Both watched people die in their cells, both were tortured and spent months in overcrowded prisons with little food and never the help of a lawyer. Two testimonies collected by El PAÍS from people detained during the emergency regime protecting the war against El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele’s gangs coincide with allegations of systematic abuses by national and international human rights organizations. Deaths in custody, extreme overcrowding, torture, arbitrary arrests, including minors, and total lack of communication with lawyers or relatives. Manuel, a fictitious name for security reasons, in her 40s, and Dolores Almendares, 53, who decided to make her identity public, have spent months in jail on charges of belonging to the gangs. They were released due to lack of conclusive evidence, but both are still awaiting trial. These are their stories.
Dolores Almendares poses in the streets of San Salvador. Victor Pena
Manuel relates that in his case the cliché used to explain the darkness of the prison became literal: “From the moment I entered until I came out, I did not see the light of the sun.” From mid-April last year to early February. Incarcerated for almost a year in Izalco prison, about two hours west of the capital. In a cell for 20 people where there were more than 70. Due to the lack of space, the inmates took turns sleeping in groups of two or three hours sitting up. There was only one toilet. It was customary for them to be given only one meal a day: “two tortillas and a spoonful of beans”.
Among the cellmates was a diabetic. “A 62-year-old man who ran a shop and cried a lot.” He, says Manuel, was allowed to sleep sitting up all night while the others stayed up. One day he didn’t wake up. They tried to move it between several and it was frozen. When the guards arrived, he had no pulse. Manuel also assures that only “two or three times” did a doctor come by to give him shots of insulin, which he says his family sent him every week. The lack of medical care in prisons is one of the violations of fundamental rights denounced by organizations.
Manuel relates that another of the prisoners, “a 21-year-old boy whose name was Daniel,” also died in the cell. “He was desperate and cried out for medicine or complained of hunger and pain.” The police responded with beatings. With kicks, with the batons (batons) or with the butts of rifles. “One day they beat him so badly that they beat him to death and dragged him out like an animal.”
The feet of Manuel, who chose not to reveal his identity. Victor Pena
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An investigation by Human Rights Watch, which had access to a Justice Department database, found that at least 32 people died in custody in the first five months of the state of emergency, from March to August, without any explanation of the circumstances. Mostly in the Mariona and Izalco prisons, where Manuel was imprisoned. Another tally by the Salvadoran organization Cristosal, this time up to the end of October, brought the death toll to 80.
“You Just Want To Die”
Besides beatings, Manuel also talks about another torture method. The water hoses in the cell were common, and when the floor was wet they would activate the electric current gun “so it can get us all”. Among the other inmates he lived with were people with tattoos from both the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs. He says they were the ones who were taken to the punishment cells the most. “I didn’t talk to them because I hated them. I felt like I was there for them.” Joint prayers were common. “Our support was faith.” He says that one of the prisoners in particular, an evangelical Christian, was the one who prayed the most for everyone. ” The biggest enemy you have in it is depression, you feel an immense emptiness and you just want to die.
Police transports during the exceptional regime. Victor Pena
Manuel was arrested at the end of March, a few days after the start of the state of emergency, which has lasted for a year. According to his version, it was a revenge of some police officers. A few years earlier, officers had beaten her 10-year-old son for not having ID when he came back from tortilla-buying during the pandemic. He denounced her and a judge eventually convicted her. In retaliation, 10 police officers showed up at his home with an arrest warrant. The beatings began on the same day and continued “to the point of boredom”. They broke two ribs. But what pained this clerk most, who worked in an office until his arrest, filling out Excel sheets and making photocopies, was being brought before the press as a gang member on racketeering, manslaughter and membership of a terrorist organization.
Bukele’s operation aims to reduce violence and break up gangs. But it is surrounded not only by accusations of human rights abuses, but also by a growing circle of opacity. According to a count by Justice and Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro at the end of January, there were almost 63,000 detainees. The number is no coincidence. That corresponds to the estimated number of gang members in a country with almost six million inhabitants.
Since the beginning of the regime, critical police officers have disclosed that quotas are being imposed on them in order to reach the symbolic number of arrests that the President has repeatedly pointed out. According to the President himself, 5% of the total number of inmates were released. The country’s human rights organizations report that only a third of those arrested have documented ties to gangs. And that criminal types like belonging to a “terrorist organization” are so broad and imprecise that they open the door to arresting virtually anyone.
“I can shoot you right now”
Dolores was arrested by five police officers on May 6 last year and charged with extortion. “They told me that my children collect the rent from companies and I collect the money,” according to this ordinance from the city council of Cuscatancingo, a municipality on the northern outskirts of San Salvador. She says she was given a document with the charges but didn’t sign it because “they didn’t have any evidence.” She asked for a lawyer but was not provided with any legal representation during the five months she was detained. Dolores, a union member, complains that her arrest was motivated by conducting several strikes to get them uniforms and increase their wages at work.
Three people wait outside the El Penalito headquarters in San Salvador for a detained family member. Victor Pena
Arriving at the police station, they put her in the dungeon with “Girls who were well stained. Some had MS tattooed on their foreheads.” She says she wasn’t scared because “she’s never heard of anything like it.” Like Manuel, she decided not to speak to the other inmates because “silence gives and speech takes away”. He remembers being told by a police officer the first night, “Now the target is you. I can shoot them right away and say they tried to escape.”
On the first day in Ilopango prison, half an hour from the capital, they lined her up with other prisoners. They stripped her naked, had her bathe in a barrel in the yard with 20 other women, put her through a scanner and examined the inside of her genitals, “in case she had drugs or something, I think. ” Dolores spent 22 days in a 150 square meter gallery with a tin roof and metal mesh walls. There, according to his calculations, more than 800 women slept soundly on the cement floor. Each with their head level with the other’s feet. The toilet was a bucket and the shower was a hose. The food was “dry bean paste”.
One of the inmates, “the Esmeralda girl,” had an infinity symbol tattooed under her neck. Dolores recalls that “everything he ate he vomited. She also suffered from diarrhea and eventually died of dehydration.” When she lost consciousness, she was carried between several inmates “because she was chubby”. The police took her away and they never saw her again. “They told us he died on the way to the hospital.” Human rights organizations also criticize the authorities for not reporting the deaths of the prisoners. There are even complaints from relatives who have found the bodies of their imprisoned loved ones in a communal grave.
Detainees wait to be taken to their cell at the Terrorist Confinement Center PRESS SECRETARY (Portal)
Dolores spent three more months in Apanteos prison, an hour and a half from the capital. “They treated us a little bit better there. We could go out on the terrace for an hour, they gave us three meals and sometimes some priests came in.” During the entire time she was in prison, she had two telematic hearings. Without the presence of witnesses or lawyers. She was released in mid-September and has to report to the police station every two weeks. The trial is set for December 8, but his lawyer has told him something he’s not quite sure about giving him hope: “If the regime ends before then, those of us who left will , to be totally free.”
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