Caribbean & Central America - July 2017 (ISSN 1741-4458)

El Salvador’s attorney general’s office (FGR) has uncovered new evidence of the active complicity between municipal authorities and the country’s mara street gangs. A local mayor in El Salvador was arrested on 20 June for allegedly using public funds to finance terrorism. The FGR reported that the mayor of the country’s fifth largest city of Usulután, Miguel Ángel Jaime, had transferred US$39,000 to Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) in exchange for electoral favours. The arrest raises disturbing questions about the infiltration of state institutions.

Jaime was arrested after the authorities captured local MS13 leader Raúl Armando Bonilla, alias ‘Snow’, upon whose mobile phone was a video containing compromising conversations linking Jaime to members of the street gang. Jaime can be seen explicitly offering municipal financial support to Bonilla in exchange for mara backing for his 2015 electoral campaign. Jaime, then a councillor, went on to become mayor of Usulután, the capital of the eponymous south-eastern department.

Shortly before his capture Jaime had warned that the municipality of Usulután was in “a financial stranglehold”, lacking the funds to pay a US$1.6m public lighting contract with the Colombian company AGM, meaning blackouts could be imminent. At the same he was siphoning off public funds from a tax on retailers in the municipality to make fortnightly payments of between US$1,000 and US$2,000 to MS13.

Jaime belongs to the right-of-centre opposition Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional (Gana), whose president of the legislative assembly, Guillermo Gallegos, somewhat ironically advocated the creation of self-defence groups back in May to combat the mara gangs in various municipalities across the country. Gallegos excited controversy by urging deputies to pass legislation permitting local communities to arm themselves.

Jaime is not the first mayor to be arrested for illegal political and financial collaboration with mara gangs. In June 2016 the mayor of the municipality of Apopa in the department of San Salvador, José Elías Hernández, a member of the main right-wing opposition Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena), was arrested. Hernández offered mobile phones, vehicles and fuel, and even employment to mara members, paid for out of public funds, and extorted local businesses in return for their promise to reduce violence and to win votes for his re-election bid in March 2015.

Homicides surge

June was the most violent month of 2017 in El Salvador, according to the director of the national police force (PNC), Howard Cotto, with over 320 murders, up 18% on the same month last year. Cotto, and his predecessor Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde, the security minister, attributed the increase in homicides to a “purge” within MS13. Cotto said that despite the increase in homicides in June, the figure for the first six months of this year was down by 42% on the 3,038 registered in the same period last year.

The director of the national prison system, Rodil Hernández, claimed in May that MS13 had been divided over financial differences between the national leadership and local leaders, leading to the creation of a dissident movement known as MS503. Hernández maintained that these differences dated back to July 2016 when the PNC and the attorney general’s office carried out ‘Operation Jaque’ targeting the finances of MS13 for the first time and revealing that the top leadership lived a comparative life of luxury. El Salvador’s other main Mara gang, Barrio 18, split into two factions, Revolucionarios and Sureños, in the middle of the last decade.

• Municipal corruption

The FGR began investigating municipal authorities after the online investigative publication El Faro revealed earlier last year that a senior legislator for the main right-wing opposition Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena), Ernesto Muyshondt, had held secret talks with leaders of all of the mara gangs in February 2014, during the last presidential election campaign, offering a series of inducements in exchange for them using their influence to persuade voters to back his party.