Last Week There Were Two Homicides In A Neighborhood In El Salvador – This Is How President Bukele Responded (Video)

Earlier this week a small amount of gang activity was registered in Northern El Salvador after 2 homicides.

Nayib Bukele immediately responded by sending 5,000 troops and 1,000 police officers to WRECK the offenders.

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced Sunday that 6,000 military and police forces had been deployed to root out gang members in the north of the country after two people were murdered.

Bukele launched a war on gangs in March 2022, with a state of emergency suspending the need for arrest warrants, among other civil liberties.

Under the provision, authorities have rounded up about 75,000 suspected gangsters, many of them locked away in a prison — the largest in the Americas — that Bukele had specially built. At least 7,000 were later released.

“We are not going to stop until we eradicate what little remains of the gangs,” Bukele warned on social media platform X, which included a video of heavily armed troops parading a pair of captured men.

He added that 5,000 soldiers and 1,000 police officers had “surrounded” the districts of San Jose Cancasque, San Antonio Los Ranchos, Potonico and San Isidro Labrador.

Bukele said the action was a response to two homicides in the country’s north, about 90 kilometers (56 miles) north of capital San Salvador, and that two “culprits” from the Surenos faction of the 18th Street gang had been captured.

Video below:

“We will completely clean the area, we will extract every last remnant of gangs,” Defence Minister Rene Francis Merino Monroy said in a separate post on X.

Bukele was re-elected with more than 80 percent of the vote in February and is widely credited with slashing homicides to the lowest rate in three decades.

His tactics have been praised by crime-weary authorities from Ecuador to Argentina, but criticized by rights activists who argue innocent people have been swept up in the anti-crime campaign.

The number of homicides in El Salvador dropped nearly 70% during 2023 and they are now close to 90%.

Bukele’s crackdown has been broadly popular with Salvadorans weary of years of gang violence, extortion and drug dealing.
But human rights groups have said the crackdown has included abuses such as torture, deaths in custody and arbitrary detentions.
The state of emergency declared in early 2022 allows police to swiftly arrest and jail suspected gang members, while suspending their right to a lawyer and court approval of preliminary detention.

Biden could learn a thing or two…