Marvin Benítez, a worker detained under the state of exception, died in June 2022. His body, secretly buried in a mass grave, showed signs of violence. His pregnant wife continued to bring him food parcels to the gates of Mariona for another six months. No one has told her that her husband has died. The guards hand her each of the packages without informing her that Marvin Benítez is no longer on the list of prisoners.
This is pure cruelty.
Since the state of exception went into effect in 2022, nearly one hundred thousand people have been detained. They cannot receive visits from family members or lawyers, unless they pay the guards to see them for a few minutes, under the regime’s corruption scheme. They have no right to a fair trial and are tried in mass hearings.
More than 500 people have died in Bukele’s prisons, many with signs of torture and secretly buried by the state.
Among those detained are workers, transport workers, political prisoners, dissidents, activists, and hundreds of minors. They fall into the black hole of Bukele’s prisons and lose all their rights, subjected to the arbitrariness of a network of repression and violence that extends from the security guards all the way up to the dictator himself.
Time to Name Names
Many state officials are complicit in these acts of cruelty:
Police officers who carry out mass arrests and falsify information in their reports to justify the arrests and meet quotas.
Torturers, who are known prison guards.
The authorities at the Bureau of Prisons and the Institute of Legal Medicine, who withhold information from family members, who fill out death certificates with euphemisms to conceal the torture; who bury the bodies in mass graves before family members can find them and reveal the visible marks of the beatings.
The guards who, knowing that a given person is no longer on their list of detainees, continue to receive care packages from that individual’s family without saying a word.
But it’s not just them. Members of El Salvador’s ruling party, Nuevas Ideas, have continued to extend the state of exception month after month for more than four years, fully aware of all its consequences.
Above all, those responsible for this cruelty are its architects: the minister and deputy minister of security, the dictatorial president, his family, his advisors, and his accomplices, who have turned violence, torture, and repression into state policy.
Cruelty is an act of malice or wickedness that deliberately seeks to inflict unnecessary harm. The most abhorrent aspect of the gangs’ activities was the cruelty with which they harmed their victims, the savagery, the levels of horror they were capable of inflicting.
It is therefore paradoxical that cruelty has been elevated to a political virtue by those who have consolidated a dictatorship through negotiations with —and the dismantling of— the gangs.
Cruelty and violence are fundamental to the maintenance of the dictatorship. The fate of all inhabitants is subject to the will of the dictator and his operatives.
That is why the head of the torture squads, William Magaña Rodríguez, alias Montaña, continues to operate despite the fact that his criminal actions are public knowledge. That is why Osiris Luna Meza, the director of Prisons, is also deputy minister of security. They ensure that life in prisons will also be subject to the dictatorship’s agenda and not to the law.
A Bukele Will Decide the Fate of Your Detained Children
These practices, recently classified by a group of international experts as crimes against humanity, seem consistent with a regime that openly disregards human rights and the rule of law. Those who run the machinery of the dictatorship know that fear is very effective at silencing divisions, dissent, and resistance.
State cruelty serves the same purposes as that of gangs and criminal groups: to make it clear that anyone who does not submit to the will of the group in power will suffer at the hands of thugs.
Dictatorial power is exercised by suppressing human dignity, turning human beings into objects incapable of action, into the dead who serve to teach lessons to the living, to crush any aspiration to live under the rule of law. So that everyone knows who is in charge in the neighborhood, in the new El Salvador overtaken by the Bukele family and their accomplices.
Cruelty is a direct attack on human dignity. It is abominable. State cruelty is abominable by its very nature and can befall any citizen. That state, where cruelty has become public policy, is El Salvador.