“They won't silence me. I want a public trial! They must grant me a public trial, the people deserve to know. Those who owe nothing fear nothing.” These were the cries of Salvadoran attorney Ruth López in front of a large group of journalists awaiting her at the entrance to the Twelfth Court of Peace in San Salvador, where the initial hearing against her was held on Wednesday, June 4. López stands accused of illicit enrichment. Initially, eighteen days ago upon her arrest, the Attorney General’s Office had reported via X that she had been detained for embezzlement.
López, head of human rights organization Cristosal’s Anti-Corruption Unit, entered wearing a white jumpsuit and carrying a Bible, guarded by National Civil Police officers who cleared a path through the crowds jostling in the corridors of the Isidro Menéndez Judicial Center. When approached by the press amid the commotion, she managed to say, “They wanted me to come in this jumpsuit.” A journalist asked her, “Did they take you to the Military Hospital?” Her response: “No!”
On Monday, June 2, López was brought before a judge, and her case was declared secret. In a statement to the press hours before the hearing, one of her lawyers, Pedro Cruz, said that the total secrecy of the case indicates that prosecutors are afraid. “What are they afraid of? That they have made an unfounded accusation,” he said. “They are afraid of what the defendant has been working on and saying in her professional capacity. They are afraid of the defense, because of its clear superiority in technical, ethical, and legal matters,” he said.
Her arrest marks one of the most notorious escalations of authoritarianism in the country in the last month, which included threats to journalists, arrests of public transport entrepreneurs, and arbitrary detentions of a lawyer and a campesino representative. “Today, the initial hearing is being held against Ruth Eleonora López Alfaro, accused of illicit enrichment,” read a post by the Attorney General's Office on its Twitter account, in which it also requested that the court move the case to the next stage of the proceedings.
For its part, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) condemned the unjustified criminalization of Ruth López, denouncing the denial of a public trial as a clear violation of the human rights defender's due process rights. Central America Director Ana María Méndez blamed the Biden administration for the arrest of Ruth López and for the deterioration of democracy in El Salvador. “They could have used their diplomatic tools to stop Nayib Bukele's concentration of power, but they did not,” she wrote on her Twitter account.
Similarly, in the morning, prior to the start of the trial, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OACNUDH) issued a public statement on El Salvador: “Regarding the recent arrests of human rights defenders, OACNUDH recalls that any restriction on pre-trial liberty must be based on the criteria of strict necessity and proportionality.”
At the end of the initial hearing, the court granted López provisional detention with a preliminary investigation phase and sent her to a prison. The prosecutors handling the case left the premises without making any statements to the press.
When López was escorted out of the courtroom by police, she shouted to the press: “In El Salvador, there is no public institution that guarantees the rights of Salvadorans! I am innocent! I am a political prisoner. All the accusations are because of my legal work. Because I denounced the corruption of this government!”
*Additional reporting from Gabriela Cáceres