In the La Campanera neighborhood of El Salvador, there are countless brick and cement walls that have long since ceased to be houses: they have no roofs or windows. Nor are they inhabited by people. These remains hide the stories of thousands of Salvadorans who fled from the gangs, leaving everything behind in an attempt to survive.
The rubble that was once the home of families reminds many of the gang at its most savage: when they forced people to flee so they could take control of their homes, dismantle them, sell them piecemeal or use them for their illegal meetings. That past is still very much alive for some.
Marina Navas is 64 years old. She lives in La Campanera, a place that was once the home of the historic leader of the Barrio 18 gang, Ernesto Mojica Lechugaknown as ‘Old Lyn’. His house is patched up all over: the roof and windows have been covered with rusty sheets. Rain constantly floods his 2 by 2 metre living room. He has no electricity or water.
The woman lives in one of those houses that more than one person left to flee from Barrio 18, an organization that began as a street gang in Los Angeles, California, and later became a transnational criminal structure.
Although El Salvador has been under a state of emergency for almost two and a half years, Marina remembers that bloody past.
“(Before)… the room had no roof… one time I slowly got up and there were two men, with a huge gun: ‘if you say anything, old lady…’ they already told me the (bad) word… we’ll kill you right here. And I immediately, zipper on my mouth,” she tells the Voice of America.
Marina recounts the encounter she had with two gang members who a few years ago climbed up the wall of the house she lived in in La Campanera and demanded money from her in exchange for not killing her. There are thousands of stories like that that have remained in the minds of Salvadorans who lived in the same neighborhoods controlled by these groups.
The security history of the Central American country has a before and after: the first two years of Nayib Bukele’s government, the maras spent ordering “open valves”, which in their jargon means carrying out large massacres. This put the Bukele government in a bind on several occasions until it was a state of exception was established.
On March 27, 2022, the Salvadoran Congress approved a state of emergency that immediately provided for detention without a court order, the extension of the maximum administrative detention period from 72 hours to 15 days, the intervention of telecommunications, and several penal reforms.
Hours after the measure was approved, the government deployed the Army and the National Civil Police to the most dangerous communities in El Salvador, including La Campanera, capturing anyone with a police or criminal record and anyone the police considered suspicious of belonging to gangs.
La Campanera is located in the municipality of Soyapango, the second most populated city in El Salvador and the second city to which the government imposed a military cordon. It has approximately 958 houses distributed in long, narrow passages. The colony has the same entrance and exit.
What was once the home of “the children of violence,” as the French-Spanish director Christian Poveda called it, during the filming of his documentary The Crazy LifeFor many, today it is an example of what the regime has achieved, whose character has ceased to be exceptional and has become indefinite.
For decades, La Campanera was a clandestine cemetery where gangs hid their crimes. There was no authority other than Barrio 18. And those who lived there had to be subject to its rules: see, hear and keep quiet.
Although the work of the police and the Armed Forces is applauded by some and censured by others after thousands of complaints of human rights violations during the regime, the government assures that the measure will continue until the last of the gang members is captured. On August 11, the twenty-ninth extension of the state of emergency was approved.
“When it comes to 10 o’clock at night, you can feel the footsteps of men here,” says Juana Ortez, a woman who also remembers the havoc left behind by the Salvadoran gangs.
He also lives in La Campanera, and he says that people in the neighborhood are scared. At night he says he hears the footsteps of a man… and those of a woman wearing a pair of heels. He has the habit of always looking out the window, but he never sees anything. His explanation is clear: nine years ago a woman was murdered in front of his house.
Although the gang members seem to have left La Campanera in these raids and, with them, their symbols, the ravages of their passage remain.
According to the Salvadoran government, more than 6,000 homes have been recovered in areas such as La Campanera where gangs controlled even the rent.
Many of its inhabitants say they are living a new life, they have recovered spaces and have broken their indirect relationship with the gangs that kept them subjugated.
In this strange peace they try to rise up, but not before recognizing that the regime has also left behind other problems: arbitrary arrests and human rights violations.
“We have found that arbitrary deaths are systematically taking place in prisons. There is also a widespread practice of torture through cruel and inhuman treatment as a state policy,” he explained to the VOA David Morales, former human rights prosecutor and now head of transitional justice at the Cristosal organization, based in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
The state of exception is now a state policy with indefinite validity, and its model has been the subject of debate in other countries in the region that seek to eradicate insecurity problems in a similar way to El Salvador. Meanwhile, the victims of gang violence are slowly getting back on their feet, with what they have left.
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