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El Salvador: News & Updates

El Salvador is the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America. The US-backed civil war, which erupted after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980, lasted 12 years (1980-92), killing 70,000 people and forcing 20% of the nation’s five million people to seek refuge in the US.

Learn more here.

News Article

Salvadoran political prisoner Atilio Montalvo is finally home with his family!

Montalvo, a signer of the 1992 Peace Accords on behalf of the FMLN and a leader of the National Alliance for a Peaceful El Salvador, had been unjustly imprisoned for 13 months without a trial. His fragile health was deteriorating rapidly but it took until a recent hospitalization, the courageous testimony of his family, and a renewed wave of public pressure for the courts to finally grant his release to house arrest.

Atilio – known to many as Chamba Guerra – is still in critical condition, but his family is hopeful that he will improve with access to the medical care he needs.

We are grateful to his family, to the Committee of Family Members of the Politically Imprisoned and Persecuted (COFAPPES) and to all the other popular movement organizations that tirelessly campaigned for his freedom.

We are also thankful to all of YOU who helped keep our international solidarity going strong. Every donation, every email, every social media share, and every vigil made a difference.

Now the struggle continues to free the other leaders from the National Alliance for a Peaceful El Salvador, all political prisoners and all those unjustly detained in Bukele’s prisons and to end U.S. support for repression.

¡La lucha sigue!

-all of us at CISPES

News Article

In exchange for jailing more than 200 deportees, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has become a favorite of the Trump administration.

For the U.S. government, sending deportees accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador fits with President Trump’s promise to aggressively deport undocumented migrants and to crack down on crime.

For El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, the rewards appear to have included, among other things, a White House visit and stamp of approval, despite widespread concerns over Mr. Bukele’s crackdown on civil liberties.

News Article

The arrest of López, a prominent lawyer in El Salvador who helped uncover alleged government corruption, has become emblematic of the increasing authoritarianism of President Nayib Bukele.

The arrests are part of an escalating crackdown by Bukele on the last bastion of dissent in a country where he already controls all state institutions, analysts and activists say. López’s arrest and a new law targeting nongovernmental organizations have accelerated an exodus of civil society: In recent weeks, dozens of academics, lawyers, researchers, human rights defenders and journalists have fled the country.

Their departures resemble the flights of critics from autocratic regimes in Nicaragua and Venezuela, but with a key difference. This time, the United States isn’t condemning the repression — it’s deepening ties with its author.

The Trump administration, which is paying Bukele’s government to imprison migrants deported from the U.S., is praising his leadership and holding him up as a model for the region. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau traveled to El Salvador last week as part of his first foreign trip, the purpose of which was to “further strengthen diplomatic ties and cooperation.”

News Article
Ruth Eleonora López, an anticorruption lawyer from the well-known human rights organization Cristosal got arrested on May 18. Her first court hearing was more than two weeks after the arrest.
 
El Salvador’s constitution gives authorities 72 hours to bring someone before a judge after an arrest. But after Bukele asked Congress in March of 2022 to approve changes under the state of emergency, people can be held in custody for 15 days before having their court hearing. This is now a common practice for the majority of the people who get arrested because the courts are saturated.
 

“Ruth has dedicated her life to the defense of human rights and the fight against corruption,” Cristosal said in a statement last week. “Hers is not an isolated case: it is part of a pattern of criminalization against critical voices.”

As she entered the court for her initial hearing on June 4, Ruth said "'¡No me van a callar, un juicio público quiero!", ("they won't silence me; I want a public trial). She was remanded into pretrial custody for an additional six months. Read this update here: https://www.laprensagrafica.com/elsalvador/Ruth-Eleonora-Lopez-enfrenta-audiencia-inicial-por-enriquecimiento-ilicito-20250604-0022.html

News Article

More than one hundred national, international, and solidarity organizations, with a presence in Canada, Europe, the United States, Mexico, Central America, and South America, signed an open letter addressed to the Attorney General's Office of the Republic of El Salvador to demand the immediate release of environmental lawyer Alejandro Henríquez and community leader Ángel Pérez, president of the El Bosque Agricultural Cooperative, who were arbitrarily detained on May 12 and 13, 2025.

In the letter, the organizations condemn the use of security forces to repress the families of the El Bosque community, who were exercising their legitimate right to peaceful protest due to a planned eviction, when they were dispersed by riot police, resulting in the arrest of Ángel Pérez and, subsequently, of lawyer Alejandro Henríquez, who was providing legal advice to the affected families.

News Article
“We used to be afraid of the gangs,” says one Salvadoran. “Now we’re afraid of the state.”
 
Many people worldwide still praise Bukele for his crackdown on the gangs. Government officlals as well.
 
The US cooperates cloesly with El Salvador by sending detainees to their prisons for which they pays millions of dollars.

Marco Rubio, Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump Jr. have made pilgrimage to El Salvador, and Republican commentator Tucker Carlson said Bukele “may have the blueprint for saving the world.”

Some Salvadorans are greatfull for the safety Bukele has brought to the streets. But the price are about 110,000 people, nearly 2% of El Salvador’s population in prison, most of them inoccent.
María Serrano son has been detained since 2022 without process. She thinks it’s only a matter of time before more people see the cost of Bukele’s rule. “It’s a lie that we’re free in El Salvador,” she said. “The people who are in favor of him haven’t had their hearts broken yet.”
News Article

“The gang pacts with Bukele are not a thing of the past; it’s a present-day aspect of how one man came to amass total power,” says Óscar Martínez, editor-in-chief of El Faro.

While thousands of innocent people remain incarcerated in inhumane conditions in the prisons of El Salvador, one of the most recognized gang leaders in the Central American country, Carlos Cartagena López, aka Charli de IVU, was secretly released by the government of President Nayib Bukele and has since given an interview to the digital media El Faro in which he shows his face and shares details about his deals with the Bukele administration.

Óscar Martínez, editor-in-chief of El Faro and co-author of the article, told EL PAÍS that “[this interview] describes how gangs turned Bukele into a relevant politician. It allows us to reach the stark conclusions that it is impossible to understand Bukele’s rise to total power without his association with gangs.”

Charli became one of the most famous gang members in El Salvador after starring in the BBC miniseries Eighteen with a Bullet. In the series, Charli, at just 16 years old, already emerges as the leader of one of the most important strongholds of Barrio 18, the IVU neighborhood in the capital. In the video, he confesses to having committed several murders and other crimes. His criminal record has only lengthened over the years, and he is currently a fugitive from justice.

Bukele maintains a merciless public rhetoric against the gangs and has marketed himself as a global example of crime-fighting. But back when he was mayor of San Salvador, he protected the gangs, demanding their support in return.  Bukele’s people would give warning to the gangs about police operations targeting their neighborhoods. Gang members, in turn, would threaten political opposition activists in their neighborhoods and force their families and neighbors to vote for Bukele.

There is a wealth of evidence regarding the negotiations between the Salvadoran gangs Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha 13 with the various governments of Nayib Bukele: prison intelligence documents, prosecutorial investigations, photos, audio recordings, and even accusations from the U.S. State Department. Now, these testimonies from Charli and another gang leader are added, providing details of the pacts for the first time.

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