El Salvador is putting hundreds of suspected gang members on trial at once in one of the largest mass prosecutions under President Nayib Bukele. Reuters reports that a court on Tuesday opened proceedings against 486 individuals accused of belonging to the MS-13 gang, with prosecutors tying them to more than 47,000 crimes over a decade, including a particularly deadly weekend that ranks among the country’s worst violence since its civil war. Charges range from homicide and femicide to arms trafficking and extortion. The case unfolds under a state of emergency first declared in 2022, which has enabled the arrest of more than 91,500 people and a new law allowing collective trials.
Human rights organizations, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, say the system erodes due-process protections by limiting access to lawyers, suspending rights to a legal defense, and lengthening detentions. “These mass trials … increase the risk of convicting innocent people who have nothing to do with the gangs that have terrorized the country for decades,” Juan Pappier of Human Rights Watch says in a statement, per the AP, which adds Bukele has acknowledged that around 8,000 innocent people have been arrested under the state of emergency but have since been freed.
Defendants are spread across five prisons, including the high-security CECOT facility emblematic of Bukele’s hard-line strategy, which his government credits with cutting the homicide rate to 1.3 per 100,000 people last year, per Reuters. In 2022, that number was at 7.8 per 100,000. The AP notes that 75 of the defendants are being prosecuted in absentia, according to the nation’s attorney general, whose office claims it has “compelling” evidence against the suspects, per the BBC. Prosecutors are seeking maximum sentences that could total up to 245 years for a single defendant, notes the Times.