Even among the brutal ranks of the transnational gang called MS-13, Vladimir Arévalo Chávez stands out as a highly effective manager of murder, prosecutors say. Known as “Vampiro,” he has been accused of overseeing killings in at least three countries: of migrants in...
When Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, agreed earlier this year to imprison deportees from the United States, he had a specific request of the Trump administration: the return of top MS-13 leaders in American custody. For the past several months, a team of...
El Salvador’s president said he would send inmates of the country’s notorious mega-prison to France in the wake of a Paris Fashion Week show critiquing the government’s treatment of the prisoners. Nayib Bukele criticised a collection debuted by Willy Chavarria, a...
Many Salvadorans now spend between two and five hours a day trapped in the heavy congestion that has become the new normal throughout Greater San Salvador. Urban-planning specialists warn that the standstill not only cripples mobility but also unleashes a cascade of...
Armando V. leaves home every morning before sunrise. The commute from his house to the office is barely ten kilometres. With no congestion he would cover the distance in ten to fifteen minutes, yet the morning rush forces him to set out at least an hour early if he...
Nayib Bukele’s dictatorship has reinvented slavery in the twenty-first century. What he markets as “rehabilitation” is nothing more than large-scale human exploitation. Thousands of persons deprived of liberty—many of them not even convicted, merely accused under an...
