El Salvador’s mass trials of alleged gang members are the latest phase in President Nayib Bukele’s hardline security model, aimed at locking in the dismantling of MS13 and Barrio 18 while processing a massive backlog of cases. InSight Crime’s Managing Editor Deborah Bonello and Central America Investigator Alex Papadovassilakis discuss how the trials, which group hundreds of defendants and thousands of crimes into single proceedings, raise troubling questions about whether collective punishment is replacing individual justice.
Transcript
Deborah: [00:00:00] Now you can’t have missed the photos and reporting we’ve been seeing around the mass trials that President Nayib Bukele’s government is running in El Salvador’s prisons, part of his hardline crackdown on the gangs. I’m joined today on the Insight Take by Alex, one of our chief investigators for Central America, who’s been watching the trials closely. Alex, thanks for joining me.
Alex: [00:00:23] Of course.
Deborah: [00:00:23] Can you tell us when these mass trials started, why, and what’s the latest?
Alex: [00:00:32] Yeah, so these mass trials are really the latest phase of El Salvador’s crackdown on gangs. The crackdown began in 2022 and has seen more than 80,000 people jailed on gang-related crimes. To process that volume of cases, the government has tweaked certain laws to allow authorities to prosecute up to 900 suspected gang members in a single trial, and those mass trials began last year.
Alex: [00:01:06] But recently, we’ve been talking about one specific mass trial that has grabbed the headlines and that is because these proceedings have now reached the highest levels of the gangs, including historic leaders who El Salvador prosecutors say masterminded a brutal civilian massacre that sparked the gang crackdown in the first place. So the kind of scale of these trials has caught a lot of attention. We’re talking about hundreds of alleged MS13 members being tried together for tens of thousands of crimes, facing sentences totaling tens of thousands of years, including one leader who is facing a request for between 15,000 and 20,000 years in prison. So really, we’re talking about kind of absurd numbers. But I mean, what this is all about really is that these trials essentially amount to a very kind of draconian legal shortcut aimed at reducing an immense backlog of cases generated by the government crackdown on the gangs while also heaping these giant sentences on gang leaders.
Deborah: [00:02:26] Right, and as you say, those sentences are kind of, you know, ridiculous in a way. I mean, what are the legal implications of asking for thousands of years in prison for a single person? Like, what’s the point? Are these trials actually about implementing those sentences and accountability, or are they just designed to sort of create this theater to display the government’s victory over the gangs?
Alex: [00:02:55] Well, I think the government—and probably a lot of Salvadorans—would argue that this is about setting the record straight and having the gangs pay for decades of violence and extortion perpetrated against ordinary people. On the other hand, critics, and there have been many critics of these trials, would argue that the state has essentially abandoned due process. So, you know, really the larger and more collective these trials become, the harder it will be to determine individual responsibility for each alleged crime. We saw during the early days of the crackdown that tens of thousands of people were swept up in arrests without necessarily having clear evidence against them. So there is a risk that this kind of model of collective justice will convict people for crimes committed by other people or that perhaps weren’t committed at all. In terms of strategic implications, I think this is really part of a strategy, a government strategy aimed at keeping people in jail in the long term and therefore minimizing the chance that there will be a kind of gang resurgence on the street. That has been a looming question throughout this campaign against the gangs that, you know, what would happen if those detained were to trickle back onto the streets? And the mass trials, I think, are aimed at slamming the door shut on that possibility.
Deborah: [00:04:41] Right. I mean, you know, both you and I have spent time in El Salvador, and we have seen something over the last couple of years, which, you know, if you’d asked me three or four years ago, I’d have said wasn’t possible, which is that, you know, Bukele’s government has largely dismantled many of the MS13 networks, and the ranfla leaders were likely going to spend the rest of their lives in prison regardless of this. So, you know, in that sense, are they going to make a practical difference to what was to come? Or is it beyond that?
Alex: [00:05:23] Yeah, I mean, the practical goal that I can see is, you know, keeping people in jail in the long term, you know, preventing some kind of gang resurgence. But I think more than that, this is also an exercise in controlling the narrative. So as you point out, this achievement, let’s say, of dismantling the gangs has been central to Bukele’s domestic and international image. He remains immensely popular in El Salvador and can kind of, in large part, thanks to this claim that he succeeded where previous governments have failed. The mass trials, I think, reinforce that narrative and also show that, you know, his government is now delivering some kind of justice against those responsible for these kinds of brutal crimes.
