Three members of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, testifying under a cooperation agreement with Salvadoran prosecutors, admitted during the mass trial of 486 alleged leaders of the criminal organization that between 2013 and 2021 they tortured, murdered and buried more than 200 people at Finca Suiza. The wooded area, located in the municipality of Nuevo Cuscatlán, occupies a unique place in El Salvador’s political history: it was there that Nayib Bukele’s political career began in 2012 and where part of the movement that would later carry him to the presidency took shape.
The site may contain the largest known clandestine cemetery in El Salvador. On that very land, where authorities themselves say 21 bodies and an undetermined number of skeletal remains have already been found, a luxury housing development has been under construction for several years.
Although the government itself classified all trials and judicial proceedings conducted under the state of exception, authorities turned the mass trial of the alleged gang leaders into a media event, allowing access to several news outlets and social media influencers. Other hearings involving people accused of collaborating with the gang, among whom human rights organizations say there could be thousands of innocent individuals, continue to be held behind closed doors.
EL PAÍS obtained a copy of the prosecution’s indictment, which includes the full testimony of three witnesses identified by the code names Bosnia, Berlin and Sweden. All three have been identified as members of MS-13, specifically of the Teclas Locos Salvatruchos clique, or cell, which operated in the northern part of the San Salvador metropolitan area, including the municipality of Nuevo Cuscatlán.
In their confessions, key witnesses Berlin and Bosnia say that, in mid-2012, during the so-called truce between the gangs and the government of then-president Mauricio Funes, the MS-13 leadership, known as the Ranfla Nacional, agreed to bury the bodies of their victims in order to keep murder statistics artificially low. According to their testimony, gang members dubbed the practice “Cultivated Homicide,” or “H1,” a reference to a type of fertilizer.
At the time, Nuevo Cuscatlán was little known on El Salvador’s political stage and had relatively low levels of crime. But because of its heavily wooded terrain, the gang chose it as a dumping ground for victims from neighboring municipalities across the San Salvador metropolitan area. “The leaders faced the problem that the gang’s backlog of unsolved homicides was growing nationwide, and they could not leave bodies in the streets. So they decided the best way to maintain control was to hide the corpses,” Berlin and Bosnia said in their statements.
After Bukele became mayor in May 2012, Nuevo Cuscatlán began to gain prominence on El Salvador’s political map. Projecting a fresh and youthful image, the then-rising politician used the small municipality to boost his national profile and presented it as a model for the rest of the country. During his tenure, Bukele highlighted the low, or even nonexistent, homicide rate and attributed it to his policies for preventing and combating violence.
In reality, Nuevo Cuscatlán was, and remains, a small municipality covering just six square miles and inhabited by a relatively affluent population. Historically, this placed it well below the national average for violence, with only one or two homicides a year on average. Bukele, however, frequently touted the fact that he had kept the homicide rate at zero for more than two years.
In July 2014, a month before publicly announcing his bid to become mayor of the capital, Bukele posted on his YouTube channel a segment produced by 4Visión, a local television program known for its sensationalist tone. In the piece, less than two minutes long, the sharp drop in homicides was credited to the plan implemented by the mayor.
“In the neighboring municipalities, the rise in criminality is very high,” said Bukele, seated at a modest desk with only a computer visible. “Almost all the municipalities bordering Nuevo Cuscatlán have very high levels of crime. So it is only a matter of time for [the violence] to cross the border and for something to happen here in the municipality. Before that happens, we want to be proactive and solve it beforehand.”
The video claimed that Bukele’s strategy for preventing violence from reaching the municipality included increased police patrols, surveillance cameras and drone monitoring. “We work directly with the communities. They tell us about the crime-related problems they are facing. Sometimes the solution is as simple as fencing off a vacant lot, installing lighting on a dark street or building a wall that separates a neighborhood from a rural area,” the then-mayor said.
However, while Bukele was campaigning, the gang continued to hide bodies in the municipality’s rural outskirts.
“According to key witnesses from Berlin and Sweden, the gang members from the El Pino Base of the Teclas Locos Salvatruchos clique brought more than 200 people to this location during the aforementioned period, and all of them were murdered and secretly buried — almost all of them having been captured in the municipalities of Santa Tecla and other nearby areas,” states the indictment.
In the court filing, prosecutors say they are confident in the claims made by their key witnesses. “This information has been abundantly confirmed by the results obtained after several areas of that estate were processed as crime scenes between November 2021 and February 2022, leading to the discovery of a total of 21 bodies buried in clandestine graves,” the document states.
Prosecutors also say that “several groups of skeletal remains” have been found in other parts of the property that “are already being developed.” The luxury residential complex Portales del Bosque is being built on the grounds of Finca Suiza. On its website, the development is advertised as “an urban oasis surrounded by nature.”
Since Bukele took office as president in June 2019, all information relating to missing persons, clandestine cemeteries and mass graves has been classified as state secret. Even relatives of the victims are unable to access it.
According to prosecutors, the remains of several people reported missing were found on the property, including Claudia Jimena Granados, a prominent Salvadoran athlete last seen in October 2021; siblings Karen and Eduardo Guerrero Toledo, who disappeared the same year; as well as Kevin Josué Cabrera and José Balmore Renderos Preza, both missing since 2020. “The remains of the other victims have not yet been identified,” the court document states.
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