Twelve thousand prisoners later, Nayib Bukele continues to protect the Gang Leaders of the MS13

Cyber trolls. Himself with his Twitter and Facebook accounts. All your officials. The attorney general he controls. The Judicial Body in which he also rules. The official media financed with public money. Nayib Bukele set his entire propaganda apparatus to maintain the narrative according to which he is a kind of avenging leader who will end once and for all the MS13 and Barrio 18 gangs, the main criminal organizations in El Salvador, whose street wars and businesses have caused tens of thousands of deaths in the country in the last few decades.

Since the last weekend of March, when gang violence left 87 dead in 72 hours in the country's streets and neighborhoods, Bukele and his apparatus embarked on their self-described “war against the gangs”, which, in addition to cyclical propaganda, has left a series of legal amendments and a state of emergency that has not yet ended and that has served to the ruling party to limit constitutional guarantees and to once again attack journalists and academics critical of the president and his policies.

On April 15, in the middle of Holy Week, the president updated on his Twitter the number of detainees counted up to that day. “More than 12,000 terrorists captured in just 21 days. We continue,” Bukele wrote in a tweet with the hashtag #GuerraContraPandilla in which photos of gang members tattooed all over their bodies appear.

If that figure is true - there is no way to carry out an independent verification: the government of El Salvador has closed all avenues to access information about its prison system - Bukele has added 12,000 prisoners to a system in which there are already about 40,000 prisoners, a figure that already exceeds the real capacity of the network of prisons. Today, with the newly admitted, the overpopulation is almost 22,000 people.

Among the new detainees there are, yes, people who display the typical tattoos of the gangs. Those are the ones that usually appear in the photographs of government propaganda. But there are also other detainees who have appeared on other social networks, not those of the government; they are young people whose captures are reported by their relatives or acquaintances as arbitrary acts.

Since the first week of April, the few newspapers that the government of Nayib Bukele continues to fail to control have been filled with complaints about PNC abuses. On Friday, April 8, for example, the police, covered by the emergency regime approved by the Bukele deputies at the end of March, entered Ciudad Credisa, a middle-class neighborhood, and took 21 people without explanation. The relatives of the detainees reported that the police took pictures of all of them and accused them of being terrorists, as the president does in his tweets.

“I asked why they were going to take them, a soldier came and pushed me with the gun and told me that we were to blame for living in a marginal area,” one citizen told the newspaper La Prensa Gráfica.

On the same night, the police arrested some young people who were leaving their work shift in a restaurant in the capital. Immediately, the PNC published photos of the detainees, from whom it had removed their shirts, and of money that, according to the police version, was payment for extortion. After a strong complaint on social networks, it became clear that the young people did not belong to gangs and that the money was the box made that day in the restaurant.

The strongest demands came from abroad, which seems logical when, after almost three years of government, Bukele has managed, with judicial and administrative persecution and constant harassment, to silence many of the country's critical voices.

On April 8, the Washington Office for Latin America (WOLA), one of the most influential thought tanks on Latin American issues in the US capital, released a statement in which it unabashedly questions Bukele's policies.

“The security crisis in El Salvador requires an urgent and firm response. The many victims of the most violent gangs in the world have the right to justice and to live without fear of being harassed, assaulted, extorted and killed. However, suspending sections of the country's Constitution will not make this happen,” WOLA wrote.

Bukele responded to WOLA's criticism with personal attacks on its president, Carolina Jimenez Sandoval. Attacking anyone who criticizes him or exposes his contradictions is already a mark of Nayib Bukele. He has done so with Salvadoran journalists, with US Congressman Norma Torres or Tamara Taraciuk Broner, Acting Director of Humans Rights Watch (HRW) for the Americas.

HRW was another organization that criticized Bukele's recent measures. “Instead of protecting Salvadorans, this broad state of emergency is a recipe for disaster that puts their rights at risk,” the organization wrote in a statement.

In the end, however, the president's narrative, all the noise generated around it and all the legal amendments passed have not been able to hide the most important flaw of his war: Nayib Bukele, for reasons that neither he nor all his acolytes can explain, still fails to extradite the 14 leaders of MS13 to the United States claimed in the United States for crimes such as homicide and terrorism. Thus, even after Bukele's 12,000 prisoners, the gang's chain of command remains intact.

Nayib Bukele has had pacts with gangs since he was elected mayor of San Salvador in 2015. Judicial records in El Salvador, investigations and a judicial process in the United States, and at least a dozen journalistic investigations based on official documents account for this. The pact remained in force and Bukele strengthened it since the presidency of the republic.

