A court in El Salvador sentenced 39 members of a criminal gang to prison terms of up to 300 years for murder and multiple robberies, the prosecutor’s office said Saturday. The institution said that it had secured sentences of up to 300 years for 39 individuals who were part of a structure responsible for 26 cases of aggravated robbery and four homicides.
It added that the harshest sentences were handed to Marvin GarcÃa, who received 300 years, and Aurelio Vásquez, who received 258 years. Both were leaders of the gang, which operated in several departments of the country between 2019 and 2023. According to the prosecutor’s office, the other convictions were for 13 people who served as gunmen, 15 drivers, and eight others who acted as spotters and suppliers of firearms, though it did not specify the length of their prison terms.
Although the criminals were convicted by an organized crime court in Soyapango, a district of San Salvador, prosecutors did not link them to any of the street gangs that operate in the Central American country. Nor did they give the date of the sentence or say whether the convictions were part of the mass trials announced in August to prosecute thousands of suspected gang members detained under the state of emergency in force since March 2022.
Although the gang members were sentenced to terms of up to 300 years, the maximum prison sentence in El Salvador is 60 years, according to the penal code. Investigators determined that the gang stole money from victims after they carried out transactions at bank branches, and in some cases killed the victims.
Among the crimes committed was the 2021 murder of a teacher who resisted a robbery as she was leaving a bank. President Nayib Bukele has taken on the country’s gangs under a state of emergency that allows arrests without a judicial warrant. More than 90,000 people have been detained, and about 8,000 were later released after being found innocent, according to official sources.
Bukele’s war on gangs has reduced homicides to historic lows in the country, but human rights groups criticize his strategy, alleging abuses by security forces. Since 2022, 454 Salvadorans have died in prison, according to NGOs.
On Friday, the prominent human rights organization Cristosal presented a report on El Salvador in Guatemala in which it said that 86 people are political prisoners, something it said had not happened since the civil war ended in 1992, placing the country in the same category as Venezuela and Nicaragua.
