Cost of calm Gangs may be gone but human rights under threat

War on criminals by populist leader Nayib Bukele produces dramatic change, but 'cure could be as harmful as disease'

- Jaime Quintanillas

To visit her father in the Sal-vadorian community of El Pepeto, Karla García used to run a fearsome gauntlet of gangs and guns.

The two streets separating their homes were a bullet-pocked no man’s land where members of the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18-Sureños groups fought deadly battles for control.

“It was really dangerous. They’d have shootouts just outside,” said the 40-year-old from Soyapango, a satellite city east of El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador.

Yet on a recent Saturday afternoon, García sat in front of her father’s greenhouse with her family and there was not a criminal to be seen, nor a gunshot to be heard.

“They’ve completely vanished,” she said of the street gangs who for years ruled the area with an iron fist. Nearby walls – once spattered with the black insignia of the crime bosses – had been painted white by the government to symboli se a new era of peace.

El Pepeto, a working class warren of single-storey homes, is far from the only mara-dominated neighbourhood in El Salvador to be experiencing once unthinkable days of calm.

After a highly controversial yearlong “war” against El Salvador’s notorious gangs waged by the country’s populist leader Nayib Bukele, similar scenes are playing out across a Central American country once considered one of the most violent places on Earth .

Even staunch government critics such as the trailblazing news outlet El Faro have conceded that Bukele’s crackdown – which has seen more than 64,000 people jailed and slashed the murder rate – has produced “extraordinary change” for Salvadorians .