Tears welled in Alex’s eyes and he pressed his head into his hands as he thought about more than a year of birthdays and holidays without his mother, who was swept up by El Salvador’s police as she walked to work in a clothing factory.
“I feel very alone,” the 10-year-old said last month as he sat next to his 8-year-old brother and their grandmother. “I’m scared, feeling like they could come and they could take away someone else in my family.”
Forty thousand children have seen one parent or both detained in President Nayib Bukele’s nearly two-year war on El Salvador’s gangs, according to the national social services agency.
The records were shared with The Associated Press by an official with the National Council on Children and Adolescents, who insisted on anonymity due to fear of government reprisal against those violating its tight control of information. The official said many more children have jailed parents but are not in the records.
It’s really hard to pass judgement when the safety and stability of the society has improved so drastically in such a short time.
Of course innocents will have gotten caught up, but this isn’t a situation like in the US of police over-enforcing crime statues on certain minorities. The entire country was a puppet state of extremely violent gangs. People have fled by the tens of millions.
If the left wing politicians didn’t want a right winger seizing all this power, they could have done something too but they let themselves be corrupted by the gangs, so someone else had to do it.
What I haven’t heard more information on is why this guy in particular has been able to withstand all the gang influence and corruption during his rise to power, when other politicians who started off well-meaning could not.