The office of El Salvador’s attorney general announced on Sunday that 248 members of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang were sentenced to up to 1,335 years in prison for multiple crimes.
Collectively, all 248 MS-13 members were convicted of roughly 240 different counts of crimes committed between 2014 and 2022.
The attorney general’s office published a breakdown of the sentencing and additional information in a series of social media posts in which it detailed that among the most serious crimes committed by the convicted criminals is the December 2021 disappearance and murder of siblings Karen and Eduardo Guerrero Toledo, the October 2021 disappearance and murder of Salvadoran soccer player Jimena Granados, and the disappearance and murders of two students in 2019 and 2020.
Most notably, the Attorney General’s Office detailed that a man identified as Marvin Abel Hernández Palacios was sentenced to 1,335 years in prison on aggravated homicide, aggravated femicide, disappearance of persons, extortion, illicit trafficking, and illicit association charges. Ten other men received sentences ranging from 463 years to 957 years on similar charges.
The office detailed that the 248 men were convicted of 43 counts of aggravated homicide, 42 count of disappearance of persons, 3 counts of aggravated femicide, 86 counts of extortion, 29 count of solicitation and conspiracy to commit murder, 32 counts of preparatory acts for illicit trafficking, 5 counts of illegal use or occupation of real estate, among other crimes committed by these criminals.
All men were part of different MS-13 clicas (“cliques”), local neighborhood-level cells of the deadly gang, with investigations determining that the criminals established bases in different sectors of the southwestern department of La Libertad that were then used to plan criminal acts in their respective jurisdictions, including extorting victims who owned businesses, demanding various amounts of money in exchange for not harming them.
“Some people had to close their businesses out of fear of the threats,” the attorney general’s office stressed.
Although the attorney general’s office did not clarify if the men were convicted in a mass trial, the office published video surveillance photos of the convicted men, handcuffed and spread across different penitentiary centers, including the CECOT “mega-prison.” The men are seen wearing masks and simple white prison garb.
In 2023, the Salvadoran Congress approved a series of legal provisions and reforms allowing courts to conduct mass trials for the tens of thousands gang members arrested through President Nayib Bukele’s still-active “State of Exception” de facto martial law decree.
El Salvador has conducted several mass trials against MS-13 members over the past years, including a July 2024 mass trial against 45 gang members, during which Ángel Geovany “Diabolical” Guzmán González was sentenced to 1,420 years in prison for dozens of crimes committed between September 2018 and March 2019.
The Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Grafica detailed that 11 MS-13 members were convicted and sentenced to 75 years in prison for their role in the murder of soccer player Jimena Granados, who formed part of different local women’s teams until her disappearance in October 24, 2021, in the town of Quezaltepeque, La Libertad.
The newspaper, citing the court’s sentence, detailed that on that day she separated from her group of friends near a soccer field when she was intercepted by MS-13 members belonging to the Teclar Locos Salvatruchos, one of the local cells in the La Libertad department. A month later, in November 2021, her body was found in a clandestine grave and successfully identified by local police based on information provided by her family.
Similarly, the bodies of siblings Karen and Eduardo Guerrero Toledo, kidnapped and murdered by MS-13, were found in the same grave in December 2021. Reports published in 2024 indicated that prosecutors believed that MS-13 buried over 200 victims across different pits in that clandestine grave.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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