OAN’s Abril Elfi
3:22 PM – Friday, August 4, 2023
Roughly 8,000 soldiers and cops have encircled a rural area in El Salvador, in hopes of finding gang members who are reportedly hiding.
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As part of one of the largest operations since President Nayib Bukele announced an assault on the gangs in March 2022, El Salvador dispatched about 7,000 military service men and 1,000 police officers to search the remote area of Cabañas for street gang members on Tuesday.
In the province of Cabañas, the troops set up checkpoints on all roadways coming in and out. The operation came after two police officers were shot during a weekend attack on a patrol car.
Bukele took to Twitter to write his concerns and hopes about this operation.
“Cabañas has become the place with the largest number of terrorists, who came seeking to use the rural areas to hide,” Bukele wrote in a tweet. “This massive operation will guarantee greater security for the area, and we will not end it until we find all the criminals.”
The president emphasized that until “all the criminals” were arrested, the siege would not be lifted. Nevertheless, he did not specify how the security forces would discern between the two groups while ensuring Salvadorans that “honest people, visitors, and tourists have nothing to fear.”
Tuesday’s action was the seventh large-scale raid since the 2020 gang campaign began. The government of Bukele has suspended constitutional rights and has imprisoned 71,976 individuals, or 1% of the nation’s population, on gang-related charges.
However, in past raids the government has imprisoned people based on their looks and the location of where they lived without solid evidence that they were involved in any crime. According to the human rights organization Cristosal, as few as 30% of people who are detained have obvious connections to organized crime.
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