El Salvador has long been a deeply broken country from its centuries of Spanish colonialism and then domination and abuse by American criminal corporations and the Satanic CIA's brutal death squads that hunted down, tortured and murdered the country's best and brightest and then put their mutilated bodies on public display.
One of the outcomes of all of that extreme trauma, abuse and failed puppet governments were criminal gangs that filled the social and political vacuums created by Washington. Some of the gangs were run by the CIA as part of its international drug trafficking operations used to support illegal off-the-books operations and enrich the Euro-American oligarchs who have long been in control of the drug trade.
Then along came El Salvador's new President Nayib Bukele, who enacted a state of emergency (régimen de excepción) and arrested or killed anyone who might be a gang member, but then curiously released some of the gang leadership or avoided arresting them in the first place.
Insight Crime's in-depth investigation doesn't go deep enough but it does provide a comprehensive overview of the situation and raises some of the right questions.
Click here to read El Salvador’s (Perpetual) State of Emergency: How Bukele’s Government Overpowered Gangs