Gangs in El Salvador make purported truce offer
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Version 0 of 1. SAN SALVADOR — A video purportedly made by El Salvador’s main street gangs is offering an end to killings in the country and asks the government not to continue an anti-gang offensive. El Salvador has suffered growing gang violence since a 2012 truce among criminal organizations fell apart. In the video, which was broadcast by local media on Saturday, a masked man claimed to make the offer on behalf of the Mara Salvatrucha gang and two factions of the Barrio 18 gang. The video said killings were ordered stopped as of Saturday — to show the government that it did not have to implement get-tough policies. The government has been considering a kind of limited state of emergency in some areas and is planning to release some non-gang inmates to free up prison space and liberate police to fight the gangs. “We have ordered all of our people . . . to halt all types of homicides nationwide,” said the man who appears in the video, “to demonstrate to the public, the government and international agencies in our country that there is no need to implement measures that only violate our constitution.” There was no immediate confirmation of the authenticity of the video, but former guerrilla Raúl Mijango said, “I had received information that [the gangs] were going to release some kind of message, that they had that idea.” Mijango has served as a truce negotiator in the past. The gangs might be trying to pressure the government into negotiating a truce similar to the one in 2012, during which homicide rates fell notably. That truce has since fallen apart. According to official statistics, at least 6,657 people were killed last year in El Salvador. The country had an overall annual homicide rate of about 103 per 100,000 inhabitants, El Salvador’s highest on record. Officials said they would not negotiate with the gangs. Eugenio Chicas, a spokesman for President Salvador Sánchez Cerén, wrote in his Twitter account that “this administration will not grant any truce in the fight against criminals and will apply the necessary measures to protect the population.” The video included veiled warnings, claiming that the gangs “have the tools to destroy the politics of this country” and saying that they “want to make the government aware that it cannot eliminate the gangs, because we are part of the community in this country.” |