Bukele has repeated it on several occasions: that, among the 130,000 detainees who have turned the country into the place with the highest prison population rate in the world (one in every 57 Salvadorans is in prison), not a single person has been arrested for their ideas, for expressing them in public, for demonstrating, or for disagreeing with the government.
Bukele even said so at the United Nations in September 2024: “In El Salvador, we do not imprison our opposition, we do not censor opinions, we do not confiscate the property of those who think differently, we do not arrest people for expressing their ideas.”
Bukele has even repeated this to attack national and international organizations, and even foreign governments, when their reports on El Salvador indicate a rapid drift toward authoritarianism. This has been particularly true since 2021. As he took office for his unconstitutional second term in 2024 at the National Palace, in an ornate black-and-gold suit with military overtones, Bukele swore: “El Salvador has left behind its past, which we vowed never to return to. In the new El Salvador, there is room for everyone.”
His own prisons contradict him.
* * *
It usually starts with criticism of the government. Next comes surveillance on the streets and at demonstrations. The police create profiles of people of interest, labeling them as supporters of opposition parties and identifying their families. Days or months later, the intimidation begins. Agents knock on doors —sometimes dressed in civilian clothes, sometimes in cars with private license plates— and ask harmless questions: “How do you get to such-and-such street?” “We want to know if anyone in this neighborhood needs help with any problems they may have.” “We're looking for the owner of a car that caused a traffic accident.”
Other times they get straight to the point. They say they need so-and-so to come out of the house, that they need to ask them some questions. They tell the family that no-one should worry, that the person will be back soon. Other times, simply living in an area once dominated by gangs is enough to facilitate arbitrary detention. “Ver, oír y callar” — “See, Hear, and Shut Up” is the title of a report by human rights organization Cristosal on the contagion of fear in El Salvador. Eleven percent of the organizations interviewed in the study reported the arbitrary detention of a member or relative.
Before or after the capture, an amorphous group of social media profiles, official outlets, YouTubers, or self-proclaimed analysts flood the internet with a message, a story, the one they want people to believe, without evidence. During election season, tensions run high. In the 2024 campaign, there were 62,657 registered attacks against candidates for the Legislative Assembly and local government, 63 percent directed at women, according to the National Association of Salvadoran Councilwomen, Trustees, and Mayors.
The media blitz aims to undercut any argument in defense of the person under attack. To delegitimize them, isolate them. “It's the beginning of the non-citizen,” said Hamlet Lavastida, an exiled Cuban artist, when asked how the attacks began on the island.
The same thing is happening in El Salvador.
Sometimes, the non-citizen is constructed in elaborate press conferences; other times, through reports submitted to the Attorney General’s Office, where an investigation is opened. Sometimes a post on X is enough to light the flame.
Usually, the persecution begins with something that is said, stirring the leviathan from its slumber. Those who criticize, but above all, make their criticism visible, expose themselves to being crushed by the very power they denounce. Like a Whack-A-Mole: an animal sticks its head out. Bang. It sinks back down. Bang, another one. And another. Bang. Bang. Bang. Sixty-seven out of every 100 Salvadorans have moderated their public expressions and no longer talk about politics, according to a January 2024 survey by José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA).
There are people who, to find out whether they are on the whack-list, have incorporated into their routine going to prosecutors’ offices every so often to ask if they are named in any open case files. Just in case. “I have asked three women defenders who were detained what it is like to be in Apanteos, just in case, because you know what? I’m not afraid to pay the high price of going to prison,” said Ingrid Escobar, a human rights defender and director of Socorro Jurídico, last March, days after two police officers knocked on her door with odd questions: “Where is the San Antonio Abad neighborhood?” She found it odd because her house is the last on a side street in an area with 300 other homes.
When the mass disinformation on the internet makes way for persecution, the time comes to make drastic decisions: stay or go into exile; be whacked or disappear. Those who have the possibility of leaving do so. When rumors of a possible arrest arrive, suitcases are packed in a flash and then a plane, a bus, a car is boarded... Others leave the country through blind spots, for fear of being detained at the border.
