What are they like and why were they created by gangs?

Clinging to the earth, in the secrecy of a vacant lot, lie the bodies of thousands of Salvadorans whom no one claims, whose name or surname is unknown, or when they were buried in unmarked cliffs.

These are the clandestine cemeteries in El Salvador, which were once used by the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs to hide their homicides and avoid police operations, but which today remind us of the violent past that the Central American country experienced for decades.

It is October, and in a circuit of neighborhoods in San Salvador where before March 2022 you could enter, but not leave, the Salvadoran authorities are working silently on the exhumation of bones in a cemetery about which little is known.

Marvin Reyes, who was a police officer for 20 years and now leads a movement of agents, assures the Voice of America That this cliff is not the only one where bones have been found, explains that the authorities have identified 50 more cemeteries, used by the gangs between 2019 and 2021.

“When they (gangs) began to murder and hide the bodies, the police, since there was no body, did not arrive, there were no operations, there were no searches of the homes and there were no arrests. This was a fairly effective strategy of the gangs that gave the perception that homicides were not occurring in those years,” Reyes explained.

When Nayib Bukele assumed the presidency in June 2019, the homicide rate in El Salvador was 38 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to data from the tripartite table made up of the Police, the Prosecutor’s Office and Legal Medicine.

But the government promoted a millionaire Territorial Control Plan which began 20 days after Bukele became president, and the figures fell from 38 to 18 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. On the other hand, the records of missing persons worsened.

A report The University Observatory of Human Rights (OUDH) of El Salvador then announced that the Bukele administration had the highest rates of disappearance of people, compared to the two previous governments.

The former leftist president Mauricio Funes closed his term in office in 2014 with a rate of 15.4 missing people per 100,000 inhabitants; His successor Salvador Sánchez Cerén (2014-2019) closed it with 30. While Bukele reached 32 missing persons per 100,000 inhabitants in the first two years of his government.

“With the methodology of hiding the bodies, there was no record of the homicides caused by the gangs. Furthermore, murdering and leaving the bodies lying around caused them problems because the area was filled with police, there were arrests, searches, and it took them several months to recover from that,” adds Reyes.

Although El Salvador went several months without homicides, suddenly, the gangs ordered “open valves,” which in their jargon meant carrying out large massacres.

It was due to these difficulties that the Bukele government, whose narrative then was that the Police and the Army had strong territorial control, imposed a exception regime valid from 2022 until then. This measure was what managed to dismantle the neighborhood gangs.

But recent exhumations remind us of that past.

Barrio 18 left a clandestine cemetery at the bottom of a ravine, about 30 meters deep. The exact number of graves it contains is still not known.

This is located in the Cumbres de San Bartolo neighborhood, a bastion of the 18th gang in Salvador, similar to La Campanera, where the Franco-Spanish director Christian Poveda was murdered during the filming of his documentary. The Crazy Life.

Although the authorities have not given details in this regard, local media report the pilgrimage of women, mothers, wives, daughters who hope that their missing relative will be found among the bones piled up and in disarray.

“It is very likely that in several years El Salvador will continue to find clandestine graves,” he explained to the Voice of AmericaVerónica Reyna, specialist in violence and citizen security in Latin America.

“It is also relevant to identify, with the support of community information, these places where the Police could investigate now that the presence of gangs in those territories has decreased significantly,” he added.

“Knowing if this person has died allows us to close that moment of pain, bury them and experience grief is required to heal that wound,” said the specialist.

Since 2022, Salvadorans cannot access information related to the number and location of clandestine graves and cemeteries under the official argument that it puts investigations at risk.

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