DEL CID: Those people were guilty, no matter what. The woman who had the key heard the anguish, the cries for help. She ignored them, and these are the consequences of not doing her job as she should have done.
GRESSIER, HOST: That’s Emelin Guadalupe del Cid Linares, a survivor of the fire at Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción, a children’s home in San José Pinula, near Guatemala City. She is speaking about the sentencing of those responsible for the deaths of 41 girls on March 8, 2017, when a fire consumed the wing of the facility they were locked into. On International Women’s Day, no less.
Hogar Seguro has been one of the most talked-about cases in the international press in recent years in Guatemala. Here, the ghastly crime stirred indignation because these were children. Girls. And the apathy that the accused at times showed seemed to be yet another example of how the State had abandoned the girls. And at the same time had kept the door shut.
A chain of abuse in Guatemala
Also on today’s show, an annual State Department report whitewashes the Bukele regime’s mounting human rights abuses in El Salvador. But first, the Hogar Seguro case. This Tuesday, August 12, the sentencing hearing was held for seven of those accused for the deaths of 41 girls and the injuries of 15 more.
A criminal court ruled Carlos Rodas, former secretary of welfare for the Presidency, guilty. Santos Torres, former director of Hogar Seguro, guilty. Brenda Chamán, former head of protection against abuse at the Welfare Secretariat, guilty. Luis Pérez, former head of operations at the 13th station of the National Civil Police, guilty. Lucinda Marroquín, former deputy police inspector, guilty. Gloria Castro, former children's advocate at the Human Rights Ombudsman, guilty.
They each received between 25 and six years in prison, partly commutable. Only the seventh defendant, Harold Flores, former head of the Office for Minors at the Ombudsman, was acquitted for lack of evidence. Anahí Keller, the former undersecretary of social welfare, was also removed from the case on May 15 by the Constitutional Court.
The case will go on. Strikingly, the judge ordered the Public Prosecutor’s Office to next investigate the involvement of then-President Jimmy Morales. Witnesses said that, prior to the fire, he exchanged calls with those responsible and ordered the police to remain inside Hogar Seguro because the girls, along with the boys in the home, had tried to escape the day before the fire to denounce inhumane treatment at the facility.
Autopsies of the girls, for example, detected substances such as fentanyl, morphine, and ketiapine. The children were desperate and wanted to flee on March 7, 2017. Some had to cross rivers filled with sewage, but the police returned them to the facility and ordered that 56 girls be locked in a six-by-seven-meter room containing only 22 mattresses.
Podcast: El Salvador: No Country for Human Rights
Surviving witnesses say they were unable to leave, not even to the bathroom, because the door was locked and the only window was sealed. They spent the night dirty, wet, and even without shoes. Although they were given food, they did not eat it, for fear that it had been laced with sleeping pills. In desperation, they set fire to a mattress, and although they called for help because of the smoke and fire, and some staff members warned Deputy Inspector Marroquín that they were in danger, it took several crucial minutes before the door was opened.
In the sentencing, the judge read a phrase that Marroquín allegedly said during the fire: “Let those hijas de la gran puta —roughly, daughters of bitches— burn. Let’s see if they’re as good at getting out of there as they are at escaping.”
Seventeen girls died instantly. Two later died on site, 11 died at the San Juan de Dios General Hospital, 10 died at the Roosevelt Hospital, and one died in the United States because she had been transferred there for surgery for her burns.
After eight years of waiting and more than 120 hearings, half a dozen officials responsible for these crimes against children have been convicted. Yet, some of the victims still fear retaliation from the accused. Perhaps Emelin del Cid said it best: “I name them responsible for any attacks against me or my family, since they know my address.”
Shedding any veneer in El Salvador
On Tuesday, the Trump State Department categorically stated that “there were no credible reports of significant human rights abuses” in El Salvador in its annual human rights report on countries receiving U.S. aid and U.N. member states.
Just last year, the same report, referring to events in 2023, spoke of prisoners beaten to death by guards, pregnant prisoners suffering miscarriages, and surveillance of opponents and journalists. One Biden official who spoke to El Faro English at the time portrayed the report as a balancing act in which “everyone can find what they want to read.”
Now, the 2024 report sheds any veneer of balance, minimizing the continued human rights violations under the state of exception and the existence of political prisoners in El Salvador, as identified by the U.S. government’s own past reporting.
This tone starkly contrasts with the State Department’s reporting on Nicaragua, which identified ongoing persecution of religious leaders and other perceived dissidents, including by parapolice; killings, disappearances, and torture; and transnational repression of dissidents, among others.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has a long record of criticizing abuses by the Ortega and Murillo regime in Nicaragua. But in El Salvador, the Bukele regime has cultivated close cooperation with the Trump administration. Virtually every statement in the report directly contradicts Salvadoran civil society reporting.
For example, the new report asserts that “the government generally respected” freedom of expression and the press. In the last two months, at least 80 journalists and human rights defenders have fled for exile. A committee of relatives of persecuted and political prisoners in El Salvador registered 28 people in political prison as of March, many of the cases dating early back into Bukele’s first term.
The report follows reforms approved by the Bukele-controlled Legislative Assembly on July 31 that allow Bukele to run for re-election indefinitely.
Podcast: Over 1,000 Days without Freedom for Guatemala’s Top Journalist
The regime in El Salvador was quick to show off this endorsement. Bukele reposted on X an official position of the U.S. government: ”We reject the comparison of El Salvador’s democratic and constitutionally sound legislative process with illegitimate dictatorial regimes in other parts of our region.”
In our June 15 issue of Central America Monthly, we observe how the Bukele dictatorship has indeed become the second regime in Central America, after Ortega and Murillo in Nicaragua. And we identify just a few of their common threads left out from this year’s report on El Salvador: not only unconstitutional reelection and total power, but also the neighboring police states, foreign-agents laws, exiles, and political prisoners.