El Salvador President Nayib Bukele framed his provide to accommodate “dangerous American criminals” and “criminals from any country” as a win-win for all.
The charge for transferring 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 on the social media platform X dated Feb. 3, 2025.
What was left unsaid is that the people can be knowingly positioned into a jail system during which a variety of sources have reported widespread human rights abuses by the hands of state forces.
A primary switch of U.S. deportees from Venezuela has now arrived into that system. On March 16, the U.S. authorities flew round 250 deportees to El Salvador regardless of a decide’s order briefly blocking the transfer. Bukele later posted a video on-line exhibiting the deportees arriving in El Salvador with their palms and ft shackled and forcibly bent over by armed guards.
As consultants who’ve researched human rights and jail circumstances in El Salvador, we’ve documented an alarming democratic decline amid Bukele’s makes an attempt to hide ongoing violence each in prisons and all through the nation.
We now have additionally heard firsthand of the human rights abuses that deportees and Salvadorans alike say they’ve suffered whereas incarcerated in El Salvador, and we’ve labored on a whole bunch of asylum circumstances as skilled witnesses, testifying 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 circumstances into which deportees are arriving and as to what the U.S. administration’s determination indicators about its commitments to worldwide human rights requirements.
Eroding democratic norms
Bukele has led El Salvador since 2019, profitable the presidency by vowing to crack down on the crime and corruption that had plagued the nation. However he has additionally circumvented democratic norms – for instance, by rewriting the structure in order that he may very well be reelected in 2024.
For the previous three years, Bukele has ruled with few checks and balances underneath 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 anybody who suits stereotypical demographic traits of gang members, like having tattoos, a previous legal document and even simply “looking nervous.”
Because of the continuing mass arrests, El Salvador now has the best incarceration fee on the earth. The proportion 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 America?
Bukele’s tough-on-gangs persona has earned him widespread recognition at dwelling and overseas – he has fostered a direct friendship with the brand new U.S. administration specifically.
However sustaining this recognition has concerned, it’s broadly alleged, manipulating crime statistics, attacking journalists who criticize him and denying involvement in a broadly documented secret gang pact that unraveled simply earlier than 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 America.
However on the bottom, Salvadorans have described how police, army personnel and Mexican cartels have taken over the exploitative practices beforehand carried out by gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18. One Salvadoran girl whose son died in jail only a few days after he was 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 seen greater than in El Salvador’s jail system.
Bukele has ordered a communication blackout between incarcerated folks and their family members. This implies no visits, no letters and no cellphone calls.
Such lack of contact makes it practically unimaginable for folks to find out the well-being of their incarcerated relations, a lot of whom are dad and mom with younger kids now cared for by prolonged household.
Regardless of the blackout, students, worldwide and nationwide rights’ teams and investigative journalists have been in a position to construct up an image of circumstances inside El Salvador’s prisons via interviews with victims and their relations, medical data and forensic evaluation of circumstances of jail deaths. What they describe is a hellscape.
Incarcerated Salvadorans are packed into grossly overcrowded cells, crushed repeatedly by jail personnel and denied medicines even when they’re accessible. Inmates are often subjected to punishments together with meals deprivation and electrical shocks. Certainly, a U.S. State Division’s 2023 nation report on El Salvador famous the “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.”
The human rights group Cristosal estimates that a whole bunch have died from malnutrition, blunt power trauma, strangulation and lack of lifesaving medical therapy.
Typically, their our bodies are buried by authorities staff in mass graves with out notifying households.
Though El Salvador is a signatory to the United Nations’ Conference In opposition to Torture, Amnesty Worldwide concluded after a number of missions to the nation and interviews with victims and their households that there’s “systemic use of torture” in Salvadoran prisons.
Likewise, a case-by-case research by Cristosal, which included forensic evaluation of exhumed our bodies of people that died in jail, decided in 2024 that “torture has become a state policy.”
‘At risk of irreparable harm’
What makes this all of the extra worrying is the size of potential abuse.
El Salvador now homes a jail inhabitants of round 110,000 – greater than thrice the variety of inmates earlier than the state of exception started.
To extend the nation’s capability for ongoing mass incarceration, Bukele constructed and opened the Terrorism Confinement Heart mega-prison in 2023. An evaluation of the middle utilizing satellite tv for pc footage confirmed that if the jail have been to succeed in its full supposed capability of 40,000, every prisoner would have lower than 2 ft of area of their cells.
It’s to this jail that deportees from the U.S. have been taken.
President Donald Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in transferring the detainees. The wartime act has been invoked solely thrice, together with to justify Japanese internment throughout World Battle II.
There are critical considerations over each the method and the legality of transferring U.S. prisoners to a nation that has not protected the human rights of its detained inhabitants.
El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Heart mega-prison.
El Salvador Presidency/Handout/Anadolu through Getty Photographs
Whereas Trump mentioned the deportees have been members of the gangs Tren de Aragua and MS-13, the incarcerated people didn’t obtain a listening to to contest allegations of their gang membership, eliciting questions as to the viability of that declare.
Furthermore, the settlement via which the Trump administration is searching for to transferring migrants detained within the U.S. to El Salvador faces scrutiny underneath worldwide legislation, given what is thought in regards to the nation’s jail circumstances.
Worldwide human rights is ruled by legal guidelines that prohibit nations from transferring folks into hurt’s approach, be it returning international nationals to international locations the place “there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at risk of irreparable harm,” or transferring detainees to jurisdictions during which they’re vulnerable to being tortured or merciless, inhuman or degrading therapy.
The efforts of human rights organizations, journalists and students to doc jail circumstances level to an unequivocal conclusion: El Salvador doesn’t meet the phrases obligatory to guard the human rights of deported and incarcerated migrants.
On the contrary, the federal government of El Salvador has repeatedly been accused by rights teams of committing crimes in opposition to humanity, together with in opposition to its jail inhabitants.
