SAN SALVADOR — More than 2,000 soldiers and 500 police officers surrounded a populous neighborhood on the outskirts of El Salvador’s capital Monday in an effort to root out the remnants of gangs the president said were trying to establish themselves in the area.

“There is a group of hidden gang members. We have established a security fence throughout the neighborhood … to extract every last gang member from the area,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele wrote in a post on X.

Police surrounded the San Marcos neighborhood with a military fence, setting up checkpoints to prevent gang members from escaping, Defense Minister René Francis Merino Monroy said.

The fence was the third of its kind to be installed in parts of San Salvador, aimed at finding and arresting gang members still operating in the country. In March, Bukele ordered similar barricades erected in a northern part of the country, which he said was to dismantle a faction of the Barrio 18 gang.

The blockade is the latest in the populist leader’s war on gangs, announced by Bukele following a wave of violence in March 2022. Bukele’s government has called for a “state of emergency” and waived constitutional rights to arrest more than 1% from the El Salvador population with little evidence.

The crackdown has fueled sharp criticism from human rights groups, raising alarm over prison conditions and saying many of those arrested were innocent or merely had close gang ties. Other steps he has taken, such as seeking re-election despite the constitutional ban on presidents serving two consecutive terms, have raised other democratic alarms.

But the gang war also dealt a heavy blow to the Barrio 18 and MS-13 gangs that have long terrorized much of the country, extorting money, killing defaulters and dealing drugs.

The measures led to a sharp drop in homicides and fueled a populist fervor for Bukele.

Despite effectively declaring victory in his war, the president continued to extend the “state of emergency” for over two years, arguing that such measures were necessary to eliminate the remnants of gangs in El Salvador.

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