El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, on Wednesday compared the collective trial of gang leaders in his country to the historic Nuremberg proceedings against top Nazi officials after World War II. A total of 486 members of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), which the United States considers a terrorist organization, have been on trial since Monday, accused of committing more than 29,000 murders. Among them are the killings of 87 people in March 2022 that led Bukele to declare a “war” on gangs.
Bukele said that the “novel” aspect of this mass trial is “holding the leaders (gang members) responsible for the crimes committed by their organizations.” “We did not invent that principle. It is called ‘command responsibility,’ and it was applied in Europe during the Nuremberg Trials,” the right-wing president said in response to criticism from former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, who called the collective trial, which includes 22 MS-13 leaders, “unfair.”
Protected witnesses on Tuesday accused the 22 ranfleros, or historic gang bosses, of acting as a “criminal corporation,” according to prosecutor Max Muñoz. During the Nuremberg Trials, from 1945 to 1946, jurists from the Allied countries that won World War II put 21 of the highest-ranking leaders of Nazi Germany on individualized trial, laying the foundation for an international criminal justice system. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death and hanged.
In El Salvador’s mass trial, the first against a gang command structure, the group is accused of 47,000 crimes committed between 2012 and 2022, according to the Attorney General’s Office. As part of his anti-gang offensive, Bukele imposed a state of emergency in March 2022 that has led to more than 91,000 detentions without judicial warrants. Human rights groups have criticized the measure, denouncing arbitrary arrests, torture, and deaths in prison.
