The block outside San Salvador’s Policía Nacional Civil station, the federal police, is cordoned off. A yellow school bus with a shattered back window rests in the middle of the street, and officers in balaclavas stand guard in front of the station’s entrance, where a crowd has gathered.
A teary woman in an apron approaches one of the officers.
“He didn’t do anything!” she pleads, mascara smudged beneath her lower lids.
“Señora, we’re just searching them,” the officer replies gruffly, a machine gun gripped between both hands.
“You have to let him go, he didn’t do anything, please, you have to let me see him!”
The crowd behind her begins to murmur. She takes a step toward the guard.
“¡Señora!” he shouts. “Please step away!” He takes a heavy pace in her direction. Her cries only build as he marches her to the block’s perimeter.
“¡Por favor!” he shouts, and the crowd retreats a few shuffle-steps more.
Inside the station, a group of twelve or so shirtless young men kneel facing the wall as an armed guard walks back and forth behind them. Most of them look like they could be high school students. They are silent and still, hands behind their heads. The only motion in the shadowy, cement-floored garage is the pacing guard and the beads of sweat that drip down the young men’s backs.
“They were using that bus to extort money from people,” a police officer explains, nodding to the bus with his chin. In recent years, Salvadoran individuals and businesses, from market vendors to pupusa shops to hotels, have paid an estimated $756 million in renta—about 3 percent of the country’s GDP. The increments are often small—$20, $50, $200 every two weeks—paid for protection from the very people who collect it. And still most gangsters remain small-time, barely eking out a living. (“El Salvador has been brought to its knees by an army of flies.”)
These kneeling boys are evidence of a Salvadoran law called agrupación ilícita, or illicit congregation. It allows law enforcement to arrest anyone who looks suspicious, which often means youth dressed stylishly and hanging out together in public spaces. In the flailing war on gangs, guilt is often presumed.
These efforts are part of an Iron Fist campaign, the third incarnation in El Salvador since 2003, and a reaction, in part, to the failed truce of 2012, which began to unravel in 2014. Police patrols are on the rise, and several illicit killings of suspected gang members—extrajudicial massacres that smack of the death squad atrocities of the civil war years—have been exposed by dogged local press, who risk retribution from both the police and the gangs. A Salvadoran young person risks becoming a target on both sides of the law.
The violence has increased over the years, and the sheer number of gang members seems to be growing, too, though it’s complicated to count. In 2013, a thorough but unscientific study by the Salvadoran government estimated that, including loved ones, family members, and other close associations, there were 470,000 Salvadorans—more than 7 percent of the population—with direct ties to gangs.
El Salvador has nowhere to put all the suspected criminals. In 2015 prisons reached 310 percent of intended capacity; holding cells that were meant for temporary confinement are crammed with suspects like these young men, who can spend months and even years awaiting trial.
The officer claims they haven’t been arrested, yet here they are. Later in the day they will still be held in this garage—hands still behind their heads, same guard marching back and forth, same crowd outside, waiting.