On October 6, 2024, funeral home employees arrived at the rusty metal door of a tortilla shop in a rural community in Santa Ana, El Salvador, to announce the death of Víctor Manuel Orellana Funes, a 57-year-old mechanic who had been captured under the state of exception, on the grounds of a previous arrest for resisting police officers while drunk, on a date that his family cannot specify.
Víctor Manuel had no tattoos nor history of gang-related crimes, and his name does not appear in connection with criminal groups in any police records from the Guacamaya Leaks, which comprises 10 million emails from the Police and 250,000 from the Armed Forces of El Salvador.
Despite the lack of links to gangs, the police took him from his home on July 14, 2022, and imprisoned him as a gang member in the Izalco prison. He never returned.
The family was not informed of any crime he committed. What followed his capture was total isolation. The little information they obtained was that, by the end of 2022, Víctor Manuel was recovering from an illness not specified by the authorities at the Zacatecoluca Penitentiary Farm in La Paz.
In less than four months, Víctor Manuel, who had not suffered from any illness prior to his arrest, had fallen ill in the overcrowded Salvadoran prisons.
Walter Sandoval, First Victim of the State of Exception, Died in Prison within 72 Hours
On December 20, 2022, the family hired a lawyer to request a hearing before the Specialized Court of Instruction A-Two of Santa Ana, in the hope that the sick man would be granted parole.
The family sought to prove that Víctor Manuel deserved this benefit because he was a hard worker and not a gang member. They presented documents including the electricity and water bills he paid monthly, the deed of sale for a property in his name, the payment receipts for a loan he had with First Cash SV, and invoices from a hardware store where he bought iron and mechanical materials for his daily work.
The judicial system denied him house arrest. After spending a few months in the Zacatecoluca Penitentiary Farm, he was sent back to Izalco Prison, one of the regime’s torture centers, according to testimonies compiled by El Faro and multiple reports from human rights organizations.
Victor Manuel died at 10:00 a.m. on October 6, 2024. The prison system continued to hide information, even after his death.
After the funeral home informed the family of Victor Manuel’s death, they traveled to the Izalco prison to confirm the situation, but prison guards told them he was still alive.
“He [the guard] said, ‘He’s here. [Víctor Manuel] is not dead.’ So they clearly weren’t paying any attention to him,” Víctor’s wife told El Faro.
Unhappy with that response, the family sought information from other institutions until they finally confirmed that his body was in the morgue of the Jorge Mazzini Hospital in Sonsonate.
There, the family received his body with lips sewn shut and a wound on the stomach, stemming from a surgery that they had never been informed about.
The family received a note from the Forensic Medicine Institute that simply stated that Víctor Manuel had died of pulmonary edema, as stated in dozens of other autopsy reports on bodies leaving prisons.
In El Salvador, Fear and Silence Shroud the Dead
His family does not know why he was arrested or for what crime he was prosecuted. They do not know what illness he contracted in Izalco prison, nor why he was operated on in a hospital. “And since no one knows anything there [about what happens in prison], they do what they do and that’s it,” says his wife.
Víctor Manuel’s wife is originally from northern Chalatenango, where she says she suffered greatly in a region heavily affected by the Salvadoran civil war. As a child, she was forcibly displaced in the 1980s and became a refugee. Yet she considers the current violence of the state and the pain of her husband’s death to have been worse than what she experienced during the war.
Just as there are now Salvadoran military personnel being prosecuted for war crimes, she says she remains hopeful that in the future justice will be served to those who are now committing atrocities under the state of exception.
Listen to the Víctor Manuel’s wife’s full testimony in Spanish.