In El Salvador, memory has a hard edge.

It lives in streets once emptied by curfews imposed not by governments but by gangs; in buses that once moved under the threat of extortion; in neighborhoods where dusk meant locked doors and lowered voices. For years, fear was not an event but a routine—something folded into daily life like heat or rain.

Now, in courtrooms bright with fluorescent light and watched through screens, that memory has been summoned into law.

This week, a Salvadoran court began a collective trial of 486 alleged members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, known widely as MS-13, in one of the largest criminal proceedings in the country’s history. The defendants—among them alleged founders, regional leaders, and street-level commanders—face charges linked to more than 47,000 crimes committed between 2012 and 2022, according to prosecutors.

The number is almost too large to hold in the mind.

Homicides. Femicides. Extortion. Arms trafficking. Enforced disappearances. Prosecutors say the charges include responsibility for nearly 29,000 killings, as well as the notorious March 2022 weekend in which 87 people were murdered in a span of days—the bloodiest stretch El Salvador had seen since its civil war.

The trial itself unfolds in fragments.

Some defendants appeared in person at the Judicial Center Against Organized Crime in Soyapango, near San Salvador. Hundreds more joined by video link from the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, the vast and heavily guarded prison that has become the symbol of President Nayib Bukele’s uncompromising campaign against gang violence. Others are being tried in absentia.

Justice, here, is mediated by screens and steel.

The proceedings are part of the state of emergency Bukele declared in March 2022, after the surge in killings shocked the nation and hardened public resolve. Since then, more than 91,500 people have been detained under emergency powers repeatedly renewed by Congress. Constitutional protections have been suspended or narrowed. Mass trials have been authorized. Judges have been granted anonymity in some cases.

The country has changed in visible ways.

Homicide rates have dropped sharply. Streets once avoided after dark have reopened to ordinary life. Markets stay open later. Families walk farther. In a country long haunted by gang rule, safety has become a tangible and politically powerful fact.

But safety has come with argument.

Human rights groups, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Amnesty International, have warned that the emergency measures erode due process and risk sweeping innocents into the machinery of mass detention. They cite arbitrary arrests, restricted access to legal counsel, prolonged administrative detention, and deaths in custody. President Bukele himself has acknowledged that thousands of detainees were later released after being wrongly arrested.

In the courtroom, those concerns remain largely outside the frame.

Inside, prosecutors describe a criminal network that sought to function as a parallel state—controlling neighborhoods, collecting extortion, ordering killings, and shaping daily life through terror. For the government, the trial is not only about individual guilt but about dismantling the architecture of organized violence.

For critics, it is also about what becomes of justice when scale overtakes precision.

The nation watches with divided certainty.

For many Salvadorans, the crackdown has brought a peace once thought impossible. For others, peace built too quickly can cast long shadows. The balance between order and rights, between urgency and fairness, remains unsettled.

And yet the trial proceeds.

Rows of shaved heads flicker across courtroom monitors. Lawyers speak. Charges are read. Families on both sides wait—for verdicts, for closure, for proof that this chapter, however written, might hold.

In El Salvador, the war against gangs has entered a new room.

Not the alley, not the prison yard, not the patrol route.

The courtroom.

And there, beneath fluorescent lights and the gaze of a nation still learning what peace costs, justice now speaks in numbers too large to count.

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Sources Reuters Associated Press CBS News The Guardian Inter-American Commission on Human Rights