Silence regarding the State of Exception in El Salvador is not an option
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 of adults and four children in custody of the State.
Among the report's conclusions:
In this context, during the second year in force of the emergency regime, arbitrary and illegal detentions continued; the de facto suspension of procedural guarantees was worsened; torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of people held in prisons continued, in conditions that sometimes caused death; at the same time that there was lack of transparency and denial of information about security policies and the situation of imprisoned people. There is also evidence of the consolidation of a framework of impunity for police and judicial actors involved in abuses and illegal acts.
The prison system is increasingly causing the deaths of incarcerated persons through inadequate care and neglect:
The health conditions of people who have been detained for many months—some have been in preventive detention for more than two years—is, according to the testimonies collected, increasingly critical. Those admitted with previous illnesses or health problems often do not receive the prescribed medical treatments nor are medications purchased by their relatives allowed to enter. Sometimes, they are not taken to their medical appointments either, which worsens their health and in some cases has caused deaths.
The report has a section which focused on the suffering of women incarcerated during the regime including sexual abuse:
Cristosal has also verified cases of rape, abuse and sexual assault suffered by detained women, committed both by prison guards and by other women. Some women in prison, say the complainants, are forced to provide sexual services in exchange for medicine, clothing or food.
The human rights organization also documented women suffering miscarriages, stillbirths and other pregnancy complications while in custody due to a lack of medical care.
Among the findings of the report regarding prison deaths:
- Cristosal could verify the deaths of 261 adults and four children in prison.
- Two of the four children were living with their incarcerated mothers when they became ill and died, two others were unborn children lost in the final weeks of pregnancies.
- 176 children have been left orphaned as a result of parents dying while in the prisons
- At least 88 of 261 deaths within prisons showed evidence that the death was the result of a criminal act.
- At least 45 persons died as a result of illnesses contracted while in prison.
- Only 24 of 261 deaths were persons who had gang-related tattoos on their bodies.
Cristosal also studied the failures of the legal system under the State of Exception. Only 34 of 1178 legal cases studied by Cristosal included charges for anything other than unspecified gang affiliation. No specific criminal act such as extortion, robbery or murder was attributed to the vast majority of defendants.
And even with these charges, there was rarely any actual evidence shared with the courts:
Even without concrete evidence, the Attorney General's Office filed criminal cases against all the detained people and requested their pre-trial detention. Without providing evidence, prosecutors attributed a rank within the gangs to hundreds of detainees, but the fact that in 93.3% of the cases they were low-level roles demonstrates that the represson of the regime is aimed at mass arrests and future sentences. and not at the dismantling of gang structures and the trial of their top leaders. Cristosal's investigation also established that, during the initial hearings, the judges against Organized Crime limit themselves to assessing whether there are merits for granting alternative measures to prison, but do not analyze the sufficiency, legality or illegality of the alleged evidence offered against defendants.
Read the entire Cristosal report here.
It is true that the homicide rate is at historic lows in El Salvador and that communities are free from control by the street gangs. But silence is not an option if Salvadorans are to evaluate the degree of suffering and abuse of human rights that the Bukele government has inflicted in pursuit of that goal.
Read my series of posts from the second anniversary of the State of Exception:
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