In Focus

El Salvador’s ‘cool dictator’ wins re-election thanks to a gang crackdown – but many have paid a high price

Beloved by many in his country for a huge fall in murder and extortion rates, Nayib Bukele won by a landslide in the latest presidential election. But the cost has come in human rights. Rory Sullivan speaks to some of the thousands believed to have been wrongly caught up in the mass incarceration drive

Monday 05 February 2024 04:18 EST

A mural at the Zacamil apartment complex in Mejicanos depicting Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. It reads ‘Step by Step' (AFP via Getty Images)

When El Salvador’s populist president Nayib Bukele announced his “war against the gangs”, Rodrigo*, a young farmer in a remote, gang-controlled part of the country, was hopeful. At last, something might be done to stop the extortion, the threats, the rapes, the deaths that these criminal groups meted out on communities like his, he thought.

Central America’s smallest nation had been terrorised for decades by two main gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, which rose to prominence after the end of its civil war in 1992. The poverty and disgruntlement of young Salvadorans made recruitment easy.

With murder rates at staggeringly high levels, successive governments negotiated with the leaders of the gangs to bring about intermittent “truces”. Bukele’s administration was no different. However, an agreement brokered by his ministers collapsed in early 2022. In retaliation for the slight they felt, gang members unleashed a wave of murders in March, killing 87 people in just three days.

The young president’s forceful response seemed to catch the gangs off-guard. He introduced the “state of exception”, which gives the police and the army greater powers while limiting individual rights, allowing security forces to round up droves of suspected gang members without any investigation. To date, more than 75,000 people, more than one per cent of the Salvadoran population, have been detained.

Almost two years on from the start of the state of exception, it is still in force. Thanks to the dramatic drop in murders and extortion caused by his iron-fist approach, Bukele, a 42-year-old ex-advertising executive, is very popular both at home and across Latin America. He has backed this with headline-grabbing initiatives such as making El Salvador the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency Bitcoin legal tender and hosting the Miss Universe beauty pageant, all underpinned by a strong propaganda machine, with slickly produced social media videos.

A soldier guards a detained youth in San Salvador ahead of Sunday’s presidential election (AFP via Getty Images)

The leader – who once labelled himself “the world’s coolest dictator” – is was convincingly re-elected in the election on Sunday. It came after judges allied to his Nuevas Ideas [New Ideas] party allowed him to seek re-election, even though it is directly prohibited by six clauses of the constitution. Bukele declared himself the winner before official results were announced, claiming to have attained more than 85 per cent of the vote. Provisional results showed Bukele winning 83 per cent support with around a third of the ballots counted. His party is expected to win almost all of the 60 seats in the legislative body, tightening its grip on the country

Human rights organisations and civil society groups have hit out at the wrongful detention of people during the state of exception. Although no one knows the exact figure, rights groups say there are thousands of cases. Some will have been falsely denounced by jealous neighbours via anonymous phone calls, and rights groups say others will have simply been targeted to meet steep police arrest quotas. These inmates have little hope of release under the current system, which gives authorities three years to investigate alleged crimes and which allows mass trials to take place.

In Bukele’s mass-imprisonment drive, Rodrigo, from the west of the country, not far from the city of Santa Ana, was one of the unlucky ones. “When the state of emergency started, we felt relieved. We thought the situation would improve. But we never imagined that we’d be part of all this, that we’d end up where we are,” he said, sitting in the shade outside his house last autumn, several months after his release from prison.

Rodrigo was behind bars for the best part of a year. Like others, he pinballed between various prisons during his incarceration. He was only let out after randomly being selected to take a lie-detector test, whose results convinced the authorities that he had no gang links.

His ordeal began early one morning in his isolated village in the spring of 2022. As he made his way to work with a few older relatives, they came across a police patrol. Rodrigo says that without even asking their names, the officers stopped them on the pretext that they were gang members. They ended up in the nearest police station.

President Bukele speaks during the Miss Universe Competition in San Salvador in November (Getty Images)

The group soon experienced the cruelty of El Salvador’s jails. Rodrigo alleges they were greeted with violence when they reached one of the country’s largest prisons. Guards lopped off their hair with a knife to intimidate the new batch of prisoners, before showering them with hits and kicks. Rodrigo’s oldest relative bled from repeated truncheon blows, he says.

However, Rodrigo says the person who suffered the worst injuries was a young man who had taken a number of blows to his ribs. Over several days, Rodrigo says he and his relatives shouted for medical help from their severely overcrowded cell, as their fellow inmate continued to howl in agony.

