President Nayib Bukele requested El Salvador’s congress on Sunday to increase an anti-gang emergency decree for one more 30 days.
Bukele has used the emergency powers to spherical up about 16,000 suspected gang members, following a spate of murders in March.
Rights teams have criticized the measures, saying arrests are sometimes arbitrary, primarily based on an individual’s look or the place they dwell.
The unique 30-day state of emergency authorized in late March restricts the fitting to assemble, to be told of rights and have entry to a lawyer. It extends to fifteen days the time that somebody may be held with out fees.
It got here after a spate of killings in late March, when gangs had been blamed for 62 killings in a single weekend, a stage of violence the nation of 6.5 million has not seen in years.
Bukele has additionally established a raft of different measures.
Amongst different issues, they lengthened sentences and decreased the age of legal duty to 12.
El Salvador’s congress has approved jail sentences of 10 to fifteen years for information media that reproduce or disseminate messages from the gangs, alarming press freedom teams.
Gang members held at Salvadoran prisons have been placed on decreased meals rations, denied mattresses and frog-marched round.
Rights teams have expressed issues that harmless persons are being caught up in sweeps concentrating on the infamous violent avenue gangs.
Gangs management swaths of territory by brutality and concern. They've pushed hundreds to to migrate to avoid wasting their very own lives or the lives of their kids who're forcibly recruited. Their energy is strongest in El Salvador’s poorest neighborhoods the place the state has lengthy been absent. They're a drain on the financial system, extorting cash from even the bottom earners and forcing companies that may’t or received’t pay to shut.
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