Soldiers and police cordon off the El Salvador neighborhood in search of gang members

More than 2,000 soldiers and 500 police officers surrounded a densely populated neighborhood on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital on Monday in an attempt to destroy the remnants of gangs the president said were trying to operate in the area.

“There is a group of gang members in hiding. We have installed a security fence throughout the neighborhood… to round up every last gang member in the area,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele wrote in a post on X.

Police surrounded the San Marcos neighborhood with a military fence and set up checkpoints to prevent gang members from escaping, Defense Minister René Francis Merino Monroy said.

The fence was the third of its kind installed in parts of San Salvador, intended to track and arrest gang members still active in the country. In March, Bukele ordered similar barricades to be erected in the north of the country, which he said were intended to dismantle a faction of the Barrio 18 gang.

The blockade is the latest in the populist leader’s war against gangs, announced by Bukele after a wave of violence in March 2022.

The crackdown has fueled criticism of human rights

Bukele’s government called for a “state of emergency” and waived the constitutional right to arrest more than one percent of El Salvador’s population without sufficient evidence. The crackdown has drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups, raising alarm over prison conditions and saying many of those arrested were innocent or had only loose ties to gangs.

Other steps he has taken — such as seeking re-election despite a constitutional ban on presidents serving two consecutive terms — have set off democracy-related alarms.

But the war on gangs has also dealt a heavy blow to the Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangs, which have long sown terror in much of the country, extorting money, killing those who didn’t pay and drugs traded.

The measures resulted in a sharp drop in the number of murders and stimulated populist enthusiasm for Bukele.

Despite effectively declaring victory in his war, the president has continued to extend the “state of emergency” for more than two years now, claiming such measures are necessary to eliminate the remnants of El Salvador’s gangs.