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Weekly Report - 03 September 2015 (WR-15-35)

EL SALVADOR: More than 60,000 terrorists on the streets

The constitutional chamber of the supreme court has issued a ruling which could be a game changer in El Salvador. As the government led by President Salvador Sánchez Cerén has taken the fight to the country’s mara street gangs, leading to violence spiralling out of control, the court ruled that mara members can be described as terrorists and that belonging to one of the gangs is a crime. While President Sánchez Cerén celebrated the court’s interpretation of the country’s anti-terrorism law, the ombudsman, David Morales, warned against the risk of it being used to justify “abuses of authority”.

Until this ruling, relations between the Sánchez Cerén administration and the constitutional chamber could best be described as fractious. But Sánchez Cerén hailed this particular ruling, which came in response to four legal challenges to the country’s anti-terrorism law on constitutional grounds, as did El Salvador’s entire political class. Sánchez Cerén said that judges would now have “no alternative” but to apply the anti-terrorism law to mara members “and those who collaborate with them”.

Morales, meanwhile, suggested that while the ruling might assist judges to apply the anti-terrorism law, it would not solve the problem of violence. There were more than 800 murders in El Salvador in August, according to Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde, the director general of the national police (PNC); this figure smashed the previous most violent month (last June with 677 homicides) since the civil war (1980-1992). There are more than 60,000 members of mara street gangs in El Salvador. Morales said that it was essential to persevere with “an integral strategy against violence” (providing opportunities for misled youths, for instance) and that designating maras as terrorists might give a completely free rein to the police and military, potentially leading to more abuses and more violence.

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