Salvadoran prelate says murder statistics are manipulated to create climate of chaos
June 01, 2015
A bishop in El Salvador has charged that statistics on gang violence are being manipulated for political purposes.
Bishop Gregorio Rosa Chavez said that “evil mechanisms” are distorting crime statistics in order to project a “climate of total ungovernability, of total chaos, even at the cost of human lives.”
Bishop Rosa Chavez did not identify the people who were, in his view, exploiting the statistics. A day earlier, President Sanchez Ceren, who had pledged to bring down the country’s soaring rate of violent crime, claimed that police had broken up 200 criminal gangs. But the bishop called attention to media reports that said there were 594 murders in El Salvador in the month of May. If accurate, that figure would represent the largest toll of violent deaths since the country's civil war.
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