Thus, heavy as a slab of concrete, the word exile emerges. At that moment, any modifier is irrelevant: preventive exile, temporary exile, permanent exile. Everything becomes uncertain. Nine journalists left the country in 2024 for fear of reprisals for reporting. A year earlier, five others went into permanent exile, according to data from the Association of Journalists of El Salvador. In May, 30 journalists left the country at the start of Bukele’s seventh year in power.
Some of those who leave prefer never to comment on politics in El Salvador again because they fear that “something” might happen to the family they left behind. Others continue to speak out from abroad. They try to keep going. They try. They keep going. Will they be allowed to return? Will they be able to? Will they want to?
The testimonies of those persecuted are increasing: There are asylum offices abroad that no longer hear stories of persecution by the maras. Since 2021, they have begun to listen to those who flee after denouncing corruption, those who flee for defending a river or a mountain, those who flee because they are journalists, judges, prosecutors, or because they speak out on behalf of victims of arbitrary arrests. There are also trade unionists and lawyers. They all poked their heads out of the hole and the hammer came down hard.
* * *
When I submitted this text to my editors on May 12, there were six days to go before lawyer Ruth Eleonora López was captured. Since May 11, 2021, she has been the head of the anti-corruption unit of one of the most important civil society organizations in the country, which has documented dozens of cases of human rights abuses and state corruption during the Bukele administration. She not only did her job; she made it public wherever she could: in front of the Bukele-controlled Attorney General’s Office when she filed a complaint; in national and international interviews; on the circuit of politicians’ offices in Washington. She was even named one of the 100 most influential women in the world by the British news network BBC in December. Six days after I submitted this report, she was arrested at 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, drawn out of her home with lies. She was told there had been a traffic accident outside her home, and when she came out, she was shown the arrest warrant. She was not allowed to change her clothes at home. She was forced to do so in the street, in front of the police.
She recorded the moment: “Have some decency, one day this will all end. You can’t lend yourselves to this,” López told her captors.
For months before her capture, every time I spoke with her, I asked if she was afraid. She always replied quickly that she was not. The photo of her arrest, published online by the Attorney General’s Office, shows her serene gaze, as if to say: I knew this could happen.
Since then, in just a few days, the Salvadoran state has violated every procedure it could in López’s case: They hid her whereabouts for 12 hours, and when her family finally found out where she was, they went to look for her, but neither the guards at the location nor any authorities would confirm anything. Twenty-four hours after her arrest, her family had no reliable information about her whereabouts, and no lawyer had been able to speak with her. Cristosal denounced this as a forced disappearance. Thirty-six hours after her arrest, her family was able to speak with her and confirm that she was well. Nine days later, prosecutors had still not brought her before a judge, tripling the constitutional deadline for doing so.
López is being treated as if she were being prosecuted under the state of exception, a legal weapon used to wage war on gangs, which eliminates constitutional guarantees and has led to the arrest of 85,000 Salvadorans in three years, thousands of whom are innocent and have no connection to criminal gangs. The state of exception allows for a maximum of 15 days of administrative detention when the case is related to gangs. López has not been charged with a gang-related crime, but rather for one allegedly committed while she was a public employee. The Attorney General’s Office claimed that López had embezzled public funds but, nine days after her arrest, the indictment had not even been presented to a judge. Some officials nevertheless condemned her publicly. Aldo Álvarez, Bukele’s former ambassador to China, ventured that the arrest was not arbitrary because “no prosecutor is going to venture to issue an arrest warrant without having, especially against a person like her, a solid and robust case.”
In just a few days, the state deployed all the injustices and violations of due process that are in the political prison playbook. What happened to her, in just a few days, is the essence of what happens to a political prisoner. There is little doubt about that. That is why this text opens with Ruth López. That is why this text closes with her, too.
In other cases, in all the ones I had examined before her arrest, everything is less obvious; the knot is more tangled and must be unraveled strand by strand.
* * *
Before he appeared on camera in custody gaunt and grey-bearded, with a desperate message to his family scrawled on a piece of paper, Ernesto Muyshondt was the clean-shaven, strapping mayor of San Salvador. In 2021, he made a poisoned pact with Bukele’s ascendant party, Nuevas Ideas, to allow him to be re-elected for another three years. The agreement with Muyshondt was that Bukele would not field any competition against him, according to sources from Muyshondt’s team who spoke to El Faro.
