El Salvador holds mass trial for 486 alleged gang members

By Gerardo Arbaiza

SAN SALVADOR, April 21 (Reuters) – A Salvadoran court on Tuesday began a collective trial of 486 alleged gang members, one of the biggest mass trials under President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gang violence through controversial emergency powers.

Prosecutors say the charges against alleged members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, or MS-13, span more than 47,000 crimes committed between 2012 and 2022, including a weekend that was El Salvador’s bloodiest since its civil war.

The charges include homicide, femicide, extortion and arms trafficking.

Under the state of emergency that took effect in 2022 and has been repeatedly renewed, security forces have detained more than 91,500 people and Congress passed a decree allowing for mass trials.

Human rights groups have warned that the collective prosecutions violate due process and block defendants from accessing legal counsel.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on Tuesday reiterated concerns over human rights violations through the long-extended state of emergency, and called for an end to its use as a crime-fighting strategy.

“This regime suspends the rights to a legal defense and to the inviolability of communications, and also extends administrative detention timelines,” the commission said in a statement.

The defendants in the current case are being held across five prisons including CECOT, a notorious maximum-security prison opened by the Bukele administration in 2023 that has come to embody El Salvador’s zero-tolerance crackdown on gangs.

The Salvadoran prosecutor’s office has presented autopsies, ballistic analyses and witness testimony as evidence, and asked the judge to impose the maximum prison sentence for each crime.

A single defendant could receive up to 245 years in prison if found guilty of multiple charges.

Among those facing charges are alleged long-standing gang leaders who participated in the 2012 to 2014 truce between the government and gangs during Mauricio Funes’ presidency.

Bukele’s government has said the gang crackdown under emergency powers pushed the homicide rate down last year to 1.3 per 100,000 people compared to 7.8 in 2022.

(Reporting by Gerardo Arbaiza, Additional reporting by Daina Beth Solomon, Editing by Alistair Bell and Edwina Gibbs)