Walter Vladimir Sandoval Peñate, 37, was a healthy man with no tattoos nor a scratch on his body when he entered the police station in Ahuachapán. His medical check-up report, prepared by police paramedic García Cortez in the late afternoon on March 30, 2022, states: “Doctor diagnoses patient as healthy (...) general appearance: conscious and calm.”
Just 72 hours later, on April 3, 2022, Walter’s corpse showed signs of torture: He had bruises on his feet, arms, and shoulders. His wrists were almost cut off by the pressure of the handcuffs. Walter died of blunt force trauma to the chest, according to the coroner's report. The family believes that Walter died from a beating and has therefore requested an autopsy from the Forensic Medicine Institute since April 2022, but this institution has refused to provide them with this document for the last three years.
The case of Walter is the first known death under the ongoing state of exception, installed at the end of March 2022, following the collapse of the Nayib Bukele government’s negotiation with gangs. During the ensuing 40 months, the police have arrested 86,400 people, according to the latest extension approved by the Legislative Assembly, which is controlled by Bukele.
As of August 17, 2025, Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, an organization that advises victims of human rights violations, reported 435 deaths in Salvadoran prisons. “They died without having been convicted in court,” the organization reported on social media. “94 percent of the people did not have a gang profile and died in state custody and with total impunity.” Dozens of people have been arrested based on files that the police put together even after the arrest. Some arrest reports literally state only that the person showed “nervousness.”
“I had to write down the names of those who left in black bags”
There are already dozens of testimonies of systematic torture, mostly from Salvadoran survivors of those cells, but also from Venezuelans who passed through CECOT, the mega-prison that Nayib Bukele lent to Donald Trump to hold hundreds of Venezuelans, many of them guilty of nothing more than migrating from their dictatorship to the United States. Some of the Salvadorans who survived that confinement speak of detainees who did not survive even the first night, after the initiatory beating administered by the guards.
The reason for Walter’s arrest is ambiguous. Two police officers, José Samuel Ramírez Martínez and Manuel Alfredo Martínez Escalante, stated in a report that a person, whom they did not identify, claiming that he feared reprisals, informed them that on the main street of the San Alfonso neighborhood in Ahuachapán there was a group of “apparent gang members, who were intimidating and demanding money from people passing by.” It was normal for there to be a group of men in that location because of the bar there. Walter was a regular, and on the day the regime was approved, he had been drinking alcohol nonstop for eight days.
The family says that Walter was arrested because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They acknowledge that they lived in an area controlled by a gang, where the police constantly carried out operations. But his relatives insist that Walter was not a gang member, and that is why he had never been arrested before.
"No, he was just hanging around, and I’m telling you, there were a lot of gang members here, and the STO was here, all the special police forces were here, and they didn’t even stop him on the street,” says one relative. “Sometimes the boys would be running down the street and they would follow him, and he would meet the officers there and they would just say, ‘Good afternoon.’ They didn’t arrest him.”
Official documents state that Walter told the police that he was “an active member of the 18th Street gang with the rank of soldier,” although the report does not have the detainee’s signature, only that of the officers. The family rejects this link and attributes Walter’s arrest to “quotas” imposed on officers by their superiors at the beginning of the state of exception, as denounced by the Police Workers’ Movement (MTP) and more recently in a report by Human Rights Watch.
The Many Deaths of Juan Saúl
El Faro has documented hundreds of cases under the exception regime where police information is contradictory, false, or ambiguous: 690 people were arrested for criteria such as appearing nervous or suspicious; in other cases, police information is contradictory, as in the case of a lawyer accused of extortion who was already in custody at the time of the events he was charged with. There are also cases of false police records that have literally turned detainees into gang members overnight, as happened to North Carolina rapper N-Real.
Walter’s family rejects the allegation of links to the 18th Street gang and claims that they were victims of a turf war between gangs in El Refugio, Ahuachapán.
His relative recalls life in a gang-controlled community: “I was working with some bricklayers, who were my nephews, and they were walking along the edge of that neighborhood when they were killed. Thank God, I got out of that shootout alive,” he says. “I think [Walter’s arrest was] simply because we were from this neighborhood. They [gang members] caught us so suddenly and they caught them all walking there at gunpoint, and suddenly he let go of me and threw me into the street. One of them told the one who was on the street to kill me with a rifle, and I ran down the street as fast as I could. They aimed at me, but I managed to get away.”
El Faro verified in newspaper archives that brothers Marvin and Alex, both with the last name Reyes Castro, nephews of Walter’s father, were shot and killed on July 27, 2019, while building a house in the Alicante neighborhood, San Antonio canton, El Refugio, Ahuachapán. Media outlets such as El Salvador Times described the motive for the double murder: “The brothers lived in a neighborhood dominated by members of the 18 gang, and where they were killed by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13).”
According to documents obtained by Guacamaya Leaks, the Attorney General’s Office opened an investigation into Walter’s murder after his arrest, and the Inspectorate of the Ministry of Security and Justice also launched a disciplinary investigation. Three years later, the family has not received any results from these inquiries.
In an interview with El Faro in early August 2025, a relative of Walter reiterated his desire for justice for the torture Walter suffered in the Ahuachapán jail. Two weeks later, the U.S. State Department categorically stated that “there were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” in El Salvador. Walter’s case is just one of 435 documented cases of death in state custody during the state of exception.