Homicides continue to increase in El Salvador

Fred Ramos / For the Washington Post

Joahua Partlow has a depressing story on the increasing violence in El Salvador for the Washington Post with El Salvador is on pace to become the hemisphere’s most deadly nation.

Amid a public outcry and mounting government pressure, El Salvador’s anti-gang police have ratcheted up their operations, killing suspected gang members and arresting more than 4,400 others this year. New laws have made it harder to investigate police violence. The country’s vice president, Oscar Ortiz, has said that police “must use weapons and should do so without fearing consequences for their actions.”

Within police ranks, there is both fear and law-and-order bravado, an edgy, confrontational climate that human rights groups say evokes memories of the brutal 1980s civil war.

His update on events in El Salvador made me think of an op-ed I wrote for Al Jazeera three years ago (A second chance for President Funes in El Salvador) in which I argued that the Salvadoran government deserved credit for supporting the gang truce, but that it must reform its own approach to the 'problem'.

Funes and his government deserve credit for supporting the truce and for reaching out to national and international businesses and organisations for support. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the Funes administration has used the truce to restart its basic approach to poor and marginalised youth. It's not clear that they have made a commitment to scale back the Mano Dura policies of recent years that contributed to this violence.

The government and its security forces need to stop seeing every young person as a gang member or a potential gang member. According to some gang members, the truce has been difficult to sustain because some police officers have been arresting and beating gang members just "for fun". In the months following the truce, the police have continued to round up suspected gang members - even though it is unclear what crimes they had committed other than being a gang member. Imprisoning Salvadoran youth because of their tattoos and general appearance rather than their behaviour contributed to an escalation of violence and needs to stop.

It was not too long ago that General David Munguia Payes said that the Salvadoran government has a "Plan B" which is more direct against the problem, although he would not go into details. If Plan B is some super super Mano Dura, the Funes administration will have learned nothing.

For the truce to hold, it'll take more than a change of heart by gang members. The Funes administration needs to recommit itself to a comprehensive anti-gang strategy that emphasises prevention, reintegration and rehabilitation. It also needs to reform the country's public security institutions away from a Mano Dura approach to societal ills.