Already as president, according to an investigation by the Salvadoran prosecutor's office that the government-appointed prosecutor has buried, Bukele continued to manage the pact through Osiris Luna, his chief of prisons, and Carlos Marroquín, an official of the presidency. Both have been named by the United States as corrupt and anti-democratic actors, among other things precisely because they administer the pact on behalf of their boss, the president.

Under that pact, Nayib Bukele has maneuvered its officials to avoid the extradition to the United States of the 14 leaders of the MS13 who form the so-called national ranfla, the name that gang jargon gives to its board of directors.

These leaders, says the U.S. Department of Justice, “are accused of conspiracy to lend and hide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism that transcend national borders, conspiracy to finance terrorism, and conspiracy to drug terrorism.” These crimes, including several homicides, were committed on US soil and ordered by the national ranfla, according to the prosecution.

The photographs of these leaders, most of them prisoners in El Salvador, have not appeared on President Bukele's Twitter account next to the terrorist label, which he and his officials have not hesitated to put next to portraits of other Salvadorans who have nothing to do with gangs.

While the emergency regime has lasted, Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado, the president's pawn, has not hesitated to tweet that most of the detainees (about 90% he says although, again, this figure is impossible to verify independently) have been rooted by a justice of the peace, the first to act on an indictment of the Prosecutor's Office as contemplated by Salvadoran legislation.

What Delgado doesn't talk about is three things. Several judges who have not ruled according to the plans established by the president on Twitter, the Supreme Court of Justice - also dominated by Bukele - ends up removing them. He himself, Delgado, has been singled out in the past for using torture to extract false confessions from alleged gang members. Nor does the attorney general mention that it was he who refused to have one of the leaders of MS13 deported to the United States and made this record before the Supreme Court.

One of the instances that, in the United States, participated in the leaders' investigation is the Vulcano Joint Task Force (JTFV), made up of agents of the Department of Justice and the Treasury, whose director, Seth D. DuCharme, was one of those who, in January 2021, announced the indictment against the 14 leaders of MS13 that Bukele does not want to extradite.

The JTFV investigations have also been essential in a criminal investigation of Osiris Luna and Carlos Marroquín, the two Bukele officials investigated by the gang pact and against whom the Southern Judicial District of New York is about to file a formal indictment, two federal officials have confirmed in Infobae in recent days.

JFTV, in fact, was involved in the first investigations of the pact between Bukele and the gangs starting in 2020. Much of that information was given to the then US ambassador to El Salvador, Ronald Johnson, who, instead of deepening it, ended up removing at least one of the US investigators involved, as at least three officers from the Biden administration in Washington have confirmed to Infobae. Johnson, a former agent of the Central Intelligence (CIA), came to El Salvador as the politician appointed politician of former President Donald Trump.

In the context of this crisis, Bukele, as he has done before at other times, has again wistfully appealed with nostalgia to the kind of support he received when Trump was president.

On April 11, State Department spokesman Ned Price called on Bukele to “protect its citizens while maintaining civil liberties, including freedom of the press,” referring to legal restrictions passed during the emergency regime that punish anyone referring to the Bukele gang pact with jail. Anthony Blinken, Biden's Secretary of State, also called for respect for the civil rights of Salvadorans and reminded Bukele something more: “Now, more than ever, it is essential to extradite gang leaders to face justice in the United States.”

Bukele, responding on Twitter, did not say a word about the ranfla leaders his government continues to protect. He did say this: “We had support from the US government... but it was DURING THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION (like that, in capital letters).” Johnson, the Trump ambassador who downplayed the investigation into the gang pact, was, in effect, one of the Salvadoran president's main allies.

Pacts such as Bukele's and others made by Salvadoran politicians in the past have redefined the criminal and political structure of gangs and their leadership. One of the academics who have studied this part of the phenomenon the most is Juan José Martínez d'Aubuisson, an anthropologist quoted in media around the world. Last year, for example, Martínez explained to Infobae that spikes in homicidal violence during Bukele's administration may be due to readjustments to the pact or because gang leaders use the dead to send political messages.

On April 11, also in tweet, Bukele called Martinez “garbage”. Then, faithful to the typical script, cyber trolls, officials and propagandists accused the anthropologist of being an accomplice to the gangs and speaking out for them, something that today in El Salvador is punishable by 10 to 12 years in prison and that, with the amendments made under the emergency regime, Attorney General Rodolfo Delgado can turn into a criminal charge without too much formality.

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