El Salvador government launches new offensive against criminal gangs 

The government of El Salvador has launched a new offensive against gangs since May 29 to prevent criminal gangs from regrouping after the heavy blows dealt by the authorities.

“We have begun the offensive against the remnants of the terrorist structures that President Nayib Bukele ordered today to the Security Cabinet to eradicate any attempt to regroup,” the Presidency of the Republic reported near midnight on its social networks.

It added that the Armed Forces and the National Civil Police are deployed throughout the national territory carrying out several actions, including “vehicle controls to ensure that no criminals leave the area and that drivers carry their documents in order”.

The official communiqué specifies that other actions carried out by the soldiers and police are intervention operations in the communities, preventive searches, and documentation verification to avoid house burglaries.

The Presidency had announced on May 28 a meeting between Bukele and the security cabinet members in a brief message that underlines that the government is winning the war against gangs.

In addition, he announced the decision to launch an offensive against the remnants of the criminal structures “to avoid any attempt to regroup, as was happening in Nueva Concepción,” a municipality in the northern department of Chalatenango, where 16 gang members shot at a police patrol and killed one of the agents.

Bukele soon after ordered a cordon of 5,000 soldiers and 500 police to surround the area, and three days ago, authorities announced the arrest of three of the attack’s perpetrators and 50 other members of a gang operating in the area.

The Armed Forces and the National Civil Police are maintaining similar operations in the municipality of Soyapango, the third most populated country, and the capital communities Tutunichapa and La Granjita, where drug trafficking groups were operating.

The roadblocks are part of the fifth phase of the Territorial Control Plan implemented by the government after Bukele’s inauguration on June 1, 2019.

In addition, an exception regime has been in force in the country since March 27, 2022, which was decreed after a weekend where gang attacks resulted in the death of 87 people.

According to authorities, with both measures, El Salvador went from being one of the most violent countries in the world to the safest in the Americas, and the homicide rate dropped from a peak of 106.3 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015 to 7.8 in 2022 and 2.1 so far this year.

With information from Sputnik