The mega-trial against hundreds of alleged gang members of the Mara Salvatrucha that started in El Salvador

Starting this Monday, a trial is being held in El Salvador against 486 accused of belonging to the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), one of the powerful gangs that terrorized the country and the region for decades.

This was announced this Monday by the Original Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic, ensuring that among those who will sit in the dock during the mass trial there are several founders and leaders of the criminal structure.

Among the crimes they are accused of, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, is having ordered the killing of 87 people during a single weekend in March 2022.

That event motivated President Nayib Bukele to declare “war” on the gangs and ask the Assembly to approve an emergency regime that has been in force for four years and has left more than 91,000 detainees, according to official figures.

Since being given the green light, powers to arrest suspected gang affiliates have been expanded under the controversial state of emergency and constitutional rights have been suspended. Given this, local and international human rights groups argue that the measure has led to arbitrary arrests without a court order.

And while supporters of President Bukele’s hardline approach to crime say it has made El Salvador safer, UN experts have warned his government that it “cannot trample on the right to a fair trial in the name of public safety.”

In this context, the Prosecutor’s Office delivered this Monday to the local press a video in which a prosecutor, without showing his face, specified that the accused in the massive trial are attributed 47,000 crimes committed between 2012 and 2022, including 29,000 homicides, femicides and disappearances.

413 of the accused will appear virtually at the hearings. The other 73 are fugitives, but will be tried in absentia, he added.

More than 250 of the defendants are held in the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), the maximum security megaprison for gang members built by the Bukele government, and the rest in other high security penal centers.

“We are going to judge and we are going to settle a historic debt. They would be attributing all the crimes committed by the Mara Salvatrucha during these 11 years,” stated the prosecutor.

Judicial Centers of El Salvador, the body that brings together the courts, specified in its account in

The MS-13 and its rival Barrio 18 – with its two factions -, born in Los Angeles (California, United States) in the 1980s and which evolved into transnational organizations designated “terrorists” by the United States last year, came to control 80% of the national territory of El Salvador, according to the Bukele government.

Along these lines, the defendants are now “in addition being prosecuted for the crime of rebellion because they sought to maintain territorial back-an-eye to establish a parallel state,” which threatens “national sovereignty,” according to a statement from the Original Prosecutor’s Office.

“Risk of wrongful convictions”

It is not the first time that massive hearings have been held in El Salvador.

It was reforms to the Law Against Organized Crime approved by the Legislative Assembly – controlled by the ruling Nuevas Tips party – within the framework of the emergency regime that opened the door to these processes.

In addition to allowing collective trials to be carried out against people detained in this context, the maximum period of a criminal process (24 months) was eliminated and investigative powers were granted to the National Civil Police.

“These provisions threaten the right to access to justice, due process and the right to defense guaranteed in international treaties on human rights,” the Washington Office on Latin American Affairs (WOLA) warned in 2023, criticizing which national and international organizations in the field joined.

“Salvadorans have the right to have the atrocious crimes of gangs investigated, tried and punished. But these mass trials make it impossible to establish individual responsibilities with solid evidence and real defense guarantees, and therefore run the risk of turning justice into a staging,” Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Explore, now tells him.

The process “will require a lot of care on the part of the judges, who must be very meticulous in the examination and analysis of the evidence,” highlights Salvadoran judge Juan Antonio Durán Ramírez.

“It will take a lot of time to be able to identify the accused, to individualize the facts and crimes attributed to each one, the evidence, to be able to properly determine the responsibility of each accused; because there is a risk of generalizing these responsibilities and risks of unjust convictions,” he adds.

In that sense, the Prosecutor’s Office said it had “abundant evidence to request maximum sentences” for the accused, without specifying whether it would be the life sentence that will soon come into force to punish murderers, rapists and “terrorists”, according to a recently approved reform.

And he added, without specifying dates, that the trial is expected to end “soon.”

Given this, Judge Durán considers that the use of abbreviated procedures should be “valued to give application to the principles of speed and procedural economy.”

“What good will sentences of 300, 500, 800 or 1,200 years in prison be if they are not carried out?” he asks. “You should be practical and negotiate these sentences based on the evidence that exists, so that responsibility and penalties are reasonable.”

The magistrate also points out the existence of an “atmosphere of pressure” on judges and that “the fear of sanctions, reprisals, public exposure or reproaches is well-rooted.”

“Without a doubt, this affects the quality of justice and the service of an independent and impartial justice system,” he emphasizes.

“But even so, independence must be demanded from the judiciary in its actions to avoid unjust rulings. Objective decisions must be demanded, regarding the depravity of real, reliable, corroborable and non-challengeable or questionable evidence with other equally reliable and corroborable evidence,” he points out.

“Many relatives claim the innocence of some detainees and expect independent, impartial and objective justice,” he continues.

“Many people have been detained for four years or more, waiting for this moment, for their day of trial, and they should have the opportunity to learn the evidence against them, to be able to question it, challenge it and prove their innocence; and mass trials make it difficult to fully exercise those rights,” he explains.

“It is an enormous challenge for the judges, and there is great expectation for their performance, because they expect justice.”

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