The top prosecutor in El Salvador has asked congress to strip immunity from a legislator he says negotiated with gangs for political benefit during the 2014 presidential election.
Norman Quijano, a current congressman who ran for president in 2014
and was mayor of the capital city, San Salvador, has been accused of
conspiracy and electoral fraud — the first time such a high-level
official faces potential charges for making secret deals with street
gangs.
Attorney General Raúl Melara announced his decision on January 27 in a morning address. That afternoon, he sent prosecutors to the Legislative Assembly to present Quijano with a summons, according to La Prensa Gráfica.
The investigation into Quijano
formally began when a gang member, identified as “Noé,” implicated him
in testimony during a court case where 400 members of the MS13 were
being collectively tried.
Noé said in court
that several gang leaders met with Quijano during the 2014 presidential
election. Quijano ran as a candidate for the Nationalist Republican
Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista – ARENA), the rightist party
that governed El Salvador between 1989 and 2009 and currently governs
the capital city. He ended up losing the election by just over 6,000
votes.
In the case where Noé was a witness,
prosecutors presented several videos as evidence. In one of these,
Quijano appears in a meeting with gang members, El Faro reported.
Part of the video, however, was kept out of court by the judge because
it showed the face of a protected witness. The investigative outlet,
however, obtained transcripts of that conversation, in which the former
presidential candidate offers to invest public funds in rehabilitation
programs in exchange for the gang leaders’ influence in the areas under
their control.
More specifically, Quijano offered to
provide up to $100,000 for rehabilitation programs from supposedly
national party funds. In return he said: “We can do it if you actually…
vote for ARENA. If you all give us the opportunity to govern,” according to El Faro.
After the accusations against Quijano were announced, he said he was innocent in a
statement on his Twitter account, something that he has done before. “I
repeat that… I have not given any money to delinquents, let alone
agreed to benefits,” he wrote. Quijano later tweeted another statement, in which he said he was a victim of a political conspiracy.
According to Salvadoran law, it is
now up to the representatives to form a special commission for the
preliminary hearing to determine if there is cause to take away
Quijano’s immunity. The decision to strip his immunity only requires a
simple majority in the legislature — 43 of 84 votes.
InSight Crime Analysis
The accusations by El Salvador’s attorney general against Norman
Quijano represent a sea change in how high-level officials are dealt
with for attempting to negotiate with gangs.
In 2016, Douglas Meléndez, the lawyer that preceded Melara as attorney general, prosecuted 19
people involved in the truce — negotiated in 2012 between the MS13 and
Barrio 18 — for conspiring with criminal groups and introducing
contraband into the jails. Among those charged were police, anti-gang, and jail officials, as well as one of the truce’s chief negotiators. But a judge later dismissed the case against them, saying that the evidence against them was insufficient, and some had been acting under orders from their superiors.
Meléndez, however, stopped short of
accusing David Munguía Payés, the minister of security and defense
during the administration of Mauricio Funes (2009-2014), of any
wrongdoing, despite testimony that pointed to Munguía Payés as the
primary architect of the truce, which allowed for a temporary decline in
homicides by gang members in exchange for their incarcerated leaders
receiving benefits.
Munguía has said that Funes was aware of everything related to the pact with the gangs. The judge who dismissed the case against the officials criticized the Attorney General’s Office for not investigating the former president and former minister.
The Quijano case, though, is just the
tip of the iceberg: a number of politicians from various political
parties have been outed as having sat down with the gangs.
Salvadoran politicians who have allegedly negotiated with gang members include the current mayor of San Salvador, Ernesto Muyshondt, and members of President Nayib Bukele’s inner circle, as well as several officials from the leftwing government of former President Salvador Sánchez Cerén.
In the case of officials close to
Bukele, the alleged agreement with the gangs was reached in February
2015, while the president was still the mayor of San Salvador. An investigation by El Faro into the talks says
that Bukele’s municipal administration “made concessions” to gang
members over the course of three years in exchange for not interfering
with the administration’s projects in the city.
An investigation by the Attorney General’s Office
determined that the Bukele administration sent Mario Durán and Carlos
Marroquín to meet with two MS13 spokesmen at a mall in the capital on
December 21, 2015, according to a report by Factum. The Salvadoran police even sent undercover agents to observe the meeting, Factum
reported. Durán is currently the minister of the interior under
President Bukele, and Marroquín is an official within the same agency in
charge of social projects in areas under gang control.
Meanwhile, Mayor Muyshondt admitted to meeting with gang members in 2015,
saying that he did so to pay the extortion fees that the gangs demanded
to let him campaign in the areas under their control. Muyshondt also
admitted to paying blackmail with funds from his political party.
While politicians from different political parties, including mayors and ministers, have been linked to gang members in court cases
and journalistic reports, up until now, no one as high-profile as
Quijano has faced possible prosecution. In a country where the primary
security problems are all related to the MS13 and Barrio 18 street
gangs, that is a game changer.