The hell of the Exception Regime in El Salvador: Children imprisoned, indiscriminate arrests and deaths in prisons

More than a thousand minors (918 boys and 164 girls) were imprisoned at the end of August in El Salvador under the

, the last one on January 11. .

Among them are 21 minors between the ages of 12 and 13 who were sent to provisional detention, after the Legislative Assembly approved a Law in March 2022 that lowered the age of prosecution from 16 to 12 years for those accused of crimes. gang related.

This has been revealed by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) organization, which has had access to a database, presumably belonging to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security of El Salvador, where the "massive violations of due process, extreme overcrowding, in prisons and the death of 32 people in custody, mostly in the Izalco and La Esperanza prisons, known as Mariona".

This entity recalled that last November, the Salvadoran authorities reported that

The database reveals that the main tool of the Government of Nayib Bukele in its particular 'war' against the gangs has served to commit

, in the words of the acting director for the Americas of HRW, Tamara Taraciuk. Broner.

Thus, it criticizes that the information from the Ministry of Justice and Public Security reveals that "the Salvadoran authorities have subjected the more than 61,000 people detained by the police and the army, including hundreds of boys and girls, to extreme overcrowding in detention centers crowded".

According to official figures, only 3,000 of them have been released from prison, in many cases with alternative measures, while 58,000 are still incarcerated.

HRW details that a "reliable source" indicated that the database belongs to the Ministry led by Gustavo Villatoro, Bukele's right-hand man, although the organization wanted to make sure, for which it compared the names in the database with other sources, including cases documented by local organizations and identified more than 300 matches.

Specifically, it points out that "more than 39,000 people had been accused of the crime of illegal groups and more than 8,000 for being members of a 'terrorist organization,' while only 148 were accused of homicide and 303 of sexual assault. HRW explains that El Salvador defines the crime of illegal groups to criminalize not only the people who lead or participate in gangs, but also those who indirectly benefit from relations with these criminal groups, adding that Salvadoran law defines a "terrorist organization" as a broad form that "is not compatible with international standards".

For this reason, it denounces that

with no relevant connection to gang activities and does little to guarantee justice for the violent abuses of these criminal groups, such as murders and rapes. sexual".

prison overcrowding

As of August, HRW details that more than 50,000 people had been sent to provisional detention, placing the prison population in El Salvador at more than 86,000 inmates, which represents an overcrowding of 286 percent, taking into account that the prisons only have capacity for 30,000 inmates.

According to the database, as of August of last year, the Mariona prison had four times more detainees than it could hold, after going from 7,600 to 33,000, while the Izalco prison increased from 8,500 to 23,300, triple of its capacity.

Likewise, the document reveals that more than 7,900 women had been sent to provisional detention, which is double the total number of women who were detained in El Salvador in February 2021.

HRW and the Salvadoran organization Cristosal had already produced a report in December 2022 that concluded that "generalized human rights violations have been committed during the emergency regime, including mass arbitrary detentions, torture and other forms of mistreatment against detainees, death under custody and abusive criminal proceedings".

In addition, they denounced that in some cases,

Within the framework of the Exception Regime and phase five of the so-called Territorial Control Plan, 14,000 soldiers have come to surround large cities to "extract the plague" of gang members, whom Bukele accuses of being part of "international terrorist organizations". in reference to the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, which have "70,000 members."

Thus, HRW and Cristosal denounce that the security forces have carried out hundreds of "indiscriminate" operations, especially in low-income neighborhoods that have suffered for years from a lack of economic and educational opportunities.

In this way, they have warned that the mass arrests have led to the arrest of "hundreds of people with no apparent connection to the criminal activities of the gangs."

These organizations attribute all these "violations" to the "accelerated dismantling of democratic institutions led by Bukele since he took office in 2019", taking into account that currently,

For this reason, HRW and Cristosal ask the authorities of El Salvador to "replace" the Exception Regime with a "sustainable and respectful" strategy of human rights to "address gang violence and protect the population from the abuses that they commit".

However, Bukele does not have the slightest intention of going back on the aforementioned Regime approved in the Legislative Assembly after registering 87 violent deaths between March 25 and 27 of last year attributed to gangs.

This translates into the

of freedom of association and assembly, right of defense, term of administrative detention and inviolability of correspondence and telecommunications.

Until this regulation came into force, administrative detention was set at a maximum of 72 hours and can now be extended up to 15 days, while correspondence can be intercepted and telephone communications tapped.

During these months, Bukele even went so far as to instruct dozens of inmates to erase all the graffiti and badges from the graves of gang members in the cemeteries to erase all traces of memory of these criminal groups that emerged in the early 1990s and that, according to the Salvadoran president, have caused 120,000 deaths in the last 30 years.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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