DailyExpertNews
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They were stripped down to their boxers and left barefoot. Many had their heads shaved because they were forced to run with their hands behind their backs or necks. A total of 2,000 convicts were transferred last week to El Salvador’s new “megaprison,” officially dubbed the Center for Confining Terrorism.
The event was announced not only on national television, but also by President Nayib Bukele himself, who tweeted a highly publicized video of the transfer set to dramatic music.
Many in El Salvador (and fans abroad) applauded the footage – further evidence of Bukele’s tough “mano dura” approach to crime. And if critics and the prisoners’ families found the footage chilling, their arguments found little traction in the country, where Bukele has effectively proposed a false dilemma: embrace his lock-em-up strategy or surrender control of the country. to a murderous criminal. groups.
Last year, after an infamous weekend of killings, Bukele declared a state of emergency with the support of his country’s Legislative Assembly, controlled by his New Ideas party. The state of emergency has allowed the government to temporarily suspend constitutional rights, including freedom of assembly and the right to legal defense.
Under the state of emergency, which has been extended 11 times, suspects can be held without charge for up to 15 days, instead of the constitutionally mandated 72 hours. Once charged, a suspect can spend months in detention before facing trial.
Many of those arrested under the state of emergency have been charged but not convicted, and are given little opportunity to plead their innocence at El Salvador’s class hearings. By early January, just over 3,000 prisoners had been released for lack of evidence – of the more than 64,000 people arrested since the state of emergency was declared.
Criminal gangs in El Salvador trace their origins to those formed in the United States by Salvadoran immigrants who fled the country’s civil war in the 1980s. More than 330,000 Salvadorans came to the US between 1985 and 1990, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
In the 1990s, U.S. immigration authorities deported large numbers of MS-13 gang members, many of whom had arrived as children, back to their home countries—mostly El Salvador. Once spread there, these groups controlled large parts of the country and made the lives of many law-abiding citizens miserable.
The issue now is not the validity of the crackdown or the decision to free Salvadorans from the scourge of the criminal gangs. For observers, analysts and human rights organizations, the question is at what price? How long will Salvadorans allow their basic constitutional rights to be suspended in the name of security? Are they prepared to live under the state of emergency indefinitely?
For decades, Salvadorans have suffered from criminal gangs that robbed, extorted, murdered, raped and terrorized the population. Now the vast majority of Salvadorans (and some in Latin America) support their president as the first leader to take the issue seriously.
In El Salvador there is little room for criticism or dissent about the state of emergency. In the country of more than six million, you are either for the president or against him; those who question Bukele’s heavy-handed policies are sternly rebuked by the president’s supporters and the Central American version of cancel culture (at best). To lawmakers, questioning his policies would be political suicide; according to a poll by the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica, in November last year, 89% of Salvadorans agreed with their president.
Bukele has effectively portrayed critics of his policies as unsympathetic to El Salvador’s bloody and painful history, describing rights groups, for example, as “not interested in the victims., they only defend murderers, as if they like to watch carnage.”
Media organizations and NGOs documenting human rights violations by his government are “partners of the gang members,” Bukele tells followers.
Javier Simán, a former presidential candidate, said in September 2021 that Bukele “used the power of the state to go against his critics” and that he “attacked and delegitimized civilian organizations”. Simán went on to say that Bukele has “used social media and government agencies to target those who criticize his government […] and journalists.”
In June last year, Amnesty International published a report titled “El Salvador: President Bukele plunges his country into a human rights crisis after three years of rule.” One section alleges government retaliation against five journalists, including three who were “forced to move or leave the country due to government harassment”.
The same report details the case of Dolores Almendares, a union leader, who was charged and detained for alleged “illegal gatherings”, although his family and union colleagues believe the detention could be linked to his defense of labor rights.
Juan Pappier, Human Rights Watch’s acting deputy director for America, recently told me that his organization has witnessed some of the abuses committed under Bukele’s administration, including the detention of innocent people.
“We have documented on the ground that some of these people [the detained] have nothing to do with gangs, are innocent Salvadorians, working people, children who have been arrested and are now facing Kafkian legal proceedings to prove that they have nothing to do with these criminal organizations,” Pappier said.
Bukele’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the subject. As a matter of policy, the Salvadoran president does not speak to the media, preferring to speak out on Twitter, where he often argues that human rights groups are more interested in defending the rights of criminals than law-abiding citizens.
In a tweet last April, Bukele acknowledged that mistakes were made in one case, saying, “There will always be a 1% error that a fair system must correct.”
But families of many of the detainees have been protesting for months, claiming their loved ones were arrested and accused of being gang members simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Maribel Flores, the mother of a detained woman, recently joined a group protesting Bukele’s policies at the headquarters of El Salvador’s Office for Human Rights in San Salvador, the capital, demanding an end to what she called “arbitrary detentions’.
Among those who believe Bukele’s policies are doing more harm than good are Rafael Ruiz and Norma Díaz. They are the parents of five children who live near San Salvador, the capital. They told DailyExpertNews that one of their sons was detained last April and a second in December. They are now both charged with gang crimes, though their parents insist they are innocent.
“They’re practically taking my life,” Díaz said as he choked. “My children are not criminals. They are hard-working, good people.”
“Little by little, one is consumed with the sadness of finding out why their children are in that place [jail]. Maybe they don’t give them medicine, or food, or anything,” Ruiz said.