Reports on El Salvador's State of Exception and Prisons

Izalco prison

Last month human rights groups released important reports documenting human rights abuses suffered under the State of Exception and within the country's prisons.  El Salvador is now in its fourth year under the "emergency" measures which define the new normal in the county.

Six Salvadoran human rights organizations released a report titled  3 Years of the State of Exception: Systematic Torture in the Prisons of El Salvador.  The report comprehensively gathers data about the 85,000 persons captured during the State of Exception.  Their study makes the important point that more than 100,000 persons are held in old prisons in a system designed to hold 28,000 persons, while the CECOT mega-prison purportedly has a capacity of 40,000 but only holds 14,000 (including 255 delivered into the prison by the United States).  The report gathers descriptions of the poor conditions and abuses inside those overcrowded prisons from more than 30 persons who were subsequently released under orders of supervision.

The report concludes:

The data from registered cases, documented by the signatory organizations, demonstrate the arbitrary nature of the mass arrests that have occurred in the country. But even more serious is what has been gradually revealed: Salvadoran prisons are spaces of institutionalized torture. "Welcome to hell," a phrase that has been recorded in various cases, is the clear statement of guard staff who have established a practice of how they treat people deprived of their liberty: beatings; physical punishment, including sexual violence; food and water restrictions; inhumane overcrowding; the obvious decision not to provide medical care or treatment; the psychological game that extends not only to the last second of detention, but is also maintained with harassment and surveillance of the victims and their families when they try to reclaim what little life they have left. Everything documented in this report, and in others already made public by organizations and media outlets, is compelling evidence of an institutionalized policy of torture by the Salvadoran State.

The Salvadoran human rights group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario ("SJH") has focused on documenting deaths within the prison system in Three Year Report: Prisoners Who Died During the State of Exception in El Salvador. SJH believes that there may have been more than 1000 deaths within the Salvadoran prisons during the State of Exception.  The study analyzes the 370 deaths for which SJH has been able to obtain evidence. The group reported that 37% of the deaths were the result of violence and 33% from some type of medical neglect of conditions the person had when arrested or developed while in prison.   The report also details the deaths of four babies.

The investigative journalists at El Faro published For Sale in Bukele’s Prisons: Calls, Letters, Conjugal Visits.  El Faro documented a network of prison corruption "including the payment for [family] visitation of hundreds of dollars and the bartering of construction materials or office goods; and, for thousands of dollars, the admission to a private hospital of inmates who are not ill."