El Salvador President Nayib Bukele framed his be offering to accommodate “dangerous American criminals” and “criminals from any country” as a win-win for all.
The cost for shifting detainees to a newly constructed Salvadoran mega-prison “would be relatively low” for the U.S. however sufficient to make El Salvador’s “entire prison system sustainable,” Bukele wrote in a put up at the social media platform X dated Feb. 3, 2025.
What used to be left unsaid is that the folks can be knowingly positioned into a jail gadget wherein a spread of assets have reported popular human rights abuses by the hands of state forces.
A primary switch of U.S. deportees from Venezuela has now arrived into that gadget. On March 16, the U.S. authorities flew round 250 deportees to El Salvador in spite of a pass judgement on’s order briefly blocking off the transfer. Bukele later posted a video on-line appearing the deportees arriving in El Salvador with their fingers and toes shackled and forcibly bent over through armed guards.
As professionals who’ve researched human rights and penitentiary stipulations in El Salvador, we’ve got documented an alarming democratic decline amid Bukele’s makes an attempt to hide ongoing violence each in prisons and all the way through the rustic.
We have now additionally heard firsthand of the human rights abuses that deportees and Salvadorans alike say they have got suffered whilst incarcerated in El Salvador, and we’ve got labored on loads of asylum instances as skilled witnesses, attesting in U.S. immigration court docket in regards to the nature and scope of human rights abuses within the nation. We’re deeply involved each over the stipulations into which deportees are arriving and as to what the U.S. management’s choice alerts about its commitments to world human rights requirements.
Eroding democratic norms
Bukele has led El Salvador since 2019, profitable the presidency through vowing to crack down at the crime and corruption that had plagued the country. However he has additionally circumvented democratic norms – for instance, through rewriting the charter in order that he might be reelected in 2024.
For the previous 3 years, Bukele has ruled with few assessments and balances beneath a self-imposed “state of exception.” This emergency standing has allowed Bukele to droop many rights as he wages what he calls a “war on gangs.”
The crackdown manifests in mass arbitrary arrests of any person who suits stereotypical demographic traits of gang participants, like having tattoos, a previous legal file and even simply “looking nervous.”
Because of the continuing mass arrests, El Salvador now has the absolute best incarceration price on the earth. The share of its inhabitants that El Salvador incarcerates is greater than triple that of the U.S. and double that of the following nearest nation, Cuba.
Most secure nation in Latin The united states?
Bukele’s tough-on-gangs character has earned him popular recognition at house and in another country – he has fostered an instantaneous friendship with the brand new U.S. management particularly.
However keeping up this recognition has concerned, it’s extensively alleged, manipulating crime statistics, attacking reporters who criticize him and denying involvement in a extensively documented secret gang pact that unraveled simply prior to the beginning of the state of exception.
Bukele and pro-government Salvadoran media insist that the crackdown on gangs has remodeled El Salvador into the most secure nation in Latin The united states.
However at the floor, Salvadorans have described how police, army staff and Mexican cartels have taken over the exploitative practices prior to now performed through gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18. One Salvadoran girl whose son died in penitentiary only some days after he used to be arbitrarily detained advised a reporter from Al Jazeera: “One is always afraid. Before it was fear of the gangs, now it’s also the security forces who take innocent people.”
Torture as state coverage
Bukele’s crackdown on gangs has come at an enormous value to human rights – and nowhere is that this noticed greater than in El Salvador’s penitentiary gadget.
Bukele has ordered a verbal exchange blackout between incarcerated folks and their family members. This implies no visits, no letters and no telephone calls.
Such loss of touch makes it just about unattainable for folks to decide the well-being in their incarcerated members of the family, a lot of whom are oldsters with small children now cared for through prolonged circle of relatives.
In spite of the blackout, students, world and nationwide rights’ teams and investigative reporters were in a position to building up an image of stipulations within El Salvador’s prisons via interviews with sufferers and their members of the family, scientific information and forensic research of instances of penitentiary deaths. What they describe is a hellscape.
Incarcerated Salvadorans are packed into grossly overcrowded cells, crushed continuously through penitentiary staff and denied drugs even if they’re to be had. Inmates are incessantly subjected to punishments together with meals deprivation and electrical shocks. Certainly, a U.S. State Division’s 2023 nation file on El Salvador famous the “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”
The human rights group Cristosal estimates that loads have died from malnutrition, blunt power trauma, strangulation and loss of lifesaving scientific remedy.
Ceaselessly, their our bodies are buried through authorities staff in mass graves with out notifying households.
Even supposing El Salvador is a signatory to the United International locations’ Conference In opposition to Torture, Amnesty Global concluded after a couple of missions to the rustic and interviews with sufferers and their households that there’s “systemic use of torture” in Salvadoran prisons.
Likewise, a case-by-case find out about through Cristosal, which incorporated forensic research of exhumed our bodies of people that died in penitentiary, decided in 2024 that “torture has become a state policy.”
‘At risk of irreparable harm’
What makes this the entire extra being worried is the dimensions of attainable abuse.
El Salvador now properties a jail inhabitants of round 110,000 – greater than thrice the collection of inmates prior to the state of exception started.
To extend the rustic’s capability for ongoing mass incarceration, Bukele constructed and opened the Terrorism Confinement Middle mega-prison in 2023. An research of the middle the use of satellite tv for pc photos confirmed that if the penitentiary had been to achieve its complete intended capability of 40,000, every prisoner would have not up to 2 toes of area of their cells.
It’s to this penitentiary that deportees from the U.S. were taken.
President Donald Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in shifting the detainees. The wartime act has been invoked simplest thrice, together with to justify Eastern internment all the way through International Struggle II.
There are critical issues over each the method and the legality of shifting U.S. prisoners to a country that has now not secure the human rights of its detained inhabitants.
El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Middle mega-prison.
El Salvador Presidency/Handout/Anadolu by way of Getty Pictures
Whilst Trump stated the deportees had been participants of the gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13, the incarcerated folks didn’t obtain a listening to to contest allegations in their gang club, eliciting questions as to the viability of that declare.
Additionally, the settlement wherein the Trump management is looking for to transferring migrants detained within the U.S. to El Salvador faces scrutiny beneath world legislation, given what is understood in regards to the nation’s penitentiary stipulations.
Global human rights is ruled through rules that limit countries from shifting folks into hurt’s manner, be it returning overseas nationals to international locations the place “there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at risk of irreparable harm,” or shifting detainees to jurisdictions wherein they’re prone to being tortured or merciless, inhuman or degrading remedy.
The efforts of human rights organizations, reporters and students to file penitentiary stipulations level to an unequivocal conclusion: El Salvador does now not meet the phrases important to give protection to the human rights of deported and incarcerated migrants.
On the contrary, the federal government of El Salvador has again and again been accused through rights teams of committing crimes in opposition to humanity, together with in opposition to its penitentiary inhabitants.