Alex: [00:06:19] In parallel, this also provides the government with a pathway to legitimizing some of the kind of contentious detentions during the initial phases of the crackdown. There were thousands of arrests that were criticized for their often arbitrary nature and the lack of a lack of evidence. But in practical terms, this is going to make little difference, I think, to the fortunes of the gangs. As you say, they were already kind of dismantled prior to the start of the mass trials. Many of the leaders were never going to get out of jail. So I think, yeah, mostly what we’re talking about is mostly kind of a symbolic exercise in just reasserting the government’s dominance over the gangs.
Deborah: [00:07:15] And what were the implications of resolving, you know, tens of thousands of crimes in a single trial? Right? This is kind of macro justice at its most macro, but does it really deliver a meaningful justice while respecting due process?
Alex: [00:07:37] I think that these trials can be best understood as an extension of a security strategy that has consistently prioritized collective punishment over individual due process. So in the same way that El Salvador’s authorities used emergency legal powers to enable mass arrests, the trials are now providing a means of reaching convictions without having to build individual cases against defendants. So they may argue that this is kind of a necessary step to deal with the kind of immense backlog. But really the result is a system that by default fails to adequately assess whether an individual defendant is responsible for a certain crime and fails to give them a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves. So, I think more than representing a new model of justice, this is really the culmination of a process that has steadily subordinated individual rights to facilitate the government’s broader objective of subduing the gangs.
Deborah: [00:08:54] Right. But despite that, and, you know, all of the human rights questions really around the crackdown that we’ve seen, it has become quite iconic in the region, and we’ve seen other governments sort of admiring Bukele from afar and promising to build bigger, better prisons and more of them based on the idea of following his lead. We’ve seen admiration from Ecuador and Milei in Argentina. Honduras has been trying repeatedly to use the state of exceptions that Bukele has used without much success. Even in Colombia, we potentially have a right-wing president coming in, who has also spoken admirably about Bukele’s record in El Salvador. Do you think any of these countries could follow his example?
Alex: [00:09:53] Yeah, I think some governments would certainly like to. We have seen a lot of interest from governments across Latin America, particularly from countries facing rising violence, who have been looking closely at El Salvador’s experience, looking closely at Bukele’s popularity, and saying, you know, hey, maybe we can implement something similar here. Ecuador is a good example of where they’ve really kind of tried to adopt a security model inspired by El Salvador’s approach. And so within these kind of hardline crackdowns, I think the mass trials fit nicely in the sense that you have this very highly visible demonstration of state action against organized crime. This kind of very punitive model appeals to an electorate perhaps wary of criminal persecution. The issue is that El Salvador’s model rests on a set of conditions that may not exist in other countries in the region. The political system in Salvador is highly centralized around Bukele. The judiciary has shown a very high degree of deference to the executive branch, which has allowed the government to enact some controversial legal tweaks that may not be feasible or accepted in other countries.
Alex: [00:11:31] So that’s one potential roadblock. There’s also an important difference, I think, between El Salvador’s gangs and other forms of organized crime. The MS13 and Barrio 18, the two main gangs in El Salvador, have long been known entities to Salvadoran authorities. They mainly operate in urban areas. El Salvador is a small country, so the presence is within a reasonable geographic space. If you try to apply that model to a country like Ecuador, a country like Colombia, where the criminal ecosystem is far more fragmented and the groups are spread out across a far broader area, particularly in rural areas that are harder to navigate for authorities, then it becomes a very different story. I think what we may see is governments kind of borrowing elements of Bukele’s strategy, be it narrative elements or practical elements, but finding themselves maybe lacking the legal and political tools to kind of implement them fully.
Deborah: [00:12:46] Yeah. It’s hard to imagine what putting 2% of the population in prisson looks like in big countries like Colombia and Argentina compared to El Salvador. But as you say, it is something that’s being discussed. And I think we’re just going to have to see what pans out. We have a piece coming up about the sort of growth of mega prisons in the region and how that has been inspired very much by Bukele. But thanks for joining me, Alex.
Deborah [00:13:16] You’ve just watched The Insight Take, a weekly video chat analysis on the biggest crime stories in Latin America. You can find it directly on the website, in the multimedia section, or on YouTube and Spotify. And if you have a story or a subject that you’d like us to take apart, then please reach out to me at Dbonello@InSightCrime.org. We’ll be back with another InSight Take next week. Bye for now.