In a dense forest in the municipality of Colón, 20 kilometers west of San Salvador, 44 victims of the violence committed by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs have been found in mass graves.
The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) and the Elite Organized Crime Division (DECO) of the National Civil Police (PNC) began their search in mid-November, using undercover work through which they determined the victims were killed by gangs.
By early December, prosecutors and Institute of Legal Medicine (IML) forensic experts had started removing the mutilated, half-naked, bullet-ridden bodies stacked in graves within a 200-square-meter area.
“They managed to find 14 mass graves containing the victims’ remains,” said Rodolfo Delgado, head of the FGR’s Specialized Organized Crime Unit. “The bodies were inside plastic bags, dismembered. Some of them were incomplete.”
The El Limón estate, where the bodies were found, is the largest clandestine cemetery attributed to gangs to date. The PNC has detained four Barrio 18 members who allegedly had some personal belongings from three of the victims in their possession.
While authorities assemble the pieces of this puzzle, apprehension and fear are in the air in the neighborhoods surrounding the El Limón estate.
In the neighborhoods of Villa Lourdes and Nuevo Lourdes, the gangs leave their mark on the walls of the poorest homes. Some residents have missing family members, and the thought they may be buried at the estate is constantly on their minds.
Eduardo Pérez Sánchez, a 30-year-old agricultural worker from the Lourdes canton, has hoped every night since December 2009 that his brother, Manuel Antonio, would finally come home.
“We haven’t heard anything about him since then,” he said. “People can’t tell us much and we’ve looked high and low. We don’t have any ties with gang members, nor did he. We’ve gone to see whether he was in the cemetery at the estate, but they still haven’t identified all of the bodies, so we have to wait.”
The IML is working to identify the bodies that have been exhumed.
“We’re taking DNA samples from potential family members,” IML Director Miguel Fortín said. “If a body is not identified, its DNA will be stored in a special bag. The body will be sent to a general grave and can be removed if family members are identified.”
Dozens of people roam the corridors of the morgue. They hang photographs of their family members and leave their contact information, hoping to find a clue of their whereabouts.
“I came to leave my sister’s picture. She disappeared in August of last year,” said Julia Elena Cabrera, a 30-year-old seamstress who works in an export manufacturing plant in the municipality of Antiguo Cuscatlán. “We haven’t heard any news about her and now that they’ve found this cemetery in Lourdes, we’re afraid that she’ll be found there. If we find her, it would at least put an end to our anguish and we would give her a proper burial.”
The horrifying scene shows gang members have continued to murder despite the gang truce of March 2012, authorities said.
“The truce doesn’t exist. In reality, there hasn’t been any kind of truce,” Delgado said. “Salvadorans continue to die and their bodies are being hidden. [This discovery] is objective evidence that gangs never abandoned their criminal activity.”
The IML reported 2,284 homicides between January and November 2013 compared to 2,426 deaths during the same period in 2012. In November of this year alone, there were 256 murders, an average of 8.5 a day. In November 2012, 177 people died, 5.9 per day.
Israel Ticas, an FGR forensic investigator, said the clandestine cemetery shows the gangs are changing their methods for burying their victims.
“Now they’re using ravines, inaccessible places, rugged terrain and cliffs,” he said. “They make improvised graves out of wood or bamboo.”
Justice and Security Minister Ricardo Perdomo said the PNC is working to dismantle the gangs.
“It isn’t enough to generalize that gang members have taken control of certain parts of El Salvador,” Perdomo said. “The population has to report this information so the PNC can take immediate steps and crack down on those who break the law. We want to send a message to these criminals: We will step up our enforcement against them.”
Wednesday 01 January 2014
http://infosurhoy.com/en_GB/articles/saii/features/main/2013/12/31/feature-01
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