El Salvador under siege as maras go on killing spree
El Salvador’s deteriorating public security situation is taking a sharp turn for the worse. In the course of 72 hours this week mara gang members murdered seven bus drivers and paralysed public transport in and around the capital San Salvador with an enforced strike, in order to ratchet up the pressure on the government led by President Salvador Sánchez Cerén. As the number of homicides has spiralled in recent months to levels not seen since the country’s brutal civil war (1980-1992), the government has refused to hold talks with the maras. It remains defiant. Sánchez Cerén is promising to pour more military on to the streets to support the police, while he and other senior officials in the ruling left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) are making increasingly wild claims of a multifaceted destabilisation campaign orchestrated by the main right- wing opposition Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena).
As a prelude to the string of murders, two microbuses were set ablaze over the weekend in a suburb of San Salvador, Ciudad Delgado, where the government launched its ‘Plan El Salvador Seguro’ (‘Plan for a Safe El Salvador’) just days earlier [WR-15-29]. Five bus drivers and a transport worker were then murdered by the early hours of 27 July. Private bus companies reacted by staging a ‘strike’, calling on the government to take urgent steps to improve the security situation. Transport chaos ensued in metropolitan San Salvador. Bus companies, transport authorities and government ministers gave differing figures of just how many bus routes were affected but in the region of 1,000 buses on 40 bus routes in greater San Salvador did not run. A further bus driver was killed for ‘defying’ the strike on 29 July.