Bukele locks up a populous municipality with 10,000 soldiers and police to capture gang members: No one enters or leaves

Nearly 10,000 soldiers and police surrounded the populous municipality of Soyapango, on the outskirts of San Salvador, early Saturday morning as part of the war against gangs launched in March by the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele.

“As of these moments, the municipality of soyapango it is fully fenced. 8,500 soldiers and 1,500 agents have surrounded the city” of 242,000 inhabitants, located on the eastern outskirts of the Salvadoran capital, announced bukele on his Twitter account.

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The president had announced on November 23 that I would encircle cities so that the military can search house to house and arrest gang members. Sopayango is the first city in which this measure is applied.

As of now, the municipality of Soyapango is totally fenced off.

8,500 soldiers and 1,500 agents have surrounded the city, while extraction teams from the police and the army are tasked with extricating all the gang members still there one by one. pic.twitter.com/9QIpj0ziwX

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) December 3, 2022

The soldiers and police They posted themselves in the early hours of the morning in all the access streets to the municipality, without allowing anyone to enter or leave the place without first being searched. The uniformed officers will be in charge of “removing, one by one, all the gang members who are still there,” he said. bukele.

The war against the “maras”that bukele Launched on March 27 under a state of emergency, it has led to the arrest of 58,000 suspected gang members, but has been questioned by humanitarian organizations.

soyapango has been considered for years an unsafe municipality due to the action of gang members. A few months ago the authorities began to erase the graffiti alluding to gangs.

A soldier frisking a man during a search operation for gang members in Soyapango, El Salvador, on December 3, 2022. (AFP).

The actions implemented by the government of bukele in soyapangoby virtue of the state of emergency, has led to “a huge improvement in its security,” its mayor, Nercy Montano, acknowledged earlier this week.

The Exception statuswhich allows arrests without a warrant, was declared by the president in response to an escalation of violence that claimed the lives of 87 people from March 25-27.

Questioned by humanitarian organizations, the rexception regime it was extended by Congress until mid-December.

In search of gang members

the colonies around soyapango They looked like there was a strong presence of soldiers and policemen, who, walking slowly and with their assault rifles in hand, were looking for gang members, observed an AFP journalist.

Army artillery cars and police patrols cruised slowly through the streets of the city.

Soldiers stand guard during a search operation for gang members in Soyapango, El Salvador, on December 3, 2022. (AFP). (HANDOUT/)

The Police also used drones to try to locate gang members from the air.

“It has been a surprise (the operation), they are registering one and they ask us for the identity document to verify where we live, but it’s okay, everything is for our security,” Guadalupe Pérez, 53, who lives in one of the neighborhoods of the municipality, told AFP.

In the meantime, policemen boarded public transport buses to register passengers.

“Ordinary citizens have nothing to fear and can continue to lead their lives as normal. This is an operation against criminals, not against honest citizens.”remarked the president bukele.

citizen support

The assembly of security fences in cities for the “extraction of gang members” is part, Bukele recently said, of the so-called Territorial Control government security plan that is now “reinforced” with the exception regime.

“The measures that are being taken are giving noticeable results and the population has noticed it, so it is not surprising that the people who have been affected by the gangs, which is the vast majority, agree with what is being done.” said criminologist Ricardo Sosa.

A survey by the Central American University (UCA) published in October showed that 75.9% of Salvadorans approve of the emergency regime, and nine out of 10 Salvadorans say that crime “has decreased” with Bukele’s policy.

Before March and before the emergency regime began, there were 16,000 incarcerated gang members in El Salvador’s prisons. Most of those detained are members of the gangs MS-13 and its rival Barrio 18 in its southern and revolutionary factions.

Born in the United States, on the streets of Los Angeles, the gangs, as Bukele recently said, still have weapons and “finance themselves from the sale of drugs.”

Source: Elcomercio