Everyday Cruelty

“This is what the Nazis were like,” exclaims one man. “I saw the face of death,” says another. “People were committing suicide out of desperation,” recalls a third survivor of Nayib Bukele’s prisons.

In El Salvador, over eighty-thousand people have been imprisoned since 2022 under the state of exception, enduring systematic torture at the hands of police and prison guards. The imprisonment and subsequent torture has been facilitated by mass prosecutions in secret trials presided by anonymous judges. While Nayib Bukele orders cutbacks over social media to already meager and sickly prison food rations, obedient legislators have rubber-stamped a perpetual destruction of rights as basic as legal defense. Human rights observers, many of them now exiled for fear of ending up behind these same bars, say the stories emerging from the prisons of El Salvador may well constitute crimes against humanity.

This sixth issue of Central America Monthly spotlights first-hand accounts from over two-dozen survivors of these dungeons. Over the past three and a half years, in the lead-up to our own exile as a newsroom, El Faro reporters gathered these testimonies the old-fashioned way: notebook and recorder in hand, conducting interviews from prison gate to doorstep, from rural village to urban sprawl, from funeral procession to hiding place. Listen to these testimonies in the video launched today with English subtitles: From the Bowels of Bukele’s Prisons: Survivors Recount Death, Torture, and Starvation.

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The latest Central America Monthly focuses on a single question: What is really happening inside the world’s most publicized prison system? “The scenes described by the survivors are brutal,” narrates El Faro’s editor-in-chief Óscar Martínez. “They depict a place where the level of cruelty depended on the mood of the guards, and where, when people came out alive, their bodies looked like they had been expelled from a concentration camp.” He concludes: “The evidence of barbarism collected by this news outlet is sufficient to initiate a trial against the state.”

Keeping in mind the legal significance of this body of evidence, we provided a full transcript of the video, joining it with photographs from the 2025 World Press Photo-winning portfolio of Carlos Barrera. His lens also accompanied reporter Carlos Martínez in early April 2022, just days after the state of exception was enacted, as authorities daily rounded up thousands of men — most of them poor and dispossessed, whose precipitous disappearance behind bars left their families even more destitute and defenseless. Greta and the Women of El Penalito is a chronicle from the steps of a police jailhouse in San Salvador, where mothers, spouses, and daughters gathered each day in search of any shred of information on those taken from them. One woman, Greta, worked to feed them all.

Three and a half years later, the militarization of everyday life continues to spread. This August, Bukele named a military officer to be Minister of Education. “In El Salvador, war was imagined and practiced in the schools,” writes Central American University historian Julián González in Pedagogy of the Rifle, an essay first published by El Faro in Spanish in 2021, turning the page back to the 19th century. He adds, “The pedagogy of war was a seed that would grow into terror at gunpoint, states of siege, the suspension of constitutional guarantees, political persecution, arrests, torture, and forced disappearance.”

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Finally, we look at that other country where Central Americans are known to languish in detention: the United States. A special episode of our weekly podcast, Central America in Minutes brings you to Georgia just hours before the deportation of Salvadoran journalist Mario Guevara, who was arrested in June while covering a No Kings rally in an Atlanta suburb. The criminal charges were quickly dismissed for lack of evidence, but he was deported anyway. Mario’s daughter Katherine recounts her days and nights since his arrest: “I wake up and I’m thinking about it, and I’m thinking about it, every single day since it happened — not knowing what’s going to happen next, and what the government may come up with now. What are they going to do against him now?”

Crackdown tactics emerging from El Salvador’s Casa Presidencial and the U.S. White House have something in common: the willingness to sow fear and enact cruelty onto a population deemed criminal or expendable. In their column this month, Time to Name Names, El Faro’s editorial board calls the evidence of state crimes in El Salvador “abundant and undeniable.”