FACTUM. Analysis of the murders spike during the pandemic

Violence has increased once again in El Salvador. On Friday, 22 homicides were reported on Friday and president Bukele ordered lockdown of prisons on Twitter.

Since Friday, “the murder of no less than 40 people can be confirmed”, reported La Prensa Gráfica.

 

FACTUM published the following analysis of the situation:

This Friday, April 24, 24 people were killed in El Salvador, according to records from the Attorney General’s Office. This Friday, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic emergency, it became the most violent day of the year, abruptly breaking with the average of 3 daily homicides of all 2020.

“How do you explain that in a militarized country, with more than 40,000 troops on the streets, under mandatory confinement, these killings have occurred? What is really clear and the message they are sending is that, despite all the government paraphernalia, there is a parastatal territorial power that is the gangs exercising their dominance in the territories”, says Jeannette Aguilar, academic researcher.

During the quarantine, from March 16 to April 20, 2020, 67 murders were committed, according to data from the Attorney General’s Office. In this period, there were days like Monday, April 6 with zero homicides. But this Friday, a little more than a third of the murders of the entire quarantine were committed.

“I interpret it as a message that the gangs are sending to the government and that we cannot fully interpret from the outside, because we are unaware of the deals that the government has maintained in recent months with these groups,” Aguilar said.

The criminologist Carlos Carcach points out that this Friday happened what had been happening on Fridays before the pandemic: that gangs decided to increase the deaths before the weekend. In fact, the most violent day of the Nayib Bukele administration had been Friday, September 20, when 19 people were killed.

 

“These spikes in violence were repeated every Friday, and this has been happening since the Territorial Control Plan was installed. We were coming from very low counts and suddenly there was an increase that sometimes reached Saturday. It is as if they were earthquakes. This week we had a replica of the same behavior”, says the researcher.

2020, taking as reference the epidemic homicide figures that El Salvador had in the last decade, has been a peaceful year. The Government has attributed the reduction in homicides to the Territorial Control Plan, which, according to the official version, consisted of police and military deployments in some municipalities, as well as stricter measures in all the country’s prisons.

The government’s response to the spike in homicides this Friday was the same: order a state of emergency in criminal matters. A response that, in the opinion of the criminologist Ricardo Sosa, shows that there is no prison intelligence, but that the authorities always have to go out and react.

«It shows that there is communication outward, that there is no planned prison intelligence, that it is reactive, they were overcome. Because, in the midst of home quarantine, without visits from family or lawyers, with virtual hearings, they are able to send orders from the heart of maximum security prisons”, said Sosa.

The reduction in homicides, according to several experts consulted by Factum in the past, began since 2016 with the implementation of the extraordinary measures in prisons, and was more noticeable since April 2019.

 

 

On Sunday, Bukele, wrote the following on his Twitter account:

El uso de la fuerza letal está autorizado para defensa propia o para la defensa de la vida de los salvadoreños.

Instamos a la oposición a que se pongan del lado de la gente honrada, y a las instituciones que controlan a dejar de proteger a quienes asesinan a nuestro pueblo.

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 26, 2020

 

“The use of lethal force is authorized for self-defense or for the defense of the life of Salvadorans,” adding that “the gangs are taking advantage of the fact that almost all of our public forces are controlling the pandemic. “

He added that “the Government will be in charge of the legal defense of those who are unjustly accused of defending the lives of honest people” and urged the Attorney General (FGR) to “prosecute gang allies” for “associations terrorists” and “apology of terrorism”.

On Sunday morning, the government decided to mix the members of rival gangs in cells of different prisons of the country, where they were separated by groups.