El Salvador holds mass sentencing hearing for gang leaders

[Eugene]

Source: Agence France-Presse

El Salvador holds mass sentencing hearing for gang leaders

Carlos Mario MARQUEZ
Thu, February 8, 2024 at 8:26 PM EST·2 min read

A court in El Salvador on Thursday held a virtual sentencing hearing for 492 leaders of the feared Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, accused of thousands of crimes, including more than 500 homicides.

The MS-13 leaders are "linked to 37,402 crimes, committed between 2012 and 2022," the attorney general's office wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

"More than 500 homicides, disappearances, extortion, arms trafficking, and human trafficking are being attributed to this group," said Max Munoz, the deputy director of the anti-crime prosecutor's office, in a video.

The gang leaders are also accused of "rebellion to the detriment of El Salvador's democratic system" for seeking to control part of the country's territory, and of "collecting taxes, exercising their own justice and having an armed group to achieve these ends," the prosecutor added.

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Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/el-salvador-holds-mass-sentencing-012652647.html

[Botany]

1. Gang violence is one of the top driving forces that makes people flee their homes in Central America

….. and end up on our southern border. My neighbor fostered 2 young people from Honduras who
saw their father murdered in his store by a gang because he had no money to give them and their
mother fled the little town they lived in because she knew the gang would come to their house and
kill the older son (13?) and sex traffic both her and her daughter who was about 11.