Almost 500 MS-13 gang members have been put on mass trial in El Salvador for 47,000 crimes, including 29,000 murders.
The Attorney-General’s office announced on Tuesday that a collective trial was underway for 486 leaders of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, which President Nayib Bukele declared war on in 2022 and accused of being responsible for 200,000 murders.
Large groups of gang members, many with face tattoos displaying their affiliation with MS-13, watched the proceedings via videolink from jail while sitting in rows handcuffed and shackled, surrounded by armed guards.
Prosecutors said the defendants included “members of the national leadership, street-level leaders, program coordinators from across the country, and founders” of MS-13 who were involved in range of crimes committed between 2021 and 2022, AFP reported.
Their charges include murder, femicide, extortion, drug trafficking, disappearances and gun trafficking, as well as the crime of rebellion for “attempting to establish a parallel state”.
Prosecutors also said the defendants were responsible for a wave of “ordered violence” that left 86 people dead in a single weekend in March 2022 and sparked Mr Bukele’s anti-gang crackdown and the arrests of 91,000 gang members in the following years.
“We are going to put them on trial, and we are going to settle a historic debt,” prosecutors said, adding they had “ample evidence to request the maximum sentences”.
Thousands of alleged members of MS-13 and rival gang Barrio 18, both of which were formed by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles before spreading back to El Salvador, are now being collectively tried and given one-size-fits-all punishments by anonymous judges after being arrested during the crackdown.
Mr Bukele’s anti-gang campaign turned El Salvador to one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest in Latin America, and has made him massively popular.
But despite the overwhelming public support for the crackdown and the unprecedented fall in El Salvador’s murder rate, foreign NGOs and journalists have regularly accused Mr Bukele of human rights abuses and said the mass trials could result in the conviction of innocent people.
Header image: Left, right, gang members during the mass trial (Attorney-General of El Salvador).
