El Salvador: Business protests against extortion racket
The Policía Nacional Civil (PNC) in El Salvador will start to train a special investigative unit to deal exclusively with the growing problem of extortion in the eastern department of San Miguel, the director of the PNC, Rodrigo Avila, revealed after meeting a group of businessmen and shop owners from the department.
Avila did not divulge any details on the size of the new unit or exactly how and where it will operate but its creation was forced on the government in response to a threat from the Cámara de Comercio e Industria de El Salvador (CCIES) in San Miguel to go on strike, stage protest marches and even stop paying value-added tax - to channel these resources into private security - unless the authorities take steps to end the extortion racket, run by mara gangs. The CCIES claims that some 80% of businesses in San Miguel are at the mercy of mara extortionists. René Aparicio, the president of CCIES, calculates that some businesses are paying out as much as US$1,200 to US$1,400 a month in protection money.
There has even been some talk of the revival of shadowy death squads such as "Sombra Negra" to carry out extrajudicial killings of criminals involved in extortion. The CCIES is certainly not in the mood to negotiate with the extortionists. Businesses reacted furiously to a suggestion by the mayor of San Miguel, Wilfredo Salgado, that he sign a "peace accord" with a gang of mara extortionists for the next six months. The CCIES said this was tantamount to condoning the actions of the maras and refused to allow Salgado to negotiate in their name. They argued that they needed a permanent solution not a six-month truce. They also accused Salgado of politicising the issue; of trying to win their favour so that he can build up a support base for a tilt at the presidency for the rightwing Partido de Conciliación Nacional (PCN).
Transport unions in San Miguel joined businesses in condemning the government's failure to crack down on extortion. They claim that their members are losing up to US$500,000 a month in protection money paid to the mara gangs. "Extortion [and] the destruction of company property by mara gangs is the order of the day_ and what is most serious is that they (the maras) are threatening the physical integrity of people by means of extortion; we must put an end to this climate of fear," Catalino Miranda, the president of the Federación de Cooperativas de Transporte (Fecotrans), said.
According to Fecotrans, the biggest union of public minibuses, mareros from the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and Mara-18 exact a "daily tax" of between US$3 and US$5 a day on most of the microbus routes as protection money. Some bus companies are paying up to US$500,000 a month and the authorities are doing nothing about it, the president of the Asociación de Empresarios de Autobuses Salvadoreños (AEAS), Genaro Ramírez, said.
The complaints about the actions of the maras, coupled with steadily rising homicide figures, suggest that the government's high-profile Mano Dura and Super Mano Dura campaigns against the maras have failed to have any tangible effect. The interior minister, René Figueroa, remained upbeat, however. "We have been able to foil bands of criminals in other departments, and we are going to do it in San Miguel, but we need people to make denunciations," he said.