A police officer searches a man in Soyapango, El Salvador. Salvador Melendez (AP)
Henry Joya was arrested on April 19, 2022. It was about 10 p.m. and he was asleep. Police dragged him from his home in Colonia Luz, in the municipality of San Salvador, and five months later his family found him dead after not hearing from him. The state of emergency declared by President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador swallowed Joya alive and then spat his body into a mass grave in La Bermeja Cemetery. But before that, technically and according to human rights organizations, he was the subject of “enforced disappearance”.
Arrested for alleged links to El Salvador’s criminal gangs, Joya was taken to Mariona Prison, where prison authorities informed his family of his well-being: he suffered from an intellectual disability that made him forget many things. However, at the beginning of July, after two months in detention, Joya’s family received no more messages. He no longer appeared on the list of prisoners held at Mariona. Jesús Joya began searching for his brother in other prisons while his family contacted other government institutions for information on his whereabouts, but to no avail. Then Jesús had a fateful “premonition”: make inquiries at the Institute for Forensic Medicine (IML).
Forensic experts there showed the family a series of photos of bodies, including the face of Henry, a man described by his neighbors in Colonia Luz as “helpful” and who “didn’t get in trouble.” The discovery came on September 19, but Jesús was stunned when he was told that his brother had been buried in the mass grave 73 days earlier.
Joya’s body was exhumed in October and died of pulmonary edema, according to the IML report. “However, a witness who shared a cell with him in Mariona Detention Center told the family that he was severely beaten by guards and died as a result,” documents a report released by the Due Process Foundation along with five other Salvadoran organizations , presented to the Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances.
Three Patterns of Disappearance
Henry Joya’s case falls into one of three patterns of enforced disappearances identified by the report, compiled by the Due Process Foundation, under El Salvador’s state of emergency, a controversial measure Bukele enforced in March 2022 that he alleges ended gang violence in Central to have “neutralized” America’s smallest country. The state of emergency has also suspended constitutional guarantees for El Salvador’s citizens and sent over 70,000 people to prison.
Although the government links all of these arrests to the country’s powerful gangs, human rights organizations have reported 5,490 “direct victims” outside the sphere of criminal structures. According to figures released by NGOs, there were 13,581 “violations” by the end of July. Arbitrary detention is mentioned most frequently at 95%. However, the list has now been expanded to include the phenomenon of “short-term enforced disappearances”.
The three patterns of enforced disappearance have something in common: People are arrested by the police or the military to enforce the state of emergency. They are arrested in public places in the presence of witnesses. Their relatives then contact the police for information. However, there it is denied that an arrest took place and the whereabouts of the arrested person are not disclosed.
The first pattern – A – highlights that after several weeks or months, relatives “receive information enabling them to locate the detainee in a detention center”. In Sample B, after “several weeks or months and despite the insistence of the relatives and the filing of habeas corpus, the next of kin have no information about the detained person.” According to the complaints received by the organizations that have signed this document, this seems to be the most common pattern,” the report states.
Finally, there is Pattern C, which applies to the Henry Joya case: “These are also persons who have been captured by the police or the military under the application of the state of emergency and it is officially recognized that the person was sent there. ‘ a correctional center. Subsequently, the family has no further official information or communication with the detainee, and after several months of searching for their relative again, they learn that it is a relative through the Institute of Forensic Medicine or private individuals, such as a funeral home died in prison. Many of these people are buried in mass graves before their loved ones learn of their deaths,” the report said.
In late July last year, the government-controlled parliament passed transitional provisions and reforms to the organized crime law to increase penalties for gang leaders and allow for mass trials. The aim of these mass interrogations with up to 900 prisoners was the prosecution of entire criminal structures. In addition, drug trafficking and juvenile justice laws have been reformed in an “inquisitorial” manner, according to the report submitted to the United Nations.
“These reforms make it easier for any person anonymously accused of a crime to remain in unofficial provisional detention for an indefinite period and be convicted with flawed evidence, including reference witnesses, facilitating the abuse of the emergency regime. “, explains the Due Process Foundation.
“Armed with these legal tools, the police and military have carried out massive and indiscriminate arrests of people […] This situation is exacerbated by the practice and/or de facto policy of the police and prison authorities to deny their relatives or defense counsel any information about the status of detainees,” the report continues. “There is no direct register of detainees, nor is there any judicial review of arrests. Most of them are young people in a situation of poverty and vulnerability, accused of the crime of unlawful association, the wording of which is broad enough to allow and facilitate the arrest of people without any basis.”
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