El Salvador Perspectives

Nayib Bukele has just had another of his critics arrested.  The government of El Salvador Saturday detained prominent attorney Enrique Anaya.  The constitutional lawyer frequently spoke in public and wrote on social media, about the constitution and the rule of law in El Salvador.  He has been an outspoken critic of Nayib Bukele's capture of the judicial system in El Salvador and violations of the constitution. Anaya is purportedly being charged with money laundering, and his detention follows closely on the heels of the imprisonment of another prominent legal critic of Bukele, Ruth López . In the week before his arrest, Anaya had been vocal critic of Bukele.  On June 3 Anaya was on  Frente a Frente , a television interview show  in El Salvador, saying Bukele was a dictator who had removed "the mask," adding "he is what he is." "Here, whoever speaks, whoever criticizes, whoever does not kneel before the idol, gets imprisoned. Of course, I am afrai...

On June 1, Nayib Bukele delivered a speech to the nation from the National Theater in San Salvador, on the first anniversary of commencing his unconstitutional second term as president.  In a large portion of his address, Bukele described sinister globalist forces who want to thwart his project and return El Salvador to a time of gang-controlled misery.    Early in the speech he stated: They gave us studies, grand projects on how to save us, but deep down, they never believed it was possible, and that's why their solutions were never designed to work. El Salvador was controlled by people with no intention of helping us. Six years ago, we merely began to reclaim our country. Today, El Salvador no longer belongs to foreign actors or their local puppets. Today, El Salvador belongs to the Salvadoran people. Bukele declared that he would never give in to calls by human rights organizations or international media to lift the State of Exception:   Me, personally, they...

The arrest of a prominent anti-corruption lawyer in El Salvador is highlighting the increased willingness of Nayib Bukele's government to arrest and imprison critics of the regime’s practices. Late Sunday night authorities arrested Salvadoran lawyer Ruth López at her home.  She is the head of the Anti-corruption and Justice unit at Cristosal, the most prominent Salvadoran human rights organization.  Both López and Cristosal have been outspoken critics of the Bukele government for its human rights record and patterns of corruption. The seizure of López comes at a moment when the Bukele regime is taking increasingly hard-line measures against its critics. Other activists and human rights defenders have also been imprisoned this year when they have been defending populations impacted by Salvadoran government policies.  López's is the highest profile arrest yet.  It illustrates that Bukele now feels he can take such actions with impunity. The arrest occurred in ...

Throughout his presidency, Nayib Bukele has craved the media spotlight and has wanted to be portrayed as one of the world's visionary leaders.  He has found that images of cruelty to persons alleged to be gang members get him publicity around the world, and lots of it. In April 2020 , the global media shared images of half-naked prisoners stacked together like sardines in the very early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, as Bukele vowed revenge for a surge in homicides. The media spotlight would turn back to El Salvador in 2022 to report on the State of Exception and squadrons of heavily armed police and military seizing tens of thousands of persons of the streets with little regard to the innocent persons among them. In 2023 to much fanfare, Bukele announced that he was opening the largest prison in the world. The Center for Confinement of Terrorists or "CECOT" would hold the worst of the worst so they could never terrorize El Salvador again he told his country, and the glo...

Izalco prison Last month human rights groups released important reports documenting human rights abuses suffered under the State of Exception and within the country's prisons.  El Salvador is now in its fourth year under the "emergency" measures which define the new normal in the county. Six Salvadoran human rights organizations released a report titled   3 Years of the State of Exception: Systematic Torture in the Prisons of El Salvador .  The report comprehensively gathers data about the 85,000 persons captured during the State of Exception.  Their study makes the important point that more than 100,000 persons are held in old prisons in a system designed to hold 28,000 persons, while the CECOT mega-prison purportedly has a capacity of 40,000 but only holds 14,000 (including 255 delivered into the prison by the United States).  The report gathers descriptions of the poor conditions and abuses inside those overcrowded prisons from more than 30 persons who w...

