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The Problem With El Salvador’s Crime Numbers
Bukele’s government has been undercounting homicides since its 2022 crackdown.
If the bodies of the 85,000 people detained without warrants bear any marks, they are more likely those of scabies and torture rather than tattoos. Testimonies gathered by Cristosal from former prisoners describe horrific overcrowding, disease, and systematic denial of food, clothing, medicine, and basic hygiene in El Salvador’s older prisons.
Cristosal and other human rights organizations have documented credible evidence of sexual assault and rape against women and children detained under the state of exception. The combination of harsh conditions and systematic physical torture has caused the deaths of at least 367 people, according to documentary, photographic, and forensic evidence gathered by Cristosal’s investigators. Salvadoran authorities deny that torture and killings occur in the country’s prisons.
In the majority of those cases, our researchers found that detainees had no criminal records and no evidence of gang tattoos. None had been convicted of any crime at the time of their deaths. According to testimonies of people who knew the deceased, the majority had no links to gangs other than the fact that many have themselves been victims of gang violence.
Instead, they were poor, surviving on the margins of the economy—often in centers of gang control that became focal points of the government’s mass roundups. They were farmers, unionists, day laborers, and informal merchants; four were newborn babies born in prison to mothers who were pregnant at the time of their arrests.
Cristosal’s testimonial evidence indicates that the death toll in prisons during the state of exception is likely much higher than 367. But the lack of public information about and transparency within the Salvador penal system obstructs more systematic monitoring.
Most family members of prisoners don’t know if their relatives are dead or alive.
El Salvador’s prisons have become a focal point for criminality and corruption involving members of Bukele’s security cabinet. Osiris Luna, the director of the prisons and a Bukele loyalist, was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2021 for leading secret meetings in prisons in which the Bukele administration provided gangs with financial incentives and protection from extradition if they kept incidents of violence low.
In these illicit dealings, “gang leadership also agreed to provide political support to the NuevasIdeas political party [Bukele’s party] in upcoming elections,” Treasury wrote in its designation of Luna.
In 2021, the Bukele administration released a high-ranking gang member from maximum security prison, despite the fact that he faced U.S. extradition requests to face terrorism charges in a New York federal court. Treasury also accused Luna of conspiring with his mother “in a scheme to steal and re-sell government purchased staple goods that were originally destined for COVID-19 pandemic relief.” According to an El Faro investigation, Luna employed prison labor to repackage the stolen pandemic aid.
Despite international sanctions and credible allegations of acts corruption, torture, rape, and killings in the prisons under his authority, Luna has thus far been immune from prosecution. His authority over El Salvador’s prisons is unrestrained by judicial oversight.
Cristosal has made multiple requests to Salvadoran courts to order alternatives to pretrial detention for people with physical and mental disabilities, chronic illness, and who are pregnant. In the rare case that courts do order a prisoner’s release, prison authorities often block them from being returned to their families. Relatives fear that may be because the prisoners are no longer alive.
Those families have learned—painfully—that the government institutions mandated to protect them now do the bidding of the president rather than the law.
In El Salvador, it often falls on the mothers, sisters, and wives of the thousands of unjustly imprisoned people to knock on the doors of prisons, courts, or the public defender’s office to demand their freedom. In return, the relatives are threatened with prison themselves.
Last year, a coalition of family members of people detained under the state of exception made a two-day march from their coastal villages to Bukele’s house in the capital to demand the right to visit their relatives in prison. They just wanted to know if their loved ones were still alive, they told media.
Under the state of exception, El Salvador’s prisons have become a system where undesirables are exiled in the model of penal colonies favored by empires and autocrats.
Now that Trump has taken Bukele up on his “generous offer,” as Rubio called it, Americans, and the families of migrants who hoped to call the United States home, should prepare to join their Salvadoran counterparts in the deceptive bargain of security in exchange for rights.
All will learn of the horror and isolation of confronting the repressive power of a state that has declared you an enemy. They will learn to count the sleepless nights of not knowing if their loved ones are dead or alive. To stop it, they will have to become unrelenting in both hope and action to safeguard the lives and freedom of their loved ones—disappeared to Bukele’s penal colony, beyond the reach of rule of law, unprotected from corruption, torture, and killing.
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