El Salvador’s justice system on Monday opened a trial against some 486 people accused of belonging to the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), including several founders and leaders, in the first mass trial against the command structure of a gang.
Among thousands of crimes, according to the Attorney General’s Office, the group ordered the killing of 87 people over a single weekend in March 2022, prompting President Nayib Bukele to declare his war on gangs under a state of emergency that has left more than 91,000 people detained.
The Attorney General’s Office provided the press with a video of a prosecutor who did not show his face and said the 486 ringleaders are accused of 47,000 crimes committed between 2012 and 2022, including 29,000 homicides. “We are going to judge them and settle a historic debt. They are being held responsible for all the crimes committed by the Mara Salvatrucha during those 11 years,” the prosecutor said.
El Salvador’s Judicial Centers, which brings together the courts, said that those on trial include members of the ranfla, the highest-ranking leadership of MS-13, regional bosses and founders. MS-13 and its rival Barrio 18, with its two factions, considered terrorist organizations by the United States and El Salvador, came to control 80% of the country’s territory, according to Bukele.
The group is also being prosecuted for the crime of rebellion because it allegedly sought to maintain territorial control in order to establish a parallel state, which threatens national sovereignty, according to a statement from the Attorney General’s Office. This is the first time a mass trial has been held against the command structures that ordered crimes, it added.
With the full weight of the law
Bukele is popular for ending the terror imposed by gangs, but NGOs report more than 500 deaths in prison, torture, and thousands of arrests of innocent people under the state of emergency, which allows arrests without a court order. Born on the streets of Los Angeles in the early 1990s, the gangs terrorized El Salvador for more than three decades, engaging in extortion, small-scale drug dealing, contract killings, arms trafficking and other illicit businesses.
Over three decades, according to Bukele, gangs murdered some 200,000 people, taking into account around 80,000 reported missing. The Attorney General’s Office said it has abundant evidence to seek the maximum penalties, without specifying whether that would include life imprisonment, which will soon take effect as punishment for murderers, rapists and terrorists under a recently approved legal reform.
At the opening on Monday of the so-called open single hearing, the judge, who was not identified, said these groups had disturbed peace and state security for decades and would therefore be judged with the full weight of the law, according to the judicial authorities. This case reveals an unavoidable truth: it shows us that these acts were not random, they were ordered by a structure that had no respect for the law and did not care about what happened, he added.
Human rights NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Cristosal have criticized mass trials because of the risk that innocent people could be convicted, since criminal responsibility is not individualized and the hearing to assess evidence has been eliminated under legal reforms.
According to the unidentified prosecutor, 413 defendants are appearing virtually at this hearing and 73 are fugitives but will be tried in absentia.
More than 250 of the defendants are being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, the mega-prison for gang members built by Bukele’s government, while the rest are in other maximum-security prisons. The prosecutor said they hope to finish the trial soon, without giving dates.
