El Salvador Perspectives

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 is 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 bread, because otherwise, we wouldn

  El Salvador is at the end of its first three years with  a Legislative Assembly controlled by Nayib Bukele and his Nuevas Ideas (NI) party.  These were three years which had a dramatic impact on Salvadoran democracy.  Here are some of the major steps of the NI-controlled Assembly: 1. Deposed the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Judicial Court .  On its first day in power, May 1, 2021, the NI-controlled Assembly removed all of the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber, the country's highest judicial authority. It removed the magistrates all at once, without giving them notice or the opportunity to be heard.  2.  Appointed new friendly judges to the Constitutional Chamber.    On the same night it purged the Chamber, the Assembly elected a new slate of judges completely ignoring the process in the constitution for appointing new judges. 3.  Deposed the attorney general .   Still on the same night that the Assembly purged the Constitutional Chamber, it also removed the count

The US State Department issued its 2023 Human Rights Report on El Salvador this week.  From the Executive Summary: Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearance; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy.   There have been numerous investigative reports of the severe violations of international human rights standards occurring during El Salvador's State of Exception and the Bukele regime's "war on gangs."  The reports are prepared by a wide range of Salvadoran and international human rights groups.   These reports do not deny the reduction in homicides and gang control of territory during the past two years, but they point out the cost of the State of Exception.  Here are 13 of

One common assertion by proponents of the current State of Exception in El Salvador is that the justice system will correct errors and only guilty persons will be locked up for any significant period of time. In fact, changes in the law, and a court system which does not act independently of the Bukele regime, mean the reality is quite different for the 70,000 persons arrested since March 2022. 1. Arbitrary arrests with little or no proof. The failures of the criminal justice system in El Salvador under the State of Exception begin with the arrests and detention of persons, usually in marginalized communities, without sufficient proof of any criminal activity. The State of Exception, which continues to be extended every month, permits an arrest to be made on mere suspicion, without police seeing a crime being permitted and without an order for arrest.  The online periodical El Faro documented hundreds of cases of arrests with flimsy evidence in an article titled  State of Exception

September 2023 parade in Tonacatepeque I do not often write in the first person in this space, but as I develop this series of posts at the start of the third year of the State of Exception, it feels important to describe how I have seen El Salvador change during that time. I have spent more than twenty years visiting and getting to know well a small community in the municipality of Tonacatepeque, northeast of San Salvador.  This collection of small houses, with water which arrives some of the days, with chickens and dogs and small children roaming the streets, is dear to me. And for most of the time I have known it, the community has been under control of the MS-13 gang. Two years into the State of Exception, the "muchachos" are no longer present, and the difference it makes in people's lives is real and observable. Residents now cross gang boundaries from one territory to another, no longer fearing deadly retribution as a consequence.  New little businesses have opened

This is the second of my series on the State of Exception in El Salvador as it starts its third year.   Today we look at the prisons holding those persons arrested during Bukele's war on the gangs. Since the beginning of the State of Exception two years ago, the prison population in El Salvador has skyrocketed.   Today El Salvador incarcerates people at a rate higher than anywhere else in the world, with almost 2% of the adult population behind bars.  The 78,000 people captured under the State of Exception, and held without trial, live in the hellish conditions of the Salvadoran prison system.  And, sadly, a significant majority of the Salvadoran public, thirsty for vengeance, applauds. To add to the prison capacity of El Salvador, the Bukele regime built its new mega-prison, the Center for Confinement of Terrorism or CECOT.  This new prison grabs all the headlines.  But the story is not CECOT.  CECOT is the story Bukele wants to tell, but it is not the story that we should focus

March 27 is the two 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 observing them commit 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 judges with their identities masked, 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 hearing which could come in six months. The Minister of Security G