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.

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    I would also put allowing parents to murder other parents consequence free under the title of a failed state. But I agree that both are awful - that’s why I think this president is morally ambiguous.

    Ideally we’d solve issues like this with international assistance - the UN would send in peacekeepers to stabilize the situation until the local government could normalize lawfulness… but that’s an extremely untrendy use for peacekeeping forces and has historically raised a lot of commotion when peacekeepers were killed.

      • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        He’s bad - I think morally ambiguous was a poor choice of words.

        The question is: are the people who live in El Salvador better or worse off than they were before.

        • rhythmisaprancer@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          From what I have read, it depends on who you ask. Like you say, it is so complicated and we could benefit from some local voices. I think? Maybe hard to say.