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A mayor in El Salvador has died after being shot by alleged gang members in his municipality of Tepetitan, marking the second killing of an official of the ruling FMLN party in suspected gang attacks in less than two weeks, local media reported Sunday.
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Guillermo Mejia, mayor since 2012 of the town of Tepetitan located nearly 40 miles east of the capital San Salvador, died in a hospital in the neighboring town of San Vicente on Saturday after being shot in his home, authorities reported.
The suspected gang members behind the assassination allegedly include Mejia’s own 15-year-old nephew, identified as Christian D., according to the Salvadoran daily Prensa Grafica.
Mejia’s death marks the second murder of a mayor in El Salvador this year, as well as the second assassination of a public official with the President Salvador Sanchez’s FMLN party.
Rene Antonio Diaz, an FMLN councillor in the city of Apopo less than 12 miles north of San Salvador, was killed in his home on June 29. According to local media, the Valle del Sol area of Apopo where he lived is controlled by the criminal syndicate Barrio 18, one of the two warring gangs in the Central American country along with Mara Salvatrucha.
In a separate case, Julio Torres, a mayor with the right-wing opposition ARENA party in the southeastern department of San Dionisio for six consecutive terms, was shot in the head and killed on April 14.
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Authorities hold Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, responsible for soaring levels of violence that has thrust El Salvador into the spotlight as the murder capital of the world in recent months.
The violence-ridden country saw a temporary drop in homicides with a 15-month truce between rivals gangs in 2012. But the murder rate started to creep back up when the deal began to break down in 2013, hitting levels in 2015 not seen since the end of the country’s civil war in 1992.
Critics say the truce failed to address the underlying causes of El Salvador’s gang problem, including systemic poverty and inequality and remnants of the country's civil-war era death squads.
President Sanchez, a former leader of the FMLN rebel army during the civil war, has repeatedly rejected the idea of entering into dialogue with gangs since he came into office in 2014. As part of a set of “exceptional measures” launched earlier this year in the name of cracking down on organized crime, authorities tightened security in jails to block kingpins from running gangs from prison.
Government supporters have accused the opposition and right-wing media in El Salvador of exploiting the gang situation to sow further fear and delegitimize the FMLN.
According to official police data, 2,853 people were murdered in El Salvador between January 1 and June 13 of this year, or about 18 people per day. The rate is a 12.5 percent increase from the same period last year.
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