The negotiation was not public, but there were hints on public display. Muyshondt, until then a hard-line faithful of the right-wing Arena party, surprised his fellow party members with his sudden closeness to President Bukele. With just a few months to go before the election, the mayor appeared on billboards exchanging a pandemic elbow-greeting with Bukele. Muyshondt defied the Arena logic of not approaching political enemies. He called Bukele a “friend”, brushing off criticism: “Me vale sorbete”. “I couldn’t care less.”
Muyshondt tried to rack up points to keep his negotiations with the president alive. At that time, the mayor publicly acknowledged that he was thinking of leaving Arena and forming another, “more renewed” party. This rift would have been ideal for Bukele, who saw Arena members as a significant storehouse of opposition votes. In the last interview he gave before his arrest in April 2021, Muyshondt admitted that, while he was mayor, he concealed information that could have benefited the opposition and damaged the Nuevas Ideas campaign: irregular contracts from Bukele’s mayoral administration (2015-2018) that Muyshondt did not criticize in public. He did so only in that interview, at the end of his term, after the journalist insisted. He said: “We are not the Attorney General’s Office, which is the one that should act... The Cuscatlán Market is the least of the evils. There are other contracts that are extremely harmful to the municipality. The contract for street lighting, the contract for an ERP and billing system; totally harmful…”
Muyshondt said that, but he had also shown enormous goodwill and awarded contracts to businessmen close to Bukele. “Politically, it might have been in my interest to fight the government,” he said in that last interview.
But nothing went as Muyshondt planned.
Nuevas Ideas announced that its candidate for the capital in 2021 would be Mario Durán, the Minister of the Interior (and current mayor). The announcement was made just before the deadline for registering party primary candidates. “Muyshondt didn’t take Durán’s appearance well; the deal had been that Nuevas Ideas would let him run alone in San Salvador,” a person who was part of Muyshondt’s inner circle told El Faro in November 2023.
Muyshondt had plans stretching to the 2024 presidential elections, in which Bukele would supposedly be unable to compete due to the constitutional ban, according to the sources who spoke with El Faro. Win or lose in 2021, his path was clear. And that was a threat to Nuevas Ideas. They defeated him in 2021, thanks in part to electoral favors from three criminal organizations: the Mara Salvatrucha-13, 18th Street Revolucionarios, and 18th Street Sureños, with whom the Bukele-sphere formed alliances.
But the most powerful weapon against Muyshondt was the judicial system. The goal, it seems, was not only to defeat him at the polls, but to excise him from politics altogether.
* * *
In 2000, Azerbaijan, a former Soviet nation bordering the Caspian Sea, sought to raise its status and become a member of the Council of Europe, that conclave of countries that champions the defense of human rights. Azerbaijan had failed to join the Council because it had a border problem: It was at war with neighboring Armenia, thus marring its intentions to be a society where human rights would shine. Azerbaijan then proposed that it would release or grant a new trial to all persons in captivity considered “political prisoners.” The Council decided to invite Armenia to also try to join the organization. To be accepted, both countries had to be willing to have their adherence to and respect for human rights monitored. They joined the Council in January 2001 with a commitment to release or retry “political prisoners.”
Civil society organizations in Armenia and Azerbaijan drew up a joint list of 716 cases of political imprisonment and submitted it to a committee of experts to decide who fell into that category. The experts toiled away for three and a half years. During that time, many of the detainees were released or pardoned by their governments. In April 2003, the list under review contained 212 cases. The experts continued their work. There were further releases and pardons by the governments. In July 2004, the experts concluded that there were 64 political prisoners and that an identical number of prisoners did not fall into that category.
Eleven years later, on October 3, 2012, the Council of Europe adopted the experts’ definition as its own. It is known as Resolution 1900, which, for example, served to classify Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, as a political prisoner. WikiLeaks published millions of documents from the U.S. State Department in 2010.
The resolution states that political imprisonment occurs when detention is used as a means of punishing individuals for exercising their fundamental freedoms: of thought, conscience, religion, expression, and information, or of assembly or association. It also applies when detention is based solely on political grounds without any connection to a previously defined crime, or if the detention or its conditions are disproportionate to the crime alleged. If the person is detained in a discriminatory manner compared to other persons. If the detention is the result of clearly unfair proceedings that “could be related to the political motives of the authorities.”
