Tears welled in Alex’s eyes and he pressed his head into his hands as he thought about more than a year of birthdays and holidays without his mother, who was swept up by El Salvador’s police as she walked to work in a clothing factory.
“I feel very alone,” the 10-year-old said last month as he sat next to his 8-year-old brother and their grandmother. “I’m scared, feeling like they could come and they could take away someone else in my family.”
Forty thousand children have seen one parent or both detained in President Nayib Bukele’s nearly two-year war on El Salvador’s gangs, according to the national social services agency.
The records were shared with The Associated Press by an official with the National Council on Children and Adolescents, who insisted on anonymity due to fear of government reprisal against those violating its tight control of information. The official said many more children have jailed parents but are not in the records.
The question you ask yourself is; are you, personally, willing to be caught up in the wide net cast, and have your own life destroyed, in favor of the supposed overall “reigned in” crime?
Police forces aren’t efficient, especially under bad, unstable, unethical leadership. You’re given a license to shoot everyone in the room because someone suspects the killer might be inside… They aren’t. Let’s say MAYBE 50% of the people they are rounding up would have ended up in jail for justified reasons, and that’s probably extremely generous - And if you disagree with my estimated numbers, I’ll just accuse you of being a secret communist and have Mr. McCarthy blacklist you.
Famously, Pablo Escobar took down an entire commercial flight to get one perceived enemy on the plane, and that person ended up not even being on the flight…
So are you cool being on that plane, and dying a horrible death, for the chance at what you perceive as the greater good happening I your wake? That’s the question you ask.