Spanish
President Nayib Bukele categorically rejected this Saturday the existence of drug cartels or kidnappings in El Salvador, and attributed the recent alarms about criminal threats to "phone scams carried out from a prison in Colombia".
Earlier, the Salvadoran Security Minister, Gustavo Villatoro, directly blamed the Colombian authorities for the persistence of a telephone extortion network that, from the Cómbita prison in the department of Boyacá, affects Salvadorans, Hondurans, Dominicans, Panamanians, Costa Ricans, Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, and Argentinians.
Villatoro remarked that "we are the Salvadorans, Hondurans, Dominicans, Panamanians, Costa Ricans, Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, Argentinians, the ones who are paying the consequences of the laziness in the penitentiary treatment of these criminals", and demanded an urgent intervention by Colombia to stop the illicit access to "this amount of phones and this amount of SIM cards" in the prison.
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Salvadoran officials sought to dismantle fears spread through social media and some local media about the alleged presence of international criminal organizations in their territory.
According to Minister Villatoro's explanation, the extortion calls target workers and professionals who offer their services online — such as plumbers or electricians —, whom the scammers contact and summon to deserted places, pretending to be members of the Mexican cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación.
The mechanic consists of "demanding payment to be able to leave the place", all within the framework of a "psychological" threat and without the real presence of kidnappers in El Salvador.
Villatoro emphasized to the press: "First, let it be clear that in this country there are no drug cartels, nor are there kidnappings, much less kidnappers; second, that in the face of these telephone scams there is no physical risk, everything is psychological, here there is no evidence of anyone who has been hurt, injured or someone who has physically seen who was taking care of them in that supposed kidnapping."
According to the authorities, only "a small number of Salvadorans have fallen for those phone scams," and the investigation identified 375 numbers linked to the organization operating from the Colombian prison, with the international code 57, in addition to at least 101 active phones.
Villatoro pointed out that the technical location of these calls had the technological support of the United States, assuring: "We are technically demonstrating that these calls are made by a group of cowards who are in this prison of Cómbita in Colombia". In addition to Villatoro, the Attorney General, Rodolfo Delgado, and the Minister of Defense, René Merino, participated in the conference. The press conference did not allow questions from the media,