Resolution 1900 traveled around the world. And its parameters on political imprisonment were used to describe the situations in Cuba, Russia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. It is not the only definition that exists, but it is one of the most widely accepted and used in the world. In El Salvador, its principles have already been analyzed as a mirror of reality. In February 2022, in an editorial entitled “Political Prisoners”, Central American University used those parameters to describe the irregular imprisonment of former mayor Muyshondt.
* * *
“...if, for political motives, he or she is detained in a discriminatory manner as compared to other persons…”
In June 2021, a month after leaving office as mayor, Muyshondt’s life was turned upside down. At the time, the state was showing him a bipolar attitude: On one hand, authorities were trying to arrest him, issuing warrants and charging him with new crimes. On the other, it seemed that the state, through the judges, was trying to work rigorously to guarantee, at least, due process.
All that has vanished. Muyshondt has been in pretrial detention for four years. That is twice the maximum allowed by the Constitution and Salvadoran law for a detainee without a conviction. But Muyshondt remains in detention because the Attorney General’s Office charged him with various crimes in different cases in 2021. Throughout the proceedings, negligence and conscious decisions have teamed up to prevent Muyshondt from being released. Muyshondt plunged into the tunnel of detention for alleged negotiations with gangs, but within three months, prosecutors ordered his arrest three more times on charges of dereliction of duty and withholding public-sector pension contributions.
In January 2021, the Attorney General’s Office accused him of negotiating electoral favors from MS-13 and the two factions of 18th Street in the 2014 elections. Muyshondt was facing trial while free until June 4, 2021 —one month and three days after Bukele imposed his own attorney general— when the capital's Second Investigating Judge reversed Muyshondt’s bail and ordered house arrest. Before he could reach his home to comply with the order, the police arrested him on new charges: According to prosecutors, he had withheld pension contributions from employees at a family business.
On June 9, he was acquitted after paying what he owed his employees. Then they ordered his house arrest again. This time, the Bureau of Prisons issued an electronic bracelet to monitor his movements, but this, too, was cut short when the police arrested him for the third time for another case of withholding contributions from the Solid Waste Department of the San Salvador Mayor’s Office. The law firm that drafted the complaint was owned by Miguel Flores Durel, a lawyer who defended two prominent MS-13 gang members and was appointed magistrate of the Constitutional Chamber imposed by Bukele. The wife of this magistrate had been hired a few months earlier by Bukele’s minister of labor. Around the same time, the minister, Rolando Castro, was waging an energetic media crusade against Muyshondt and had accused him, without presenting any evidence, of being involved in a murder.
At the initial hearing of the new case, Muyshondt was sent to Mariona Prison on June 14, 2021. On July 19, an appeals court reviewed his detention and found that the justice of the peace had not provided sufficient grounds for the measure. The court ordered house arrest, but the order was ignored. Days later, the Bureau of Prisons said it had “no electronic bracelets available” for Muyshondt, according to a post on its social media accounts on July 30.
The court insisted in various rulings that Muyshondt’s house arrest must be enforced. The last order was issued on September 3, 2021. By that time, the file on the unpaid contributions had already been sent to the Eighth Court of First Instance in San Salvador. The court ordered Judge Mario Miramontes to exhaust all measures to ensure that Muyshondt was placed under house arrest. But the judge did not do so.
On September 10, the Attorney General’s Office issued a fourth arrest warrant against the former mayor: another case of withholding more contributions from more municipal employees. Rinse and repeat: The Seventh Court of Peace admitted the case. The judge ordered house arrest. No-one obeyed. Muyshondt remained in prison.
On October 1, two newly appointed magistrates in the Third Criminal Chamber took up Muyshondt’s case and revoked the house arrest. It was a futile annulment because he had never been confined to his home: The order was never carried out by the prison authorities. And it was never enforced, among other reasons, because of a purported lack of ankle bracelets and because the police said that Muyshondt’s house was too big and they did not have enough personnel to ensure that he did not escape.
