‘Extract every last one’: El Salvador troops target gangs in large-scale operation

Around 2500 soldiers and police have been mobilised for a high-profile operation in an ongoing gang crackdown, with the President vowing to “extract every last one”.

Around 2500 soldiers and police surrounded a neighbourhood on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital on Monday for a high-profile operation as part of President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gangs.

Mr Bukele said on social media that the goal was to “extract every last one” of the suspected gang members believed to be hiding in the 10 de Octubre area of San Salvador.

Defense Minister Rene Francis Merino said there were “indications that these criminals want to establish themselves” in the neighbourhood.

Images released by the government showed soldiers massing for the operation and heavily armed police patrolling the neighbourhood and checking identity documents.

Around 2500 soldiers and police surrounded the shantytown. Picture: Handout/AFP

According to Justice and Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro, the operation aimed to “continue destroying the criminal economy”.

El Salvador has been under a state of emergency since March 2022 as part of Mr Bukele’s controversial “war” against gangsters.

Around 83,000 suspected gang members have been detained under the measures, which allow arrests without a court order.

The crackdown has led to a sharp fall in homicides and is praised by many Salvadorans, although rights groups have criticised Mr Bukele’s methods.

El Salvador has waged a brutal crackdown on gang members. Picture: Handout/AFP

Mr Bukele claimed a massive first-round re-election victory in February, with the 43-year-old winning more than 85 per cent of the presidential vote and his party Nuevas Ideas 58 of the 60 seats in parliament.

He polls as Latin America’s most popular leader, mainly for his roundup of presumed gangsters in the violence-weary country.

El Salvador’s fearsome gangs had taken some 120,000 civilian lives in three decades, according to the government, which says criminal groups controlled 80 per cent of the country when Mr Bukele took power in 2019.

Around 83,000 suspected gang members have been detained since 2022. Picture: Handout/AFP

Last year, the country that was once one of the most dangerous in the world, saw the murder rate plummet to its lowest level in three decades — far below the global average.

Shortly after voting in February, Mr Bukele batted away criticism of his rights record and boasted he had cured the Central American country of a “cancer” of gangs.

“Why do we have the biggest incarceration rate in the world? Because we … changed the murder capital of the world, the world’s most dangerous country, into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere,” he told reporters in English.

“The only way to do that is to arrest all the murderers.”

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele. Picture: Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP

Activists say many innocents — including minors — have been caught up in the dragnet, locked up in inhumane conditions and even subjected to torture.

Thousands are held in a brand-new prison — plugged as the largest in the Americas — which the president had built in a matter of months.

“We did surgery, we are in radiotherapy, and we will leave healthy without the cancer of gangs,” insisted Mr Bukele, who has ironically adopted the moniker “dictator” sometimes used to describe him.

But he added that “our police made a couple of mistakes, of course they did, that’s why our judicial system has been freeing innocent people” — some 7000 to date.

In December, an Amnesty International report raised alarm over the “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence”, pointing to arbitrary arrests.

But for most Salvadorans, this seems to be a not-too-pressing issue.

“Things were ugly before,” Sandra Burgos, 68, told AFP in La Campanera — a once notoriously violent neighbourhood of San Salvador which in the time of gang rule was divided into numerous no-go areas.

“Now we are fine. We can move around … before it was not possible.”