El Salvador: News & Updates

Like other sectors of the population, artisanal fishers work in almost absolute vulnerability, without any social measures to protect them or provide adequate coverage from the accidents or illnesses they face on a daily basis, and with only precarious health systems to rely on. According to a FAO report from January 2021, in El Salvador in 2018 the fishing sector employed about 30,730 people, with a total fleet of 13,764 boats, 55 of which were used by the industrial sector and the rest by artisanal fishers, 50 percent of whose boats were motorized. FAO urged the countries of Central America to begin efforts to incorporate artisanal fisheries into national social security policies, during the Mesoamerican Forum on Social Protection in Artisanal Fisheries and Small-scale Aquaculture, held in May in Panama City. The UN agency pointed out that worldwide, small-scale fishers account for half of the world’s fisheries production and employ 90 percent of the sector’s workforce, half of whom are women.

On April 27, a group of progressive Members of Congress called for withholding all military and security aid to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in light of “human rights violations” resulting from “state violence.” In parallel letters to the House Appropriations subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations and to the subcommittee on Defense, which will soon propose 2023 spending bills for each department, the members expressed concern regarding “the use of U.S.-trained and equipped security forces for civilian repression” and sought support from committee leadership to “restrict police and military financing” to all three countries.

Three years have passed since the end of the former leftist administration in El Salvador, and popular social movement groups are decrying that the country is dangerously heading towards the consolidation of a dictatorship. This was expressed on June 1st by hundreds of people who gathered in various parts of El Salvador and in other cities abroad, such as Washington D.C., to denounce human rights setbacks under President Nayib Bukele on his third anniversary in office. As a representative of the Popular Resistance and Rebellion Bloc, Marisela Ramírez, summarized, the Bukele’s administration has meant “three years of the most serious and systematic violations of human rights since the Peace Accords were signed, with persecution of the press, political, religious and academic opponents, a dramatic rise in disappearances and the tripling of the number of migrants fleeing the country for fear of violence or hunger in search of a better life and also political asylum. [In sum] an inadmissible, intolerable, and condemnable setback.”

Since May, there has been an alarming trend of social movement leaders being arbitrarily arrested in the context of the nationwide State of Exception. Under the State of Exception, which was approved on March 27 for a 30-day period, but which has already been extended twice, raising concerns that the Bukele administration seeks to maintain its expanded power in perpetuity, constitutional rights such as the right to due process and the right to defense are suspended. A person can be arrested without a warrant and held for up to 15 days without charges being presented. As of June 5, the government reports that the total number of people arrested has since risen to over 37,000. As news outlet Gato Encerrado has reported, the number of people incarcerated in El Salvador has doubled within the span of less than three months.

In the Salvadoran Constitution, Article 29 establishes the Regime of Exception aka State of Emergency, to respond to extreme circumstances, such as war, invasion of territory, rebellion, sedition, catastrophe, epidemic, or other general calamities, or serious disturbances of public order. Thus, it is possible to suspend freedom of movement, expression, association, assembly, and inviolability of communications, among other rights. At midnight on March 27, 2022, the Legislative Assembly, which was by that time fully controlled by the ruling party, imposed an Regime of Exception of for 30 days, in response to a spike in homicides that claimed the lives of 62 people in a single day. These are the articles that were affected by the 30-day suspension.

In El Salvador there are at least 3,000 Water Administration boards, community associations that play an essential role in the supply and management of water resources in rural areas and the peripheries of cities, in the face of the State’s failure to provide these areas with water. This northern area covering several municipalities has been in conflict in recent years since residents of these communities began to fight against an urban development project by one of the country’s most powerful families, the Dueñas.

Amnesty International has accused El Salvador’s government of committing “massive human rights violations” during an extraordinary security crackdown that has seen more than 36,000 people arrested in just over two months. The clampdown was orchestrated by the Central American country’s authoritarian-minded president, Nayib Bukele, in late March after a sudden eruption of bloodshed that saw 87 murders in a single weekend. Bukele’s response to those killings was swift and severe, with pro-government lawmakers approving a draconian state of exception which entered its third month last week. This week, Bukele’s security minister, Gustavo Villatoro, claimed 36,277 people had been detained since their “war on gangs” began: 31,163 men and 5,114 women.

Please see a summary of the letters we sent to heads of state and other high-level officials in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, urging their swift action in response to human rights abuses occurring in their countries.  We join with civil society groups in Latin America to (1) protect people living under threat, (2) demand investigations into human rights crimes, and (3) bring human rights criminals to justice…..IRTF’s Rapid Response Network (RRN) volunteers write six letters in response to urgent human rights cases each month. We send copies of these letters to US ambassadors, embassy human rights officers, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, regional representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and desk officers at the US State Department. To read the letters, see https://www.irtfcleveland.org/content/rrn , or ask us to mail you hard copies.

Police have been told to fill an arrest quota since the start of the state of exception, according to Marvin Reyes, general secretary for the Movement of Workers of the Salvadoran National Police, a police union with roughly 3,000 members nationwide, who said he has received reports from dozens of members of the organisation. The quota varies depending on the size of the municipality, and has fluctuated throughout the state of exception, Reyes said. The countrywide quota reached as high as 1,000 per day around the end of April, then dropped to about 500 daily arrests across different police sectors, he told Al Jazeera. As of May 25, the National Police said more than 34,500 people had been arrested for alleged gang ties and other gang-related offences, such as extortion. Bukele has said there are an estimated 70,000 gang members in El Salvador, and on Wednesday, the legislature voted to extend the state of exception for another 30 days to continue the government’s “war” on gangs. Now, there is no daily quota but police must meet a general goal post by the end of the state of exception, he said. The military is also expected to contribute to this quota by identifying people for arrest and then referring them to the police, Reyes said.

Legislators in El Salvador have extended a state of emergency backed by President Nayib Bukele for a third month amid a widespread crackdown on gang violence. Sixty-seven members of the Latin American country’s 84-seat legislature voted on Wednesday for the 30-day extension of emergency powers, which were first approved in March following a surge in gang killings that included 62 murders in a 24 hour period. “This war is going to continue for as long as necessary and to the extent that the public continues to demand it,” Villatoro said. “We are going to continue to confront this cancer, and we have said it before and we stand by it, this war will continue until the gangs are eradicated from the territory of El Salvador.”