Authorities in El Salvador are keen to expand a much-praised local policing model believed to have helped two rural communities tackle bloody gang control. But a visit to the areas revealed a murky combination of factors behind the security gains, including indications of vigilantism.
On a dirt
road leading to the villages of Guajoyo and Miramar in the municipality
Tecoluca, some 80 kilometers east of the capital, San Salvador, a rusty
checkpoint barrier blocks an unpaved path cutting through the countryside.
Uncultivated
fields sprawl on either side of the dirt road, in one direction to the foot of
a mountainous forest looming in the distance that once served as a hideout for
guerrilla insurgents who fought in El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s and
early 1990s.
A few
kilometers back stands the landmark “Golden Bridge,” one of the biggest and
most impressive engineering feats in El Salvador until it was famously blown
up in 1981
by a commando from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation
Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional – FMLN), the
guerrilla group that later became the governing political party.
The civil
war is long over, and the FMLN flags flying above so many of the rural
households here now represent a non-violent political movement rather than
armed revolution — a sign of how far the country has come in securing peace.
But the war in this region gave way to another conflict, this time between the
MS13 and Barrio 18 gangs as well as state security forces, which turned the
area once again into a battleground.
Criminal
Migration
Juan José
Leyva, a sturdy man in his mid-fifties who is an officer with Tecoluca’s
municipal police (Cuerpo de Agentes Municipales – CAM), remembers that the
presence of gangs began expanding in 2012.
Early one
evening in 2014, he was stationed in Tecoluca’s central plaza when he says
three gang members walked up to him, two with weapons visibly tucked under
their shirts, the third with his gun in his hand.
“So tell
me, if we kill someone right here are you guys [the municipal police] going to
get involved?” Leyva says they asked him.
The police
officer says he told them that if they attacked innocent men, women or
children, then yes, the CAM would retaliate. But if they happened to run rival
gang members out of town and deal with them elsewhere, it wouldn’t be of the
CAM’s concern.
“We’ll take
that into account,” Leyva remembers the young gang member saying.
Under
increasing pressure from urban security forces in the 2000s, gang members had
migrated to the countryside, setting up some of the same activities that make
up their bread and butter in cities, such as extortion. With this geographical
shift, violence increased, with rising homicides blamed on
extortion and score-settling.
Another
Tecoluca police officer, José Ambrosio, told InSight Crime that the situation
around Guajoyo and Miramar quickly worsened in 2014 with the arrival of a
hardened Barrio 18 gang member, Apolonio Neftalí Rivera Durán, alias
“Polo.” By 2015, some businesses near the Golden Bridge were paying up to $100
a week in extortion to the gang — nearly half the monthly minimum wage for a commercial employee.
In June
2015, things came to a head. A police operation to arrest the gang’s
second-in-command in the area resulted in the suspect’s death. The following
day, members of the Barrio 18’s Revolucionarios faction dragged the daughter of
a local Guajoyo community leader from her house onto the main road, and in
broad daylight executed her and her father, who tried to intervene.
Shock to
the System
The motive
behind the killings was uncertain — the daughter reportedly was in a
relationship with one of the local gang members — but the bloody incident sent
ripples through the community. Fourteen families fled, while the rest organized
to create a local committee for violence prevention and increased their
cooperation with local police, which helped lead to the dismantling of the gang,
according to authorities.
Ambrosio,
the police officer, says that the development of community policing in the area
dates back as early as 2010, but that it was the desperation provoked by the
killing of the leader and his daughter that really brought the local population
closer to law enforcement, who simultaneously saw the opportunity to launch an
outreach campaign.
“First, [law enforcement] succeeded in gaining
the population’s trust,” local community leader Miguel Ángel Cruz told InSight
Crime.
“Before, we
would have community meetings and there would no law enforcement participation.
Since then, there hasn’t been a single social meeting without a member of the
police present, giving out a speech or a training,” he added.
The renewed
trust spurred the sharing of information by locals that allowed police to take
down the local gang structure. By the end of 2016, all fourteen families had
returned to their homes.
Praising
the security gains achieved in the area since the peak of the violence,
authorities at the national level are pushing to replicate model known as the
Local Violence Prevention Committee (Comité Local de Prevención de la Violencia
– CLPV), through which law enforcement and the Guajoyo and Miramar communities
cooperated. In April, the government announced that it was hoping to see 23
new CLPVs in the area.
Ambrosio’s
superior, Police Commissioner Gerson Pérez, in charge of the department of San
Vicente, also insisted that the community’s social cohesion was key to the
successful model.
“These are
places that have remained organized since the war,” Pérez noted.
Community
Policing or Vigilantism?
There is a
consensus among officials and non-governmental observers that the lack of trust
in Salvadoran law enforcement is one of the main obstacles to bringing down
extortion levels and prosecuting gang members. Improving the flow of
information from communities to law enforcement appears to be a step in the
right direction.
But
improved cooperation alone may not fully explain how such a powerful gang
presence was dealt with so quickly.
Two sources
requesting anonymity told InSight Crime that extrajudicial killings and
executions of gang members had taken place during the period in which locals
were trying to force the gangs out of the area — a period during which murder
accusations against security forces jumped by 630 percent at the national level.
Such a hypothesis
would be in line with a national and regional pattern of
extortion victims taking justice into their own hands. Some politicians are
advocating for a bill to legalize self-defense movements against gangs. The
president of Congress, Guillermo Gallegos, has even boasted about
financing the
arming of a vigilante group.
At the
national level, extrajudicial killings by Salvadoran security forces have also
become an issue. Several investigations have revealed the existence of death squads led by police and military,
sometimes in coordination with community members. And local press reports suggest that a combination of
policing efforts and a vigilante movement by locals pushed gang members out of
the Miramar and Guajoyo.
Ambrosio
vehemently denies these claims, but Commissioner Pérez told a different story.
“It doesn’t
really matter if they [the civilians] were armed or not,” Pérez told InSight
Crime, choosing to highlight the communities’ concerted effort to coordinate
with local authorities.
Officials
and experts consulted by InSight Crime concurred that the ability of a
community to organize itself is essential to resisting gang infiltration and
criminal activities like extortion. All agreed that measures such as Tecoluca’s
community policing program can go a long way in undermining gang structures.
But the
story of Guajoyo and Miramar suggests that attempts to replicate this model in
other communities should take into account the potential for abuses by both
community members and security forces.
*
Deborah Bonello contributed reporting to this article.