A warning against El Salvador’s brutal gang crackdown

When it was time last month for Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez to preach on the 43rd anniversary of the death of his friend and mentor St. Oscar Romero, the retired auxiliary bishop of San Salvador chose to address a very controversial topic in the country right now: the “state of exception” that allows the government to lock up thousands of gang members without due process.

These “domestic terrorists” are to be housed (or better said, warehoused) in the recently opened “Terrorism Confinement Center.” This mega-prison will be the world’s largest with a capacity of 40,000, surpassing the Silivri Penitentiaries Campus in Turkey, which supposedly has more than 22,000 inmates. (Turkey, it should be noted, has a population of 84.6 million people, more than 14 times that of El Salvador.)

The gangs in El Salvador have a monstrous record of mayhem and violence, their criminal activity penetrating almost every sector of the country’s economy and people’s daily lives. In the little town where I was pastor for many years, El Puerto de La Libertad, hardly any small business escaped paying protection money.

It was a way of life. One “pandillero,” as the gang members are called, charged my compadre — a store owner whose son with Down syndrome is my godson — $50 a week. The average daily wage in El Salvador is estimated at $12 a day.

This same gang member later went to prison for the murder of the wife of a Mexican agent of Interpol who worked in El Salvador. Ironically, he had been contracted by the wife, who was in love with her children’s swimming instructor, to kill her husband. The “pandillero,” on a motorcycle, rode up to the car of the couple at a traffic light and shot into the car, wounding the husband, who survived, and killing his client. Stories like these help explain why The Washington Post in 2016 declared El Salvador “the murder capital of the hemisphere.”

We can thank God that is no longer true of the country. Violence has dropped dramatically, earning President Nayib Bukele popular support around the country. Unfortunately, it has taken something like the “state of exception” for that to happen. Bukele’s government has not been shy to admit its suspension of legal rights for anyone accused of being a gang member.

Under the “exceptional rules,” police don’t have to inform arrestees of their rights or what they’re being arrested for, nor do those arrested have the right to a lawyer. They can now be held for 15 days without seeing a judge (the period used to be 72 hours).

Watchdog group Human Rights Watch reported that the policies have resulted in “mass arbitrary detention, torture, and other forms of ill treatment against detainees, deaths in custody, and abuse-ridden prosecutions.”

Bukele’s government has produced videos showing at least 4,000 “domestic terrorists” being transferred to the mega-prison. The scenes of shirtless, shoeless tattooed men in white boxer shorts filing into a courtyard and squatting with their heads touching the backs of the men ahead of them resembles something out of Hollywood science fiction.

I don’t know what is more shocking: the footage of these men or the fact that many Salvadorans, especially those who have immigrated to the U.S., are not appalled by the sight of so many young men entering an environment that would have intimidated Dante Alighieri.

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” the Italian poet famously imagined the sign welcoming new arrivals to hell. The same words would seem fitting for this mega-prison.

The government boasts that no one can escape from it. “This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, all mixed, unable to do any further harm to the population,” boasted Bukele recently. The potential for violence in prison in a country with no death penalty is part of the terror the “state of exception” inspires.

One of Cardinal Chávez’s concerns is the many innocent young men who have been detained mistakenly. Some 4,000 of the 70,000 arrested under the new anti-terrorism protocols have since been released, but I am told that this takes some doing. Not all innocent men and their families have recourse to the lawyers and other resources needed to apply pressure.

“How can you sleep at night, seeing how the ‘exceptional’ has become the rule, what is normal?” said Cardinal Chávez, addressing the government in his March 24 homily. “How is it that you can accept as normal that the people who suffer cannot even express themselves publicly? How is it that it can be