President threatens to cut all food for gang inmates

SAN SALVADOR (AP):

El Salvador’s president threatened on Tuesday to stop providing food for imprisoned gang members as he continued his crackdown following a wave of killings that led to a state of emergency and implementation of measures that have drawn international condemnation.

Speaking at a graduation ceremony for new police officers and soldiers, President Nayib Bukele said that if the gangs “unleash a wave of crimes, we are going to cut off food in the prisons”.

“There are rumors that they (gangs) want to start taking revenge on random, honest people,” Bukele said. “If they do that, there won’t even be one meal in prisons. I swear to God they won’t eat a grain of rice, and let’s see how long they last.

“They should stay calm and let themselves be arrested; at least on the inside they will continue to live and have two meals a day,” Bukele said.

Previously, Bukele had ordered food for gang members held in Salvadoran prisons to be reduced to two meals per day, seized inmates’ mattresses, and posted a video of prisoners being frog-marched through corridors and down stairs.

Following a wave of homicides in late March, Bukele declared a state of emergency that suspended some constitutional rights and rounded up about 6,000 street gang members.

The president also ordered a new maximum-security prison to be built to hold 20,000 inmates.

The move has faced criticism from human-rights organisations in El Salvador and abroad, warning that the suspension of fundamental rights could open the door to human-rights abuses. El Salvador’s human-rights prosecutors’ office said it had received 67 human-rights complaints, including 33 for arbitrary arrest.

United Nations Human Rights spokeswoman Liz Throssell said on Tuesday, “We are deeply concerned by the series of measures recently introduced in El Salvador in response to the rise in gang killings.”

Throssell said “5,747 people have been detained without an arrest warrant, and some have reportedly been subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”.

Bukele, as usual, brushed off criticisms.

“I don’t care what the international organisations say. Let them come here and protect our people,” the president said. “They can take their gang members if they want; we’ll give them all of them.”

El Salvador’s Congress has also increased sentences for crimes committed by gang members. The country’s notorious street gangs effectively control many neighbourhoods in the capital.

The state of emergency restricts freedom to associate, the right to be informed of rights when arrested and access to a lawyer. The government also extended to 15 days, from 72 hours, the time that someone can be held without charges and allowed authorities to intercept suspects’ communications without a judge’s approval.