That day, the Chamber buried Muyshondt’s chances of leaving prison with a questionable decision, made without anyone asking them to do so. Chambers can revoke house arrest, but only when the lawyers in the case request it within the first 72 hours after the decision has been made. In this case, months had passed since the decision to place him under house arrest. Revocations by judges are also only valid when they concern routine procedural matters, not when they weigh substantive issues such as preventive detention or someone’s freedom.
In 2023, there were three open cases. The maximum term of Muyshondt’s detention for the electoral fraud case and the two pension contribution cases expired between June and September. By October, when the maximum period of detention expired, the former mayor should have been released from prison, but this did not happen. On October 18, 2023, a judge in one of the latter cases revoked her own decision to place Muyshondt under house arrest, a measure she had taken in June 2021.
The legal proceedings against Muyshondt are a relay race of cases activated one after the other. A race to keep him in captivity.
In February 2025, a trial was held for the pension case; by then, the two cases for that crime had been merged into one. The prosecution requested that Muyshondt be sentenced to 22 years in prison, but the court gave him four. The defense attorney said he would appeal, arguing that he was dissatisfied with the way the evidence was assessed. “He will have already served 36 months in detention without a sentence,” said the lawyer.
Muyshondt reported being the victim of physical and psychological torture and was taken to a psychiatric hospital without any kind of evaluation, order, or medical prescription.
“I saw that Muyshondt was held for three or four months in an isolation cell. Supposedly it was for aggression. I heard him screaming in the early mornings or at night. They were insults or the names of the guards,” said Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde, a former minister of justice and security who was detained between 2021 and 2024.
* * *
In the Republic of El Salvador, that first word rings increasingly hollow. The separation of powers has been broken since May 1, 2021. Three out of four legislators who took office that day came from Bukele’s party and, in a matter of minutes, removed the five members of the Constitutional Chamber, including the president of the Judicial Branch, without due process. Then the police arrived at the homes of the dismissed judges while they were receiving calls to force them to sign letters of resignation. The same thing happened to Attorney General Raúl Melara.
Bukele had complained that the Chamber and the Attorney General’s Office were boycotting his measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. “If I were a dictator, I would have had them all shot,” he said on August 11, 2020. “You save a thousand lives in exchange for five.”
Neither the constitutional magistrates nor Melara were given the opportunity to defend themselves, as required by the Constitution.
Attorney General Melara had been investigating corruption schemes for months, including Bukele’s negotiations with gangs. The case was being handled by the Special Anti-Mafia Group, which was dismantled after May 1. The new Constitutional Chamber took a 180-year step backward and allowed presidential reelection, which had been prohibited in the seven previous versions of the Constitution — except when dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez also amended it for that purpose. The new Supreme Court then teamed up with Bukele to purge judges and prosecutors over the age of 60, arguing that this would eliminate judicial corruption, as if it were a question of age. Judges were sanctioned, demoted, or dismissed. Those who showed loyalty to the new regime were rewarded.
By September 2024, the concentration of power was complete. No president since the end of the war in 1992 had ever managed to control all 15 seats on the Supreme Court, because it takes nine years to renew those positions and a president was supposed to be limited to five consecutive years in office. Bukele took control between 2021 and 2024, through irregular processes. In December 2024, lawmakers extended Delgado’s term until 2027.
How Bukele Crafted a Best-Selling Political Brand
The circle had been closed. Bukele ruled without checks and balances.
* * *
Rodolfo Delgado has more than 20 years of experience in the Attorney General’s Office. His rise was meteoric. Among his achievements is having led the Organized Crime Unit from 2004 to 2009, replacing his friend and mentor, Gustavo Villatoro, now Bukele’s minister of justice and security. The Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman (PDDH) documented two cases in which Delgado covered up for powerful individuals or accused innocent people. It also found that, while he headed the elite anti-kidnapping unit in 2001, he allowed detainees to be tortured.
After leaving the Attorney General’s Office in 2017, Delgado worked as a private litigator. In August 2018, he appeared as the defense attorney for Jorge Vega Knight, whom the Anti-Narcotics Division had profiled as a drug distributor and money launderer for MS-13 and was later acquitted of those charges. Starting in 2021, as attorney general, the institution he heads allowed Vega Knight to recover two motels that had been seized for money laundering. Delgado was also one of the lawyers for Alba Petróleos de El Salvador, a subsidiary of the Venezuelan oil company that was raided and investigated in 2018 for money laundering. Among those who benefited from the Alba Petróleos bonanza was Nayib Bukele, who received $1.9 million from the business group.
