El Salvador said Thursday that leaders of a powerful gang will be sentenced to thousands of years in jail over a raft of charges they face in a mass trial.
The Latin American country is trying 485 members of the MS-13, which the United States and El Salvador classify as a terrorist organization, for 47,000 crimes that the group allegedly committed between 2012 and 2022, according to court documents.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele declared a "war" on gangs in 2022, imposing a state of emergency that has been used to arrest around 92,000 suspected gang members, the majority of them without a warrant and thousands who were later declared innocent.
The defendants include 22 MS-13 leaders, already convicted of other crimes, who now face a vast number of new charges, including some of the 29,000 murders allegedly committed by the gang.
The Salvadoran attorney general's office previously reported there were 486 defendants in total.
"With the sentences the judge will impose, sentences of thousands of years, these people will definitely not leave the prison system," Max Munoz, deputy prosecutor against organized crime, said in a statement published by the Salvadoran presidency's press office.
"They would not even have enough lifetimes to serve the sentences they will face," Munoz added.
The mass trial, which began in April, is El Salvador's first against a gang's leadership structure.
One of the defendants is 47-year-old Borromeo Henriquez, or the "Little Devil of Hollywood", who is already serving an 87-year sentence for 497 homicides and other crimes since 1998.
Henriquez "could face a sentence of between 15,000 and 25,000 years in prison", the prosecutor said.
Rights groups have criticized Bukele's mass arrests under his state of emergency and claim the legal system lacks independence.
Bukele has shrugged off criticism from legal experts who say his crackdown may have led to crimes against humanity, arguing that the ends justified the means.
