MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 12th March, 2023) Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's tactics to combat gang activities in the country by putting as many criminals as possible in jail and building a new high-volume prison for them is doomed to failure, as it results in arbitrary arrests and does not keep young people out of violent gangs, an activist from El Salvador told Sputnik.
Despite being fortunate enough to grow up in communities unaffected by the rampant gang violence in El Salvador, Rina Montti got interested in resolving her country's biggest problem when she was still a student at Jose Simeon Canas Central American University (UCA).
"I've been doing research in this area for over 15 years. I studied to become a social psychologist at UCA. I've always been focused on such issues as human rights, women's security and violence," Montti, who serves as the director of human rights research at Cristosal, an organization working in central America, told Sputnik.
As part of her research work as a psychologist, Montti aspired to learn who gangbangers are, and why some young people choose to join such violent groups.
"I want to understand who the gang members are in order to prevent such activities. But it's still very dangerous to talk to them, work with them or even to be close to them. You have to take care of yourself," she said.
El Salvador's struggle with gang violence started in the early 1990s after the end of the civil war. The political instability in the country led to the rise of a number of notorious gangs, such as Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, and Barrio 18.
Although many of those criminal groups were originally set up by Salvadoran immigrants to protect their fellow compatriots in Los Angeles and throughout California in the United States, they spread and flourished in a number of central American nations when people were deported back to their homelands.
Many El Salvador leaders tried all kinds of tactics to deal with the gang problem in the country � from carrying out harsh crackdowns against the criminal groups to negotiating a ceasefire with them.
After taking office in 2019 as the youngest president in the country's history, Bukele initially tried to maintain the truce with the gangs reached under the previous administration, but when the talks with the criminal gangs broke down in March 2022, he launched a large-scale campaign of mass arrests against gang members to contain their activities.
The gang problem in El Salvador grabbed international headlines in recent weeks, after Bukele unveiled a new high-volume prison capable of holding 40,000 inmates in late February.
In a video the country's president posted on his official Twitter account, dozens of young men covered in tattoos were lining up to be transported to the new facility. The video has received over 6.9 million views.
In a tweet accompanying the video, Bukele hailed the success of the operation to transfer 2,000 gang members to the new prison, known as the Center of the Confinement of Terrorism.
However, for human rights activists like Montti, the Salvadoran president's latest moves to tackle the country's gang problem appeared to be more focused on gaining popularity among the general public than on ensuring the effectiveness of the fight against crime and violence.
"It seems the main goal is to use the large amount of people (inmates being transferred) for publicity and show: 'We're working now. We have them. People, please don't worry.' And you do have the whole country on your side, since, in El Salvador, we do feel the gangs are a big problem that needs to be controlled," Montti told Sputnik.
But what really worries the rights advocate is the fact that the crackdown could have taken those who just happened to live in the wrong areas.
"To capture gang members, he (Bukele) started arresting all the people, especially the men, who live in the mountain areas. But not all the people living in the poor regions are gang members. They could just be neighbors (of gang members). They're just ordinary people. The biggest problem is that Bukele didn't use the investigations by the attorney general or the police to extract the evidence proving that they were involved in gang activities," Montti said.
She also noted that the underprivileged communities located in the mountains appeared to be unfairly targeted, while violent crimes in more prosperous regions of the country were ignored.
"He (Bukele) didn't start (arresting people) in the richest areas. You don't see that happening in malls or tourist areas. He chose the areas where poor people live. About four or five months ago, we began witnessing arrests in communities that don't face a gang problem. We have communities that were organized after the war and they were ex-guerillas, but they're just farmers now," Montti said.
The activist added that a number of constitutional rights were being ignored by the president during his crackdown on gangs.
"Depriving these people of the opportunity to have a defender is a really big problem. According to the official information, they (the authorities) have 65,000 people in prison. But we don't really know how many of those are indeed gang members. As an organization and as citizens, we don't have problems with Bukele, if everyone he arrested is indeed a gang member. We're against human rights violations during the (arrest) process," she said.
Montti also warned that El Salvador's president could be using crackdowns on gangs for political purposes in preparation for the country's general election next year.
"About five months ago, the police began arresting leaders in those farming communities. The police said they had received an anonymous call claiming that those leaders had been involved with gang members. But this is just an excuse. The main reason is that we have a general election for the president, municipalities and the congress next year. I think this is a warning to the community leaders that they do not mess with the elections or even try to participate," Montti said.
She expressed her belief that Bukele was manipulating the state of emergency in the country to not just capture gang members, but also to arrest all dissenters.
"That's a big problem, because human rights defenders, community leaders, journalists and attorneys could all be targeted," Montti told Sputnik.
Montti found out through her research as a psychologist that poverty and economic disparity are very significant, but not the only factors encouraging individuals to join criminal groups or "jump to the gangs," as they call it by themselves.
"Gang members were indeed poor. Many gangs started as a group of people who had no access to public services or even were not recognized by the state ... They wanted their communities or their families to have something," the activist told Sputnik.
Moreover, people living in the areas controlled by the gangs usually have no other choice but to fill their ranks, Montti said.
"If they said they didn't want to jump, they would receive threats from the gang. They were told: 'If you want to live in this community, you have to jump. If not, you have to leave. You have to work with us. If you don't, I'll rape your mother, your sister. Or your brother has to be my woman' ... They're really violent," the human right advocate explained.
In addition, the lack of adequate education services is also an important reason behind some young people's decision to join criminal gangs.
"Our educational system is really bad. You have a lot of young people living in these areas. And they don't really go to school. Even if they do go to school, they're not well educated. They have a lot of free time and they don't have anything else to do," Montti said.
The situation is exacerbated by the large-scale crackdowns against the gangs, as a result of which the children of those arrested are forced to flee from the areas or to engage in criminal activities to stay alive.
"They're now children or adolescents living without a parent or an adult who could be responsible for them. They don't have anyone who can keep checking on them to make sure they're good persons or not," the activist explained.
Given all these factors, the human rights advocate urged Bukele to make more efforts to prevent young people from joining the gangs instead of focusing on the heavy-handed approach of imprisoning as many members of criminal groups as possible.
"Trying to arrest them is like having a big wound and only putting a band-aid on it," Montti concluded.
