNC figures. 3First quarter, IML data.
Notes: Peak year in bold. Figures for rates have been rounded to one decimal.
Source: Alertamérica (OAS) save where indicated.
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