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.
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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.
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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.”
We wrote to President Bukele of El Salvador to express our concerns over the weakening of democracy in El Salvador, especially in light of the recently imposed State of Exception (a government-declared crackdown on gang activity). Measures implemented by the Bukele government over the past three years mark a move away from democracy and toward more authoritarianism: militarized repression, the state surveillance of journalists and dissidents, and political persecution....More than 34,000 suspected gang members have been arrested since the State of Exception in late March. Maximum time-limits on pre-trial detention have been lifted. Journalists are under surveillance of spyware and criminalized for reporting on gang activity or the government’s response to it. Recent legislative reforms limit freedom of speech, association, and movement. Civil society organizations in El Salvador have documented more than 300 human rights complaints since March 27. Today, the government announced that the State of Exception crackdown will continue for at least another month....We join with human rights organizations within El Salvador and across the world in calling for an immediate end to the State of Exception, which is an instrument of repression and social control that dangerously limits constitutional rights.
More than 30,000 people have been arrested under a “state of exception” in El Salvador, police said, as President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on armed gangs continues. El Salvador’s Congress approved a “state of exception” in late March after a weekend of gang-related violence left more than 80 people dead, spurring widespread fears among residents in the Central American nation. The order, under which the authorities have been able to suspend certain civil liberties, was renewed for another 30 days in late April. Salvadoran police said on Twitter on Monday that 30,506 arrests had been carried out “since the start of the war against the gangs”, including “536 terrorists” who were arrested on Sunday alone.
A woman in El Salvador has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for the death of her unborn child following an obstetric emergency, according to a rights group. The Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion said on Monday that the 28-year-old woman, identified by the court only as “Esme”, had suffered a health emergency while pregnant in 2019 and sought assistance at a local hospital. She was later convicted of homicide and handed the lengthy sentence after serving two years of pre-trial detention, according to the group. The case is the first of its kind in the past seven years in the country, the group said. Abortion is illegal in El Salvador, even in cases of rape and when the woman’s health is in danger.
Far from providing tools to protect citizens from violence, the state of emergency has represented a threat to everybody’s human rights. The government seems to be using it as an excuse to introduce unwarranted restrictions on human rights and civil liberties, to further its campaign to silence political opponents, civil society organizations, and independent media, taking over the judiciary, and seeking other self-serving purposes. The introduction of legal reforms such as those made to the Penal Code on April 5 to criminalize media or journalists who “reproduce and transmit messages from or presumably from gangs that could generate uneasiness or panic in the population” are a clear illustration of the lengths Bukele is prepared to go to in order to ensure nobody criticizes him.
On April 25, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly extended for another 30 days a state of emergency enacted the month prior in response to escalating gang violence. Since enacting the state of emergency on March 27, the Legislative Assembly has gone on to approve a series of measures proposed by President Nayib Bukele that allow judges to imprison children as young as 12, restrict freedom of expression, and dangerously expand the use of pretrial detention and counterterrorism legislation. More than 17,000 have been arrested under the degree, which restricts the right to gather, to be informed of rights upon detention, and access to a lawyer, as well as allows phone calls and emails to be intercepted without a court order. CISPES shares excerpts of an analysis of the situation by human rights experts in El Salvador.
In scenes that were chillingly reminiscent of the 1980s, in the midst of the ongoing State of Emergency in El Salvador, the state put up many now-standard obstacles to those who came out to march: intimidating searches by the military and over 20 police barricades blocking highways and turning away buses across the country. But the people were determined. With tremendous courage, labor unions and popular organizations held fast to their claim to May 1 as thousands took to the streets.
Reproductive rights activists across Latin America have vowed to protect hard-fought gains in their own territories as they brace for potential ripple effects if the US supreme court overturns Roe vs Wade – the 1973 ruling which guarantees the right to abortion. Latin America has some of the most draconian anti-abortion laws in the world. But feminist movements have fought for decades to chip away at the prohibitions, and in recent years a younger, diverse generation of activists has mobilized in massive numbers to help clinch a string of victories in traditionally conservative countries.
Five human rights groups reported Wednesday there have been complaints of at least 338 violations of human rights during El Salvador's massive arrests of suspected gang members. The most frequently cited abuse was arbitrary arrest, as well as illegal searches of homes, injuries, robbery and the death of a detainee. The roundups, begun in late March after a spike in homicides, have resulted in the arrest of over 24,000 presumed gang members.
