More than 240 members of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, gang, were sentenced to hundreds of years in prison in El Salvador.
In a post on social media, the Central American country’s attorney general’s office said that 248 members of the gang had received “exemplary sentences” for 42 homicides and 42 disappearances, among other crimes.
The statement did not specify the date of the sentences or whether the accused had been tried en masse.
One individual, identified as Marvin Abel Hernandez Palacios, was sentenced to 1,335 years in prison, while 10 others received prison terms ranging from 463 to 958 years, the post said. The attorney general’s office said the crimes were committed between 2014 and 2022.
Since March 2022, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has been cracking down on gangs under a state of emergency that allows for arrests without warrants.
More than 90,000 people have been detained, and some 8,000 have been released after being found not guilty, according to official sources.
Bukele’s campaign against gangs has reduced homicides to historically low levels in the country, but human rights groups accuse the security forces of committing abuses.
According to the Salvadoran government, MS-13 and another gang, Barrio 18, are responsible for the deaths of approximately 200,000 people over the course of three decades.
The two gangs once controlled an estimated 80 percent of the country, and El Salvador had one of the highest homicide rates in the world.
The groups extorted “victims who owned businesses, demanding different amounts of money in exchange for not harming them,” the Attorney General’s office said.
“Some people had to close their businesses out of fear of the threats,” it added.
The MS-13 gang was formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants who fled the civil war in their home country.
The brutal gang has since spread to Guatemala and Honduras, turning the region into one of the most violent in the world. Its violent grip in Central America is one of the forces driving thousands of migrants to flee to the United States.
Earlier this year, the U.S. designated MS-13 a terrorist organization, with President Trump calling it “probably the meanest, worst gang in the world” and “an evil group of people. They’re sick and deranged.”