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People incarcerated in El Salvador, where more than 34,000 people have been detained as part of the Bukele administration’s “war against gangs.”
Nayib Bukele became the forty-third president of El Salvador on June 1, 2019. As the country commemorates the third year of his administration, the legislature approved another thirty-day extension of a controversial “state of exception” to combat gangs, which further compounds fears among observers and human rights defenders of the authoritarian leanings of the administration.
“It has been a disaster for human rights,” Juan Pappier, a senior investigator with Human Rights Watch, tells The Progressive. “This regime of exemption that has brought with it such serious violations of human rights, only puts more Salvadorans at risk.”
“I know people who have sent their children to the United States because they don’t want their children to be captured. Not because they are linked [to gangs], but because there are no rights.”
The declaration, issued on March 27, came after a weekend when more than eighty people were killed across the small country. Since it was approved, more than 34,000 people have been detained as part of the administration’s “war against gangs.” It suspends constitutional rights and empowers security forces to make arrests, something that Bukele has suggested will be a model for the rest of the region.
“At the moment a mechanism doesn’t exist to inform the people [of what happened to their loved ones], there is no register of detained people,” Sonia Rubio, a lawyer and human rights defender with the Due Process of Law Foundation in El Salvador, tells The Progressive. “The state has not guaranteed the right to information. They do not know with certainty.”
The majority of those arrested have been young men between twenty and forty years old. This has placed a burden on women who have needed to care for and financially support their families alone in their absence.
Human Rights organizations have documented the widespread violation of rights under the emergency declaration. According to a report by Human Rights Watch and Salvadoran NGO Cristosal, people detained under the state of exception are being charged with “illicit association,” or associating with gangs or criminal groups, which is often not the case.
“We are talking about cases of arbitrary arrests, which are occurring massively in the country without evidence that justifies these arrests and without arrest warrants,” Pappier says. “And we are talking about several cases of forced disappearances.”
These have resulted in a number of deaths in prison, as there has been a sharp increase in the prison population.
“All this has further overloaded the prison system,” Pappier says. “If the numbers of detained people provided by the government are true, we are at prison congestion rates that surely have dramatic consequences for the living conditions of people who are deprived of their liberty.”
Bukele has regularly threatened to revoke all food to imprisoned people accused of having a gang affiliation. “This is generating an almost unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the country,” Rubio says.
The state of exception has also resulted in an increase in migration from El Salvador.
A labor activist, who asked to remain anonymous, tells The Progressive: “I know people who have sent their children to the United States because they don’t want their children to be captured. Not because they are linked [to gangs], but because there are no rights.”
On Wednesday, May 11, British officials announced that they were implementing a visa requirement for citizens from El Salvador after authorities noticed a spike in asylum claims. Data suggests that cases of Salvadorans requesting asylum have increased in the last few months.
According to other data, from the Guatemalan Migration Institute, in the last two months of the state of exception in El Salvador, forty-five Salvadorans have requested asylum in Guatemala. Others have passed through Guatemala in the hopes of reaching the north.
Since assuming office in 2019, Bukele has been accused of taking an authoritarian path. In his three years in office, Bukele has consolidated power around himself and his political party, Nuevas Ideas.
Among the first actions that raised fears of budding authoritarianism took place in February 2020 when Bukele entered the Salvadoran legislative branch backed by heavily armed soldiers in order to force through the approval of a loan for millions of dollars to combat gang activity. The loan was eventually approved.
Bukele’s party won a majority in the country’s legislative branch in 2020. Following the victory, the Salvadoran congress voted to purge the supreme court of five magistrates and to replace them with allies of the administration.
During the state of exception, the government has reformed the legal code to prosecute gang members more quickly. These efforts have also impacted the press, which can face legal challenges for reporting on gang activities.
“He has dedicated himself to dismantling, destroying democratic institutions and checks and balances,” Pappier says. “And he has done it at such a speed that in two years, two or three years, he has achieved what Hugo Chávez achieved in Venezuela in a decade.”
Throughout this consolidation of power, the Bukele administration has distanced itself and the country, and taken a more hostile relationship with the Biden Administration and U.S. Democrats. In November 2021, the United States paused relations with the Central American country due to the Bukele administration’s “lack of interest in dialogue.”
Bukele has often governed via Twitter through the posting of controversial tweets such as the call for the state of exception.
His tweets have touched on political divisions in the United States, too, seeking to stoke division.
“The most powerful country in the world is falling so fast that it makes you rethink what are the real reasons,” Bukele tweeted. “Something so big and powerful can’t be destroyed so quickly, unless the enemy comes from within.”
Yet, in spite of these authoritarian and divisive tendencies, Bukele continues to have a high public approval rating, according to surveys in El Salvador. This is in part thanks to Bukele’s populist narrative that relies on an “us vs. them” brand of rhetoric.
“The majority of citizens are willing to give up some spaces of freedom or even rights, as long as [the government] can guarantee their security,” Rubio says.
This is reflective of a common trend in the region.