El Salvador Gang Truce Expanded to Include Extortion (REPORT)

(Video Al Jazeera)

Opinion by Tatiana Faramarzi

El Salvador’s involvement in a truce between the country’s two major street gangs has grown, with the government now pursuing a reduction in gang extortion in addition to homicides.

Although the daily homicide rate has declined sharply since 30 leaders of the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs were transported to a more relaxed prison facility in March, reports of extortion have continued and even risen in some departments, according to the country's Attorney General.

Transportation unions in particular have reported an increase in the monetary losses incurred by gang extortions.

(PHOTO: Tico Times) Straying from prior denials of government involvement in the negotiations, La Prensa Grafica reports that Justice and Security Minister David Munguia Payes has stated that “the government cannot sit down to negotiate with criminal groups, but if other institutions do, we will facilitate the dialogue.” The Church and former congressman Raul Mijango have already initiated efforts to negotiate a reduction in extortions with the gangs.

Munguia claimed that he is unsure of what the gang leaders will ask for in exchange for a reduction in extortions, but the government is prepared to do whatever is necessary to facilitate a dialogue, so long as concessions remain within the scope of the law. Currently, the government is considering some “gestures of goodwill” that gang leaders have requested, such as allowing imprisoned gangsters to be visited by their children, or lengthening the allowed visit time.

According to the minister, all the dialogue can do is “create opportunities.” If negotiations through Mijango and the Church are fruitless, the government will be forced to explore other options. However, he is convinced that the reduction in homicides that resulted from the truce can only be followed by a reduction in extortion, auto theft, and illicit arms acquisition.

The Salvadoran government’s continued facilitation of the discussion between the Church and the country’s two largest street gangs points to the state’s deepening investment in the deal.

The consideration of new concessions to curtail gang extortion also sheds light on the leverage that the gangs have in the negotiations.

(PHOTO: Justice Minister David Munguia Payes) Minister Munguia appears confident that dialogue between the Church and the gang leaders will lead to the decline of several criminal activities, but brokering a truce between two gangs at war is very different from convincing the groups to cease the activities that dictate their way of life.

Each of the myriad illicit activities that Salvadoran gangs engage in may require new government concessions.

As Insight has suggested, inadvertently delegating this kind of political power to gangs could compromise the justice system, as well as any peace that has already resulted from the negotiations.

---This piece originally appeared in INSIGHT HERE.

Fighting the drugs menace in Saudi Arabia (PERSPECTIVE)

(PHOTO: Saudi Arabia Police train to find undercover drugs/ARABNEWS)From the Arab News

The latest figures relating to drug abuse in the Saudi Arabia Kingdom make appalling reading. In the last three years, 119,000 people of different nationalities have been arrested for drugs offenses. What is worse, it is reported that some 400 police and anti-narcotics officials have been killed fighting the traffickers.

The full extent of this great evil can be gauged by the astonishing fact that the total value of the drugs seized exceeded SR18 billion. The Department for Combating Drugs this week listed their haul as including 181 million Captagon tablets, 222 kilos of heroin, 61 tons of hashish and 2,206 tons of qat. 

Working on the basis that, as with anti-drug enforcement campaigns worldwide, narcotics seizures represent only a relatively small proportion of the actual amount of illegal substances in circulation, these figures are truly frightening.

What are our young people — and drug abusers are all too often the young — what are they thinking about? It is of course the nature of youth to rebel. Every new generation throughout history has sought to find its feet by establishing its own identity. Only with increasing age comes wisdom and an acceptance of established values. Yet the use of narcotics by the young, to somehow differentiate themselves from their elders is dangerous, foolish and deeply wrong.

Drugs do not just endanger the people who use them. They threaten the very fabric of society.

As the police have pointed out this week, fully 60 percent of the crimes in the Kingdom were drugs-related. Put simply, once users have become addicted to a narcotic, their competence in the workplace, their ability even to maintain natural relationships with friends and family, are steadily destroyed. Without income and support, only theft will enable them to sustain their body’s increasing demand for more narcotics. The result is squalor, loneliness and self-destruction.

Yet while society is the victim of drug users, so too are the users themselves victims of the cynical peddlers of death who grow, refine and otherwise manufacture narcotics and as a result, worldwide, rake in hundreds of billions of dollars in profits every year.

Young people can be educated about the dangers and evils of narcotics, as the Kingdom has been seeking to do in an ongoing campaign in schools and colleges. But this is clearly not enough. Moreover, it could be argued that this program should be harder hitting, with graphic and alarming displays of the horrors, degradation and ugly deaths to which addiction eventually leads. Maybe also, young people should be shown the bodies and surviving family members of some of the 400 brave security officers who gave their lives here in the Kingdom, so that these same young people could live safe, decent and productive lives.

Yet the harsh reality is that such campaigns will never be enough. The only way to stop the wicked destructiveness of narcotics use is to attack it at its source, to assault the merchants of death and smash the mafia-networks that run the international trade in illegal drugs.

This requires real coordination between anti-narcotics forces worldwide. Next week the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which is mandated by the United Nations to oversee the implementation of the UN’s drug control conventions, will release its latest annual report.

It is unlikely to make comfortable reading. The drugs barons arguably have larger financial resources at their disposal than the forces of law and order that are seeking to destroy them.

Nor do these mafias have to work within any legal framework. Yet they must be crushed, for the sake of young people around the world, not just here in the Kingdom, who take the foolish and fatal first step of experimenting with narcotics.

In a prosperous country like Saudi Arabia, where  the younger generation has so much to live for, the joy and security of work, family and eventually children of their own have to conquer the false lure of drug-induced well-being.

---- You can read more here from the Arab News