“I’ll eat when my father comes back. 8-year-old girl hugs her 2-year-old brother. “She’s clearly losing weight,” sighs her mother Anabela (first name changed), 27 years old. Like every evening, the boy is bored on this sidewalk in front of the Penalito, the remand prison in San Salvador, which prisoners pass through again shortly before their release, Anabela believes. “I can’t bear to think that there is no one to meet my husband when he leaves,” she says. He has been in Mariona prison, 8 kilometers away, since mid-April, where she camped with hundreds of other people for a month before the police drove her out. Since then, she and her three children have been sitting in front of the Penalito every evening until 10 p.m., at a table in a canteen that sells food for prisoners.
Police pick-ups regularly bring new prisoners. Anabela’s husband is one of around 49,000 people officially arrested in El Salvador since March 27. This weekend, the gangs committed the worst massacre in the small Central American country’s recent history: 87 dead in three days.
Women spend their evenings in front of the entrance to Penalito, a detention center in San Salvador, hoping for the release of their loved one. They settle down on the terrace of a canteen that sells products for prisoners, July 21, 2022. NADÈGE MAZARS FOR “DIE WORLD”
President Nayib Bukele, in power since 2019, who has made the fight against gangs one of his priorities, wanted to strike hard and fast: he sent police officers and soldiers into the streets, houses, churches, shops to arrest everything that happened to him even remotely resembles a pandillero (member of a pandilla, a gang) and imposed a state of emergency: suspension of freedom of expression, association and assembly, inviolability of correspondence and the right of defense, extension of police custody from three to fifteen days.
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Criminal law reform has quintupled the penalties for gang membership (up to 45 years in prison for their leaders) and allows minors to be sentenced to 10 years in prison from the age of 10 to 12 years. The detainees, the head of state immediately promised, will see their meals rationed, sleep on the floor, no longer see the light of day and be isolated from the outside world. Ministers and MPs agree with the majority. The population too, for decades victims of the cruelty of the Pandillas, who have long had a habit of torturing, dismembering, beheading and leaving corpses on the side of the road.
Police will bring a new detainee to Penalito, San Salvador, on July 21, 2022. NADÈGE MAZARS FOR “THE WORLD”
With 1.7% of the adult population behind bars, El Salvador has become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to a calculation by the Foundation for Law Enforcement Studies, there are 83,000 people in prison with a prison capacity of 27,200. Authorities estimate the total number of pandilleros at 70,000. A huge “terror containment center” for 40,000 prisoners is being built in Tecoluca, 75 km east of the capital.
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