  March 27 is the three-year anniversary of the State of Exception in El Salvador. This suspension of constitutional due process protections as part of a war on gangs was adopted by the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly in the midst of a bloody weekend in March 2022 in which gangs murdered at least 87 people around the country. Under the State of Exception, security forces of the police and military can arrest anyone without a warrant or without having observed them committing a crime, can hold them for 15 days before appearing before a judge and without telling them the charges, and can freely intercept communications without a judicial order. Those detained receive initial hearings, before masked judges, in groups that often number in the hundreds, where the charges are simply gang affiliation. Judges routinely order defendants into El Salvador's hellishly overcrowded prisons without bail, to await for their next preliminary hearing which could come in six months.  Even peop...

On the morning of February 25, Fidel Zavala  was outside of the office of El Salvador's human rights public advocate (PDDH) to denounce the arbitrary arrests four days earlier of two community activists  from Hacienda La Floresta.  Zavala is spokesperson for a group calling itself the Unit of Defense of Human and Community Rights (UNIDEHC for its initials in Spanish).  UNIDEHC is leading a fight against the expulsion of approximately 250 families from their dwellings at La Floresta.   Later that same afternoon, Zavala found himself arrested at the offices of UNIDEHC.  And around the same time, twenty other La Floresta community members were also detained.   Many observers are calling their arrests potential reprisals and intimidation by the government for their actions in defense of human rights.     Zavala worked as a young businessman before being arrested the first time in February 2022 and accused of financial crimes. ...

Today is the 43rd anniversary of the 1981 El Mozote massacre in which close to one thousand civilians were killed by a US-trained elite unit of El Salvador's army.  Most of the dead were children, women and the elderly. Of the documented victims, 553, or 57%, were under 18 years of age and 477 were 12 and under. This year's anniversary saw some different visitors to the massacre site : Representatives from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center (HRVWCC) traveled to El Salvador this week to remember the victims of the largest single massacre of civilians in modern Latin American history and commemorate the Dec. 10 United Nations Human Rights Day. The ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI)-led HRVWCC brings together criminal investigators, attorneys, intelligence analysts, criminal research specialists and historians from various sectors of the federal government to investigate global atrocities and pursue the perpetrato...

  Today the InterAmerican Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) issued a 354 page report titled The State of Exception and Human Rights in El Salvador . The press release which accompanied the report highlights the major recommendations of the report: In the report, the IACHR underscores that inter-American standards stipulate that a state of emergency is an exceptional measure that must be necessary, appropriate, and proportionate to the emergency context. It also warns that certain judicial guarantees cannot be suspended under any circumstances and stresses that the duration of the state of emergency should be strictly limited to the period of the emergency. The IACHR calls on the Salvadoran State to make crosscutting efforts to prevent violence, mitigate the risks and damages to vulnerable groups, and restore the social fabric. It has also noted the statistics provided by the State on improvements to citizen security. These appear to demonstrate that the country has moved beyond t...

Last week the human rights group Cristosal released a 126 page report titled El silencio no es opción (Silence is not an option) which reviews torture, deaths, and the absence of justice under the ongoing State of Exception in El Salvador.  During the first two years of the State of Exception 79,211 persons were arrested, including 12,704 in the second year as the pace of detentions slowed down.  The new report from Cristosal is an important, and damning, account of what the Bukele government has been willing to do in its war on gangs. Cristosal based its findings on a study of 3,643 complaints Cristosal received since the beginning of the State of Exception; hundreds of interviews including testimonies of members of the police and armed forces regarding arbitrary detentions; analysis of the legal cases of 1,178 people detained and prosecuted under the exception regime; a sample set of the 7,742 women detained by the emergency regime; and investigation of 261 deaths...

Trigger Warning -- this post includes first person accounts of torture and abuse within El Salvador's prisons during the State of Exception, now in its third year.  These accounts are important to hear.  These are the testimonies from people released from Salvadoran prisons -- in other words, these individuals spent months in these hellish prisons even though the government lacked proof of any ties to gangs.  [Note: torture and abuse are wrong even when committed against the guiltiest criminal, but this post contains only the stories of persons who were freed]. These are the stories of people who chose to speak to the media despite the very real risk that doing so could result in their return to hell.   Journalist Victor Barahona spent 11 months imprisoned under the State of Exception before being freed.  He  recounted  what he lived through: "[The cell] was suited for perhaps about 50 people, but there were 100 of us. We slept like sandwich brea...