San Salvador – The Salvadoran government said Wednesday it is reinforcing police presence in parts of the country most savagely assailed by gangs, after death-squad leaflets appeared in an eastern city vowing extermination of extortion-racket street thugs.
President Tony Saca, meanwhile, said his government has not lost control of security despite the killings and acts of extortion carried out by the violent youth gangs.
The president told reporters that the presence of law-enforcement personnel has been stepped up in areas where the situation is most serious, including the eastern city of San Miguel, the country’s third largest, where the local population has announced protests to demand improved police protection.
Over the past few days, pamphlets have appeared in San Miguel from a supposed clandestine group called “Black Shadow” threatening to exterminate “extortionists.” The development conjured grisly memories of death squads, which usually included police and army officers, that operated during the 1980-92 civil war to eliminate leftists.
The daily El Mundo reported Wednesday that San Miguel’s district attorney’s office was also investigating the existence of another apparent death squad known as “Comando Central XGN” that allegedly plans to target groups that extort shopkeepers and other business people.
Saca has condemned the concept of the vigilante “social cleansing” squads.
The president commented after attending a ceremony commemorating the birth of Roberto D’Aubuisson, founder of the governing rightist ARENA party and the ideological leader of the anti-communist death squads of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
D’Aubuisson died of throat cancer in 1992.
Will Salgado, San Miguel’s mayor, said Wednesday that the crime problem was “out of the control” of the authorities and that, therefore, citizens were looking to take matters into their own hands.
He said in an interview on Canal 21 television that gang members – who even offer “credit facilities” – constantly extort fixed quotas from store and factory owners, intimidating them into paying by threatening to kill their family members.
Salgado noted that those who collect the protection money arrive at the businesses with their faces covered and that victims do not report the crime for fear that they or their relatives will be killed.
Recent figures provided by the National Police showed that an average of 10 people a day are slain in this Central American nation, with most of the murders blamed on the street gangs.
