Sawt Falasteen - Guatemala minister ousted after gang members' jail break

In a televised address, President Bernardo Arevalo said he had accepted the resignation of Interior Minister Francisco Jimenez and two deputy ministers amid political pressure following the gang members' disappearance from a jail near the capital, Guatemala City.

"I have decided to make changes to the team in charge of security tasks," he said.

On Sunday, while Arevalo was out of the country, a prison chief in the Central American nation announced that 20 Barrio 18 members had escaped from prison, without stating when.

One has since been rearrested.

Guatemala is plagued by a violent rivalry between the Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gangs, both with ties to neighboring El Salvador -- itself the subject of an iron-fisted crackdown under President Nayib Bukele.

The gangs battle for territorial control, extorting shopkeepers, transport workers, and civilians, killing those who refuse to pay.

Washington has blacklisted MS-13 for years and designated Barrio 18 a foreign terrorist organization last month as part of its crackdown on drug trafficking.

The US embassy in Guatemala condemned the prison escape as "utterly unacceptable" and internal pressure built on Arevalo's administration -- in place since January 2024 -- to do something.

Guatemala stepped up security at prisons and on its borders with El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico and offered a reward for the fugitives' arrest.

On Wednesday, the president also announced that Guatemala's army engineering corps will build a maximum-security prison with a capacity for 2,000 gang members, to open within a year.

Prisons, he said, must "serve as centers for sentence compliance and not as universities of crime."

According to Guatemala's interior ministry, there are about 12,000 gang members and collaborators in the country, and another 3,000 in prison.

The country's homicide rate, which notched up from 16.1 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2024 to 17.65 this year, is more than double the world average, according to Guatemala's Center for National Economic Research.

V.AbuAwwad--SF-PST