El Salvador's VP Ulloa: 'mistakes' in gang crackdown but it's not a 'police state'
El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Ulloa says they've “made mistakes” in its war against the country’s gangs, but has never undermined the country’s democracy.
SAN SALVADOR — El Salvador’s government has “made mistakes” in its war against the country’s gangs, but it has never undermined the country’s democracy to consolidate power, according to the man likely to be re-elected vice president.
Félix Ulloa, temporarily on leave as El Salvador’s vice president while he runs for re-election alongside Nayib Bukele, defended his government’s crackdown in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, days before a presidential election they are expected to win easily. Such policies, he said, will continue until El Salvador’s gangs are defeated.
Ulloa acknowledged that in their administration’s mass detention of citizens the government imprisoned thousands of people who had not committed any crime, something he said they are correcting, but justified the harsh actions as being widely popular and completely “legal.”
Since declaring a state of emergency in March 2022 following a surge in gang violence, the government has detained 76,000 people — more than 1% of the population in the small Central American nation. The declaration, which suspended some fundamental rights like access to a lawyer and being told why you’re being arrested, has been renewed by Congress every month since.
“There is no perfect work by humans. ... Look at the big picture,” Ulloa said. “Understand what this country is doing when we have defended people and the human rights of millions of Salvadorans whose rights were being violated by criminal structures.”
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