Bukele’s government has been using emergency powers for almost a year
(Bloomberg) — El Salvador has jailed more than 64,000 gang members in nearly a year of using emergency powers, according to the government.
Even so, there are still about 30,000 gangsters still at large, who are being sought by the authorities, Defense Minister Rene Merino said Monday, in a TV interview with Telecorporación Salvadoreña.
The country’s murder rate fell to 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people last year from more than 50 per 100,000 in 2018, he said.
Read more: El Salvador’s Gang Crackdown Could Boost Growth
“The state of exception has been our most effective tool in the fight against gangs,” Merino said.
El Salvador’s congress declared a state of emergency last year granting authorities greater power to make arrests. Congress this month extended the use of the emergency powers through March.
Human rights organizations have criticized the lack of due process and transparency and the use of torture against detainees.
President Nayib Bukele inaugurated a giant new prison in January and transferred the first 2,000 inmates to it last week. El Salvador’s incarceration rate is now the world’s highest.
The additional inmates would give the nation of 6 million a jail population of about 100,000 people. That compares to fewer than 40,000 before the crackdown, according to data from World Prison Brief, which monitors jail populations worldwide.
Bukele’s crackdown has been popular at home with 88% of Salvadorans saying they felt safe at the end of 2022 due to the state of emergency, according to a poll by the Universidad Centroamericana Jose Simeon Canas. The same poll found those surveyed gave Bukele’s performance as president an average score of of 8.4 out of 10.
(Updates with Bukele popularity data in ninth paragraph.)
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