8/2/2023 0 Comments Www oncue co za“We were terrified that if we made this public that it would make things worse but we had to do something. Potes and Castrillón were eventually freed in April after Potes’s partner, Claudia Marcela García, relentlessly lobbied for the pair’s release in the Colombian press. Potes and Castrillón say their heads were shaven, their clothes stripped and that guards fired teargas into their cells if they broke silence. “The government is trying to project the image that it is restoring order but in reality it is losing control and causing immense, irreversible social damage.”Īs El Salvador runs out of space to house inmates, prison conditions are growing increasingly dire. “What these Colombians are living, thousands of are going through,” said López. In another case a young lesbian woman was taken from her home by soldiers after she was reportedly denounced by taxi drivers who did not like her sexual orientation. On 9 May a fisherman from Isla El Espíritu Santo in the south of the country was released after a year in prison after authorities admitted he was wrongly imprisoned following an anonymous phone call. The pair say they saw countless other foreigners caught up in the crackdown, including Hondurans, Guatemalans and North Americans.Īs Bukele ramps up his attack on the gangs such tales are increasingly common. You simply need to be a young male,” said López. “You no longer need to have any link with the gangs to be locked up in El Salvador. The pair say they saw countless other foreigners caught up in the gang crackdown, including Hondurans, Guatemalans and North Americans. José Antonio Potes and his friend Manuel Castrillón on their way back to Colombia. Disgruntled neighbours, unhappy partners or rival businessmen can easily take advantage of the breakdown of due process. Under the state of emergency, no trial or charges are required to detain someone. The two men eventually spent a month in Ilopango and almost two more in equally hellish conditions at Jucuapa, where they shared a cell with no toilet – just a bucket – with 400 others. “It started really making sense then that they were just throwing innocent people in jail to show them off to the outside world,” he said. Outside the Ilopango prison where the two Colombians were held, Potes saw dozens of women asking for their children’s whereabouts, all saying they had nothing to do with the gangs. But human rights groups say thousands of innocent people are being caught up in the offensive. The Salvadorian government says it has jailed nearly 70,000 gang members – about 2% of the country’s population. Since then, the country has experienced a dramatic drop in violence.Įl Salvador has frequently ranked as the most murderous country in the world but on 11 May Bukele tweeted that it had not recorded a single homicide in a year. While countries across the region are struggling to control criminal violence, the Salvadorian strongman is credited with beating criminal organisations into submission and given glowing profiles in newspapers and magazines.Īfter taking office in 2019, Bukele first tried brokering a pact with gangs, allegedly promising to block extraditions in exchange for law and order, but when the deal broke down he declared a state of emergency in March 2022 – and dropped diplomacy for brute force. They say the officials paid particular attention to their tattoos – a hallmark of the country’s gangs. Shortly after they were detained by soldiers and asked for documents.Įight hours later they were taken to a jail, where they were questioned, strip-searched and photographed. On 21 January, the day after Potes flew out to join Castrillón, the two men met for lunch in Soyapango, a satellite town just outside the Salvadoran capital. “They went looking for paradise,” said Ruth Elonaro López, a lawyer at Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights group. But instead of benefiting from Bukele’s war on gangs, the pair were arrested and locked up in squalid prisons for three months. Together they set out to find work and send dollars home to their families. The two, both 27, come from the tiny town of Riofrío in Valle del Cauca, Colombia. Potes is a welder and Castrillon an expert in mechanised farming. “We’d heard about this transformation: that there were no more gangs, that things had gotten really safe and that there was an infrastructure boom because of all the investment,” said Castrillón.
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