SAN SALVADOR – The director of the police of El Salvador, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, suggested on Tuesday in a interview television broadcast in the program A.M of the state channel 10that the politicians and journalists involved in the truce between gangs and the government that occurred in 2012 “at any moment are going to have to answer for their actions.”
“Those political leaders, who led this, like some journalists who were also in this because it must be said, and they are in the arena… I believe that little by little, the Salvadoran people, the Salvadoran justice and those in charge of politics of criminal prosecution, at any moment they are going to show them at the judicial level and they are going to have to answer for those actions in which they made a lot of apology for the crime,” said the official.
Between 2012 and 2014, the gangs agreed to a non-aggression pact that reduced homicides in El Salvador. However, the Prosecutor’s Office recently demonstrated that the gangs received benefits from the government of Mauricio Funes in exchange for lower homicides. Funes was sentenced to 14 years in prison for the case.
Arriaza added, in his statements, that (the politicians and journalists) not only introduced technology of any kind to the prisons at that time, but also that there was an “evil communication to continue committing criminal incidence and attempt against the lives of Salvadorans”.
first reactions
The official did not mention names of media outlets or journalists in his statements. However, the reactions did not wait.
The editor-in-chief of the newspaper The lighthousea medium that recently moved to Costa Rica after denouncing harassment by the government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, published in its twitter account : “The police director announces that they will go after journalists who covered the truce. This country would not have known the truce without journalism, nor the multiple subsequent pacts, including that of the Bukele government,” he said.
In the same way, the anthropologist and researcher of the gang phenomenon, Juan Martínez, added that the official has threatened to “capture the journalists who have covered the negotiations between the gangs and the government,” which in his opinion is “one more step toward dictatorship.”
In April 2022, the Salvadoran Congress approved punish with up to 15 years in prison for those who create or reproduce “messages, names or propaganda alluding to gangs” in the Central American country.
The measure was proposed by President Bukele and the Ministry of Security, Gustavo Villatoro, and covers the media that publish texts, images, graffiti, or any other form of visual expression related to gangs.
“When the Germans wanted to eradicate Nazism, they prohibited by law all Nazi symbology, as well as messages, apologies and everything that was aimed at promoting Nazism,” the Salvadoran president justified then.
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