El Salvador crackdown

God-embracing ex-convicts targeted

For Nelson Moz, an affable gangland preacher from El Salvador’s violencescarred capital, it should have been a day to rejoice. “It’s an honour to be the pastor here – it’s a privilege!” the church leader told worshippers as they filled the Ebenezer Baptist church one Sunday morning last month to celebrate the denomination’s 35th birthday.

But Moz’s mood was sombre, despite the white streamers and balloons with which his temple was festooned and the jubilant slogan behind his rust-eaten lectern proclaiming “Jesus the King”.

The congregation was smaller than usual, too, after security forces had raided the church a few days earlier to capture the ex-gangsters to whom it had offered sanctuary and hope. “They took all of them,” sighed the 60-year-old evangelist, who has spent more than a decade fighting to save the lives and souls of some of El Salvador’s most violent men in the gang stronghold of Colonia Dina.

Moz was bewildered that police had targeted his church’s rehab centre as part of a huge crackdown that El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, ordered in late March. The crackdown came after an explosion of bloodshed that many suspect was the result of the collapse of a secret pact between the government and the gangs.

“Our project wasn’t underground or anything,” said the pastor as he stood outside a small bakery next to his church, where Godembracing ex-convicts were taught to make bread, not gang war. “The condition for being allowed to stay at a place like ours is that first … you’ve served your time,” Moz said.

“We don’t accept anyone who’s still actively involved in the gangs. The requirement for being here is having … given up violence.”

Yet that was not enough to save Moz’s flock from a clampdown that has seen more than 43,000 Salvadorans dragged into custody in the past three months – a security blitz with few parallels in Latin America’s recent history.

Bukele’s “state of exception” – declared at the end of March and extended until late July – has outraged activists who say that massive human rights violations are being committed.

“They have detained tens of thousands of people, many because of their physical appearance or because they have tattoos,” said Tamara Taraciuk Broner, the acting director of Human Rights Watch in the Americas. “This could happen to [anyone].”

Exhausted with tears of gang violence, many Salvadorians see little extreme about Bukele’s crusade, which the president compares to chemotherapy, insisting he will continue until “the cancer” of crime is eradicated.

"He doesn't just say things with his mouth, he gets them done. He is guided by the hand of God,” enthused Gilberto Orellana Mena, a 45-year-old preacher who attended a recent rally in San Salvador.

“Nothing happens to those who are obeying the law,” Orellana said of his leader’s crackdown, batting away fears that innocent people were being ensnared.

Outside the prisons – into which thousands of mostly young, impoverished men are vanishing – panicked relatives beg to differ. More than 50 prisoners have reportedly died in mysterious circumstances after being arrested on the vague charge of “unlawful assembly”.

“Each day is agony,” said Marina Lemus de Arce, 50, weeping as she described how her son, Wilber Alexander, was carted off to Mariona prison. Since then, Lemus has slept under a tree outside its gates while she waits for news.

“We’re all human beings. There’s no reason to treat us like this,” she sobbed, voicing disenchantment at Bukele’s actions. “He promised so many things – and he hasn’t fulfilled them,” Lemus said.

Moz responded to the crackdown with a message of comfort and hope for worshippers, quoting Corinthians: “We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”