Weekly Report - 5 August 2003

President Francisco Flores has enlisted the army in a drive to wipe out the gangs known as maras. There are fears that this may prove ineffectual, even backfire. 

The maras, estimated to have a joint membership of about 9,000, have been blamed for about 100 killings, many deliberately gruesome, a month - indeed, in the half-week in which Operación Mano Dura was set in motion, seven gang killings were reported in the San Salvador area. 

Joint police-military patrols, targeting primarily the two largest gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and Mara 18, claimed almost instant successes: in less than a week they made 541 arrests. 

This apparent success could prove unfounded: most of those detained may have to be released, as the police have no charges to file against them. Already about 200 have been set free. President Flores had openly admitted that the military-police drive would not suffice to eradicate the maras: the first phase of the campaign, he said, was intended to 'rescue' the neighbourhoods the gangs had made their own. 

Real success, he added, required the passage of new legislation - which he only submitted to congress after giving the army and police the order to go in. The bill sharply increases the penalties for a number of offences, but most notably (emulating the law passed earlier by Honduras) makes mere membership of a mara a punishable offence. 

This has been strongly criticised by human rights organisations and a number of jurists. Jaime Martí­nez, of the Fundación de Estudios para la Aplicación del Derecho (Fespad, a private foundation that conducts research into the application of the law), says that it is fundamentally wrong to penalise a condition rather than an action. 'To make it a crime to be a marero, is tantamount to believing that being a vagrant or a homosexual is criminal.' 

Even the Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, Fernando Sáenz Lacalle, has pointedly reminded congressmen that 'if it is necessary to create special legislation, the proper steps must be taken, but keeping always within the framework of legality and the constitution.'