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SALVADOR: Clandestine Graves Are Back
By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR (IPS) - Spatula in hand,
forensic scientist Israel Ticas carefully
excavates a decomposed human foot protruding
from a shallow grave in rough terrain in the
mountains of Las Crucitas, close to Ciudad
Arce in the west-central Salvadoran province
of La Libertad.
Other body parts, already identified by the
expert, give him some idea of what kind of
person lies buried here in bushy thickets
between plots of farmland planted with
coffee and beans.
The body is that of a young man under 20,
who at the moment of death was decapitated
and dismembered: his head, feet and arms
were severed from his trunk.
These are probably the remains of a person
reported missing to the authorities in
mid-October, who lived in the El Bosque
shanty town in Ciudad Arce. Although the
investigation has just begun, everything
points to one of El Salvador's notorious "maras"
or youth gangs.
The main gangs in El Salvador are Mara
Salvatrucha and Mara 18 (18th Street Gang),
and they are sworn enemies. Drug mafias,
maras and death squads are all waging
undercover wars in this country of 5.7
million people.
"This young man was murdered about a month
ago. There's probably another body, about 15
metres away, because we have found more
bones there," Ticas tells IPS.
Ticas, a forensic expert for the Attorney
General's Office (Fiscalía General de la
República or FGR), is in charge of finding
and unearthing remains in clandestine burial
grounds, an activity that triggers
flashbacks to the 1980-1992 civil war.
Some 75,000 people were killed in the armed
conflict, most of them by paramilitary death
squads and the army, which was fighting the
then guerrilla Farabundo Martí National
Liberation Front (FMLN), which is now the
governing party.
FGR statistics indicate that between January
and September this year, 80 bodies have been
found spread around the country in 18
clandestine cemeteries and two wells, a
method of disappearance used during the
armed conflict by the fearsome death squads
and army units who executed alleged
left-wingers, although they also frequently
left the bodies of their victims in public
view by the roadsides.
Now clandestine burials are re-emerging in
peacetime.
"Criminals try to evade justice for the
crimes they commit, and the easiest way is
to get rid of the body. Without a body, we
can't pin the murder on anyone," an FGR
prosecutor who did not give his name told
IPS.
The murder rate in El Salvador, at 52 per
100,000 population, is one of the highest in
the world, and the new leftist FMLN
government is under pressure to take
vigorous action against the crime wave and
produce results, in spite of only having
taken office on Jun. 1.
An Oct. 22 study by the University Institute
of Public Opinion (IUDOP) says that more
than half the people interviewed are afraid
of becoming a prey to violence. Another 16
percent say they have been the victim of
crime of some sort in the last 12 months,
one percentage point higher than was found
in a similar poll in 2006.
National Civil Police (PNC) records show
that 80 percent of murders are committed
with firearms, in a country where half a
million weapons are unregistered and are
freely traded on the black market.
The spate of homicides and other crimes over
the last several years is reminiscent of
situations that have not been seen since the
days of the internal armed conflict.
As well as clandestine burial grounds and "pozos
macabros" (grisly wells) as the local press
calls them, the practice of forced
disappearance, so common during the years of
political violence, has reappeared.
The Truth Commission that was set up in El
Salvador after the end of the civil war
reported that some 8,000 people were
forcibly disappeared for political reasons.
It was a method commonly used by government
forces at that time, copied from the
dictatorships that held sway in the southern
cone of South America in the 1970s and
1980s.
Now the motives are no longer political, but
the result of the whirlwind of violent crime
sweeping the country. The PNC reports that
between January 2007 and June 2009, 1,272
people have been disappeared.
Some television newscasts give out
information about missing persons, such as
telephone numbers relatives of the
disappeared can call to get clues to where
they can be found. They are usually found
dead.
The local daily El Diario de Hoy reported
Oct. 12 the cases of three disappeared
teenagers, among them 17-year-old Kevin
Antonio Rivera. His father told the
newspaper that his son was intercepted by a
group of gang members on Aug. 14 in San
Martín, 18 kilometres east of San Salvador,
and has not been seen since.
Many Salvadorans are even calling for the
return of curfews, normally only imposed by
military regimes to control the movements of
the population.
On Oct. 15, supposed gang members sent email
messages to several media outlets warning
that they would step up criminal actions
against the population in response to a plan
- not yet implemented - by the government of
President Mauricio Funes to send military
troops on to the streets to reinforce public
security.
That day, many businesses in the Salvadoran
capital closed their doors early, and some
schools in the provinces where the crime
wave is worst, such as in Lourdes, in La
Libertad, closed completely, turning their
students away.
"The people of this country suffered during
the civil war and now, in peacetime, we are
again seeing kidnapping, extortion,
executions, disappearances, fear, and calls
for curfews," Miguel Montenegro, head of the
non-governmental Human Rights Commission of
El Salvador (CDHES) which played a major
role in denouncing detentions and forced
disappearances during the armed conflict,
told IPS.
"The question is, why, so many years after
the end of the war in 1992, are situations
that were common during the conflict
happening again?" he asked.
Montenegro says the high levels of crime in
El Salvador are a direct consequence of the
apathy and wrong-headed strategies with
which the rightwing National Republican
Alliance (ARENA), in power for the past 20
years, tackled the issue. ARENA lost the
presidential elections in March and was
replaced by the first left-wing government
in the country's history.
The neoliberal free-market policies espoused
by ARENA made the rich wealthier, but
further impoverished the rest of the
population, and young people found
themselves without any opportunities or
prospects to better themselves and escape
the vicious circle of violence, Montenegro
says.
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