El Salvador: News & Updates

After multiple postponements, a worrisome trial began in El Salvador on July 29: a re-trial of the Santa Marta 5, a group of well-known water defenders who had been instrumental in the country’s successful effort to ban mining in 2017. In a press conference prior to the start of the trial, grassroots organizations in El Salvador joined community leaders from Santa Marta to denounce the proceedings as “double jeopardy” in practice, “violating the legal principle that no one can be tried twice for the same crime.” The community concluding that “the only lawful and just outcome is the absolution of our environmental leaders” due to the lack of evidence against them. The case has been a flashpoint internationally for concerns about the integrity of the justice system and increasing risk to environmental and human rights defenders in El Salvador.A new trial against five Salvadoran environmentalists, accused of murdering a woman in 1989 during the civil war, will take place on Tuesday, announced the NGO they belong to, denouncing the case as a form of “persecution” for their anti-mining activism.

The environmentalists, who were guerrilla fighters at the time of the crime, were acquitted on October 18 along with three other former rebels also accused of the murder. However, a higher court overturned the ruling and ordered a retrial.

“The case is criminalization and persecution of environmental activism (…) they are key figures in the community resistance against metal mining,” said Alfredo Leiva, a board member of the Santa Marta Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES).

The five environmentalists helped push through the 2017 ban on mining, which was repealed last December by the pro-government Congress at the request of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who supports gold mining operations.

After 125 days behind bars, Arturo Suárez and the other detainees were freed on 18 July after a prisoner swap deal between Washington and Caracas. Since flying home to Venezuela, they have started to open up about their torment, offering a rare and disturbing glimpse of the human toll of President Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crackdown in El Salvador and Trump’s campaign against immigration.

Suárez said conditions inside the maximum security prison were so dire he and other inmates considered killing themselves.

Noah Bullock, the head of the El Salvador-focused human rights group Cristosal, said activists had heard very similar accounts from prisoners in other Salvadoran jails, suggesting such terror tactics were not merely the behaviour of “bad apple prison guards”. “There’s clearly a culture coming from the leadership of the prison system to inculcate the guards into operating this way, [into] using dehumanising and physical abuse in a systematic way.”

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Justice Department to tell her more about a deal struck between the Trump administration and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to imprison immigrants deported from the United States in a Salvadoran maximum-security facility in exchange for the return of top leaders of the MS-13 gang who are in U.S. custody.

The order by the judge, Joan M. Azrack, came as she was considering a request by federal prosecutors on Long Island to dismiss sprawling narco-terrorism charges against Vladimir Arévalo Chávez, who is alleged to be one of those leaders, in preparation for sending him back to El Salvador.

In exchange for taking the deportees, the Bukele government received millions of dollars from the United States, as well as the Trump administration’s pledge to return top MS-13 leaders who are facing charges in federal court.

An investigation by The New York Times found that the returning of the gang leaders to El Salvador was threatening a long-running federal investigation into the upper echelons of MS-13. Prosecutors had amassed substantial evidence of ties between the gang and the Bukele administration — and had been scrutinizing Mr. Bukele himself, The Times found.

Caracas, July 23, 2025 (venezuelanalysis.com) – A group of Venezuelan men forcibly deported from the US and detained in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison accused Salvadoran authorities of systematic torture, beatings, sexual abuse, and medical neglect.

At a press conference on Monday, Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab presented testimonies from several men detailing the abuse they endured in the infamous prison. 

The fiercest voices of dissent against President Nayib Bukele have long feared a widespread crackdown. They weathered police raids on their homes, watched their friends being thrown into jail and jumped between safe houses so they can stay in El Salvador.

Then they received a warning: Leave immediately. It’s exile or prison.

A combination of high-profile detentions, a new “foreign agents” law, violent repression of peaceful protesters and the risk of imminent government detention has driven more than 100 political exiles to flee in recent months.

The biggest exodus of journalists, lawyers, academics, environmentalists and human rights activists in years is a dark reminder of the nation’s brutal civil war decades ago, when tens of thousands of people are believed to have escaped. Exiles who spoke to The Associated Press say they are scattered across Central America and Mexico with little more than backpacks and a lingering question of where they will end up.

“We’re living through a moment where history is repeating itself,” said Ingrid Escobar, leader of the human rights legal group Socorro Juridico, who fled El Salvador with her two children.

When Julio González Jr., who had agreed to be deported to Venezuela (but was instead sent to El Salvador), refused to get off the plane in San Salvador, he, along with two other shackled men, were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.

Julio González and the two others were able to return to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.

Many of the former detainees, after 125 days denied contact with the outside world, began to share details of their treatment.

“I practically felt like an animal,” González said by telephone from his parents’ home. “The officials treated us like we were the most dangerous criminals on Earth. … They shaved our heads, they would insult us, they would take us around like dogs.”

The three men denied any gang affiliations. Neither the U.S. nor El Salvador has provided evidence that they are gang members.

Under President Bukele, basic freedoms have disappeared. Civil society is under siege, and the government is arresting those who speak out to silence them. The team at the human rights organization Cristosal has endured harassment, surveillance, and defamation. So Cristosal, which was founded by Anglican bishops 25 years ago and came to prominence for its investigations into corruption in the Bukele government, has made the difficult decision to relocate nearly 20 staff to Guatemala and a few others to Honduras. It has been forced to suspend operations inside the country.  

supportcristosal@cristosal.org

PO Box 4424 Burlington VT, 05406

Watch the one-hour Cristosal webinar (This Moment in El Salvador: Cristosal Suspends Operations in El Salvador, July 22 2025) with director Noah Bullock and other human rights leaders here . 

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