Caribbean & Central America - May 2015 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Annihilate the mara gangs. This was the core message of the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, when he visited El Salvador at the start of May to present a plan drawn up by his consultancy, Giuliani Security and Safety, to the country’s powerful private business association (Anep), which hired him. This should suit President Salvador Sánchez Cerén, whose government has already responded to mounting violence by adopting an aggressive security policy, creating three 400-strong elite army battalions to take the fight to the gangs in the 50 municipalities where their presence is strongest; transferring imprisoned mara leaders en masse from ‘softer’ common jails to the maximum-security prison Zacatecoluca; and floating the threat of extradition to the US.

Giuliani presented his firm’s proposals for reducing violence in El Salvador on 4 May at an Anep forum, attended by President Sánchez Cerén, three and a half months after he sent a team of experts on a fact-finding mission to the country. Giuliani said the two main gangs, Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and Barrio 18, had not been elected by anyone and were not approved by anyone, adding that living in a neighbourhood controlled by a gang was like living under a dictatorship.

Giuliani said the government needed to have a single-minded focus to free people from the control of the gangs through tough law enforcement; restructuring the prison system so that prisons are controlled by prison guards rather than providing a refuge for gang leaders to order crimes from within; improve the efficiency of the justice system; reform the penal code to hand down tougher sentences and to stiffen laws against minors who commit serious crimes; improve the compilation of crime statistics; and enhance coordination between police and prosecutors.

Giuliani drew on examples of methods used to reduce crime in New York and in Colombia. He discussed some specifics, such as improving the police DNA analysis system, and introducing bonuses to provide incentives for law enforcement officials who do a good job (although this has its associated problems as shown by the ‘false positives’ scandal in Colombia).

Above all, however, Giuliani said there must be political will to reduce violence and crack down hard on corruption at all levels (not just the police, but also the attorney general’s office and judges) or his proposals would amount to nothing. He recommended the creation of a dynamic anti-corruption investigative unit to take the fight to the corrupt to create fear of the justice system and to make any official think twice about accepting a bribe.

Despite the scale of the transformative reforms recommended in the document, which was handed by Anep to Sánchez Cerén, the attorney general’s office and the supreme court of justice (CSJ), Giuliani expressed his confidence that a reduction in crime could be achieved within six to seven months. Giuliani was critical of any suggestion of a gang truce, which he said works for a bit before a resurgence in crime follows. The resurgence in crime in El Salvador, however, came after the 2012 gang truce was abandoned.

Anep recently published a report predicting that homicides could reach 4,651 this year, which would be the highest since the civil war (1980-1992). The total number of homicides for the first four months of 2015 was 1,551, according to a report released on 7 May by the supreme court’s legal medicine institute (IML). This is up by a massive 44.3% year-on-year.

• Elite army battalions

President Sánchez Cerén announced the establishment of three special battalions of 400 soldiers each on 18 April, as well as a rapid response unit within the national police force (PNC), to support his government’s increasingly militarised fight against organised crime. This is the first time elite army battalions have been used in El Salvador since the civil war (1980-1992), when death squads proliferated.