In the fight against gang crime in El Salvador, some 10,000 soldiers and police surrounded the town of Soyapango, near the capital San Salvador. The city was “completely surrounded”, President Nayib Bukele announced on Twitter yesterday. An AFP news agency correspondent reported that soldiers and police armed with assault rifles were searching the city for gang members. Military vehicles and police cars roamed the streets, and drones were also in use.
From those moments, the municipality of Soyapango is completely surrounded.
8,500 soldiers and 1,500 agents surrounded the city, while the police and army’s extraction equipment took care of removing one by one all the pandilleros who were still here. pic.twitter.com/9QIpj0ziwX
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) December 3, 2022
87 people murdered in three days
Bukele declared a state of emergency in late March after 87 people were murdered in the Central American country in three days. In November, he announced that entire cities would be sealed off so that soldiers and police could go house-to-house looking for gang members. Soyapango was now the first city where a large-scale operation took place.
With about 290,000 residents, Soyapango is one of the largest cities in El Salvador and has long been considered unsafe due to gang crime. A few months ago, authorities began removing graffiti that gangs use to mark their areas. According to Mayor Nercy Montano, “an enormous improvement” in the security situation has already been achieved with the measures taken so far.
More than 58,000 suspected gang members have been arrested in El Salvador since a state of emergency was declared. Parliament has extended the state of emergency several times, most recently until mid-December. Human rights organizations criticize the state of emergency, which, among other things, allows detention without a judicial decision, as a drastic restriction of fundamental rights.