Since the end of El Salvador’s civil war, the country’s police has become a key player in the underworld. This series of five articles explore the dark ties between criminal organizations and the government’s key crime-fighting arm.
Investigation Chapters
The Infiltrators: Corruption in El Salvador’s Police
Ricardo Mauricio Menesses Orellana liked horses, and the Pasaquina rodeo was a great opportunity to enjoy a party. He was joined at the event — which was taking place in the heart of territory controlled by El Salvador’s most powerful drug transport group, the Perrones — by the town’s mayor, Hector Odir Ramirez, and the infamous…
‘Chepe Luna,’ the Police and the Art of Escape
The United States — which through its antinarcotics, judicial and police attaches was very familiar with the routes used for smuggling, and especially those used for people trafficking and understood that those traffickers are often one and the same — greeted the new government of Elias Antonio Saca in 2004 with a proposal: take down…
Operation Chameleon in El Salvador: Anatomy of a Failure
The experience with Jose Natividad “Chepe” Luna — the drug trafficker who had eluded a giant dragnet in 2004 — had demonstrated that the leaks from the National Police of El Salvador (PNC) were continuous and, in general, all the history of the contraband in the west had an extensive element of police and district…
How an El Salvador Drug Trafficker Smuggled Cocaine Into the US
The woman phoned the office of the antinarcotics division (DAN) in Bolivar, in El Salvador’s La Union province, on August 13, 2008, at 1:30 PM. Investigators later established that what she told agent Javier Ramon Aguilar Ordoñez during that phone call was the story of a drug trafficking network led by Juan Maria Medrano, alias…
The Fixer and El Salvador’s Missed Opportunity
In the photograph, they are both smiling. In the foreground, on the left hand side, a man in a short-sleeved buttoned white shirt, jeans and a metal watch, holds a bottle of water in his right hand. He laughs heartily. He is Herbert Saca. On the right hand side is a man in a hat,…
