El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly approved a law on Tuesday to expedite the construction of new prisons, El Salvador’s La Prensa Gráfica newspaper reported, noting the legislation aims to help accommodate some of the 13,573 alleged gang members arrested by police in the country over the past month as part of an unprecedented crime crackdown.
The “Special Law for the Construction of Penitentiary Centers” establishes a regulatory framework for the planning, design, and building of new penitentiary centers across El Salvador, with the prison locations yet to be determined. The legislation tasked El Salvador’s Ministry of Public Works with constructing the new penal centers and allowed it the possibility to establish “agreements with private companies for this purpose,” according to the Argentine news outlet Infobae.
“The prisons will be operated by the [Salvadoran] General Directorate of Penal Centers. The approved law does not establish a specific number of prisons to build, which will be added to the twenty prisons that already exist,” Infobae noted.
El Salvador’s government was spurred to construct new penitentiaries after the nation’s existing jails and prisons overflowed with nearly 14,000 new inmates within a record time span of just 24 days (from March 27 to April 20). The influx of new prisoners followed a crackdown on suspected criminal gang members by Salvadoran security forces starting in late March.
The Salvadoran government declared a month-long state of emergency on March 27 in response to an “excessive increase” in murders nationwide. Police across El Salvador documented 87 murders within a 72-hour period from March 24 to March 27. For comparison, Salvadoran authorities recorded 79 homicides nationwide for the entire month of February.
The government of El Salvador blamed the March murder spike largely on the nation’s powerful criminal gangs, including the transnational “la Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13).” Salvadoran security forces are thus using the ongoing state of emergency order to target MS-13 and other gang strongholds. El Salvador’s National Civil Police (PNC) arrested over 600 suspected gang members from March 25 to March 27 after raiding gang hideouts in and around San Salvador, El Salvador’s national capital.
The March 27 state of emergency order extended the duration of “administrative detention,” or the incarceration of a criminal suspect without trial or charge, from 72 hours to 15 days. This, coupled with the surge in new arrests of criminal gang suspects over the past month, has greatly contributed to El Salvador’s prison crisis.
The arrest of 13,573 suspected gang members from March 27 to April 20 across El Salvador was “unprecedented in the last 30 years in this Central American country besieged by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 [gangs],” Infobae observed on April 20. The news site estimated that El Salvador is home to as many as 70,000 criminal gang members.