The controversial measures carried out by Nayib Bukele in El Salvador since he was elected president are applauded by many and criticized by many others. The ruler justified this Sunday that due to these measures, labeled as repressive by many humanitarian organizations, 1.5% of the population of his country is incarcerated, in exchange for having reduced gang violence, reports Afp.
More than 100,000 Salvadorans are in prison, making El Salvador the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, according to human rights organizations, as part of the "war" that Bukele initiated against the gangs in March 2022.
"People complain that we had to put 1.5% of our population in prison," Bukele wrote on the social network X alongside an image of Thanos, a supervillain from the Marvel universe, saying: "we have reduced crime by 98%." "By the way, more than half of them (the prisoners) are in rehabilitation and will be released in a couple of years," the president assured.
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), El Salvador has around 108,000 people incarcerated, an "alarming 1.7% of the country's population." Meanwhile, the director of the Salvadoran NGO Cristosal, Noah Bullock, recently stated that it is between 110,000 and 120,000.
As the spearhead of his anti-gang offensive, Bukele imposed a state of emergency that allows arrests without a judicial order, under which about 87,000 people accused of being part of these gangs or collaborators have been detained, according to government data.
Of them, about 8,000 innocent individuals were released, according to Bukele, but human rights groups claim that they are still under process, that there are still thousands of innocent people behind bars, and they denounce torture and deaths in prison.
Bukele argues that gangs killed about 200,000 people in three decades, and that with his security policy, homicides, which reached 106 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, dropped to 1.9 in 2024.