In a message on social networks, the president noted that: “Almost all governments in the world are between 10 and 1000 times stronger than all their criminals combined. The reason they don’t put an end to crime is because they are in collusion with it, or because they benefit from it. You choose the reason,” he said in a message on the social network Twitter.

The target of frequent criticism for the way in which his government confronted the evil of gang crime by putting behind bars more than 71,500 alleged members of the so-called maras, the Salvadoran president made, in this field, his main work tool for his predictable victory in the 2024 elections in which he hopes to be reelected.

It is incomprehensible that governments with the power to act, and the resources, fail to eradicate criminal groups or fight them head-on, he said.

In El Salvador, after the failures of approaches and dialogues with criminal groups, the government intensified the application of the Territorial Control Plan, which was accompanied by the exception regime still in force, to strike hard blows and dismantle criminal groups, whose members are imprisoned, hiding or escaped from the country.

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