The coordinator for the implementation of phase six of President Bukele’s Security plan, called “integration”, Alejandro Gutman, is of the opinion that the reintegration of young gang members in El Salvador is possible, “in some cases.”
“In those that already have a very marked history, it is very difficult” because “they also have very long sentences,” said the Argentine in an interview with journalists in the city of Madrid, where he referred to El Salvador as “a country that decides “penalize gang members for the acts committed.”
However, he added that “there are others who surely had smaller participations” and could have “that opportunity to, over time, leave” the prisons.
The State must “accompany them.” “It is important to work with them, with those who can,” said Gutman, in the face of criticism that international organizations make of President Najib Bukele’s security strategy based on an emergency regime.
The Legislative Assembly, under government control, extended last week for the twenty-fifth time, without even discussing it, the emergency regime that suspends constitutional guarantees, a measure that, according to official data, has already left close to 80 thousand arrests of people accused by the authorities of being gang members or collaborators of the so-called ‘maras’.
Humanitarian organizations have received more than 6,000 complaints of human rights violations, mainly due to arbitrary detentions and torture, when the deaths of detainees in state custody exceed two hundred.
«The young people who have had the greatest involvement have to rethink life from the places they live in (prisons), there are ways of life that they have chosen in some way or that they have had no choice but to choose and they have deepened their behavior “They will have to pay the consequences of that choice,” he said.
The young prisoners were marked by poverty and thus became a “breeding ground” for violence and the “disintegration of the country,” he explained.
«There were very notorious forms of violence in recent decades, the Civil War (1979-1992), then the gang phenomenon, what form of violence would be next?, he asked.
Regarding the criticism of human rights violations against the Bukele administration for its plan against violence, the Argentine summarizes that the reality of the country is “very difficult to understand.”