“The guard arrived and said that if he was alive he didn’t need help,” according to Rodrigo. He alleges the guard said this: "The government says the only way you can leave here is dead. You’re a piece of rubbish and aren’t worth anything.”

The man died a short time later in the cell. His death was the first of many that Rodrigo says he witnessed in prison. The Salvadoran government claims inmates have died from "natural causes", but human rights groups have catalogued dozens of deaths under the state of exception they believe to be suspicious.

Rodrigo endured physical pain, too. “As a result of the dirty conditions, fungal infections appeared on people’s feet, hands, practically all over the body,” he says, adding that he had pus-filled wounds under his armpits.

Members of the Barrio 18 gang in a cell in Tecoluca, El Salvador (Getty Images)

After he received his freedom, a sympathetic judge, who he had gone to see as part of the terms of his release, told Rodrigo to leave the country for his own safety. Being recaptured is a real possibility under Bukele, the judge warned him. However, Rodrigo doesn’t have the money to go into exile and doesn’t know where he would go.

For now at least, Rodrigo, unlike some of his older male relatives, is out of prison. But he mainly spends time inside, afraid of the consequences of being out in public. “I feel oppressed. Because one doesn’t have freedom, even though you’re on the outside. It’s as if you were still a prisoner.”

Abraham Abrego, the director of strategic litigation at Cristosal, a prominent human rights organisation which works in Central America, says Bukele’s state of exception is likely to remain in force for a while yet. Even though the threat of the gangs has largely receded.

“The government has indicated that the state of exception will last for as long as the ‘war against the gangs’ continues. There’s always a new justification for extending it. But practically it’s turned into a permanent regime,” says Abrego.

He highlights just how unusual the measure is: “I think this is the longest period that the country has experienced with suspended rights. And there’s no war on.”

Police inspect a prison in San Salvador, where gang members serve their sentences (Presidencia El Salvador via Getty imagwes)

To his critics, Bukele has used the policy as a smokescreen for his consolidation of power.

Juan Pappier, deputy director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch, says it is understandable that many Salvadorans support Bukele’s state of exception given the decades of abuses that were perpetuated by the gangs. However, he stresses that arbitrary violence still exists, albeit in a different form.

“This state of exception has given the police and the military a carte blanche to commit all sorts of abuses against ordinary Salvadorans,” he alleges. “I think that El Salvador is moving from a country where large parts were controlled by criminal groups to a police state.”

Dolores Almendares, a trade unionist who lives a short drive north of San Salvador, the country’s capital, experienced this change firsthand in May 2022. Five police officers knocked on her door and asked her to follow them. She didn’t return for more than half a year, held on the common state of exception charge of “illicit association”.

“They asked me to accompany them because they wanted to ask me some questions. I don’t know what questions they wanted to ask me, because I was in prison for seven months and they didn’t ask me anything,” she says. “One supposes that the state of exception is for criminals. Not for one who earns their daily bread by working,” she adds.

A market in San Salvador selling items adorned with President Bukele’s face (AFP via Getty Images)

In the single mother-of-10’s absence, no one could pay the bills and her house’s light and water were consequently cut off. Her oldest daughter also had to quit her job and move home to look after her younger siblings.

Almendares says the hardest thing was the moment she returned. “I came back and my youngest said to me, ‘Mum, why did you go away on holiday?’ Everyone had tears in their eyes.”

Several hours’ drive to the east, Manuel de Jesus Gutierrez has also had to readjust to post-prison life. The boat driver was arrested along with some of his colleagues in mid-May 2022, before being released the following March.

What makes his detention more unusual is that he is from Espíritu Santo, an island in the Bay of Jiquilisco, where gangs are never believed to have had a presence. Of the 25 islanders arrested under the state of exception, only seven are free. Gutierrez’s nephew is one of those still in jail.

Reflecting on his time in prison, Gutiérrez says beatings, squalor and grim food were a constant. Items from food and medical packages sent by anxious family members often went missing, he adds. For him, the two main worries that hung over him in jail were “the anxiety to eat and the anxiety to know about my family”. As prisoners are mostly held incommunicado, they and their relatives are left in the dark about their loved ones’ welfare.

Gutierrez was told in February 2023 that he would be freed in a matter of days. “The two days came and went. One week passed, then another and then another. Until I’d almost forgotten about it,” he says.