El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced Sunday that 6,000 military and police forces had been deployed to root out gang members in the north of the country after two people were murdered.

Bukele launched a war on gangs in March 2022, with a state of emergency suspending the need for arrest warrants, among other civil liberties.

Under the provision, authorities have rounded up about 75,000 suspected gangsters, many of them locked away in a prison — the largest in the Americas — that Bukele had specially built. At least 7,000 were later released.

“We are not going to stop until we eradicate what little remains of the gangs,” Bukele warned on social media platform X, which included a video of heavily armed troops parading a pair of captured men.

He added that 5,000 soldiers and 1,000 police officers had “surrounded” the districts of San Jose Cancasque, San Antonio Los Ranchos, Potonico and San Isidro Labrador.

Bukele said the action was a response to two homicides in the country’s north, about 90 kilometres (56 miles) north of capital San Salvador, and that two “culprits” from the Surenos faction of the 18th Street gang had been captured.

“We will completely clean the area, we will extract every last remnant of gangs,” Defence Minister Rene Francis Merino Monroy said in a separate post on X.

Bukele was re-elected with more than 80 per cent of the vote in February and is widely credited with slashing homicides to the lowest rate in three decades.

His tactics have been praised by crime-weary authorities from Ecuador to Argentina, but criticised by rights activists who argue innocent people have been swept up in the anti-crime campaign.

-AFP