Delgado also defended Bukele’s police chief, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, when he was prosecuted for contempt of an order from the legislature.
On June 1, 2022, Bukele announced on national television an unprecedented crusade against corruption. “I think some of you have noticed that the attorney general is not with us tonight. That is because he is currently in the process of seizing all the properties of (former president) Alfredo Cristiani,” said Bukele, referring to the attorney general as if he were an employee.
The new justice system allows such things. The president knows before anyone else when the attorney general will carry out operations, allowing him to stage a political show in advance.
* * *
Bukele controls who prosecutes crime and also who judges it.
Nowadays, what breaks with the norm is any semblance of transparency or minimum guarantees. The courts on which the lives of 85,000 Salvadorans detained under the state of exception depend do not allow anything to be known about the cases. The law now guarantees the judges’ anonymity. In mass hearings with up to 500 defendants per case, public defenders are overwhelmed. It is impossible to fully dimension the arbitrariness committed under Bukele’s foremost political strategy throughout his career: the state of exception.
Judges have been punished for not toeing the line. In April 2022, when San Salvador Judge Godofredo Salazar pointed out the investigative weakness of the Attorney General’s Office due to the lack of evidence against 42 alleged gang members, the new system had no time for such technicalities. Bukele ordered an investigation against the judge on social media, setting off a media firestorm accusing Salazar of defending terrorists and chasing the judge into exile. Or there is Judge Gladys Margarita Salgado, of the Sixth Sentencing Court of San Salvador, demoted in December 2021 after dismissing an accusation of defamation by a ruling-party legislator against an academic. A magistrate who ordered Muyshondt’s release to house arrest, Martin Rogel, was demoted to a criminal chamber outside the capital.
Other judges were rewarded. The late Carlos Iraheta Zelaya was promoted to replace Rogel after ordering the provisional detention of five former high-ranking FMLN officials in July 2021 on charges of money laundering. Mario Miramontes, the Investigating Judge of San Salvador who heard the Muyshondt case and disobeyed Rogel’s house arrest order, was promoted to magistrate of the Second Criminal Chamber of the capital two months later.
There are judges who were not affected by the forced-retirement purge. Héctor Villatoro, 79 years old, held onto his post while his colleagues over the age of 60 cleaned out their offices. He is the father of one of Bukele’s key cabinet members, Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro.
* * *
“…if the detention has been imposed in violation of one of the fundamental guarantees set out in the European Convention on Human Rights and its Protocols (ECHR), in particular (...) freedom of assembly and association…”
When she was two years old, little Valentina began to suffer the wounds of El Salvador.
First wound. April 26, 2022. Valentina had no food for dinner. Paola, her 17-year-old mother, went out to look for something to eat at the store, leaving the girl with her grandmother in a neighborhood in Ciudad Arce, Santa Ana. She was at the store when the police raided it and swept her up in a series of arrests. Valentina was left without her mother.
Paola was a minor. Accused of being a gang member, she was taken to the headquarters of the National Institute for Children and Adolescents (ISNA). Two weeks later, on May 11, Paola had a hearing and the judge saw that she was vulnerable. “I am going to release you for Valentina, your two-year-old daughter. You will get out, you will study, and you will not get pregnant again,” the judge reprimanded her. Paola nodded and promised to continue her studies. That day, Valentina got her mother back for a few days.
Prisons and detention centers are miniature Babels where misfortune and manifold paths cross. While she was detained, according to the Missing Persons Search Unit, Paola was threatened by a female gang member.
Second wound. Fifteen days after regaining her freedom, Paola developed a cough from her days in confinement. She left to look for medicine. Valentina stayed with her grandmother. That was the last time Valentina saw her mother. Paola has been missing ever since.
Third wound. Valentina is now five years old. Her grandmother is Verónica Delgado, 43. Since Paola disappeared, Verónica quit her job to take care of her granddaughter and devote herself to the search. On Saturday, March 9, 2024, thousands of women from various collectives, associations, and movements took to the streets to march in commemoration of International Women’s Day. Valentina and Verónica marched alongside some thirty women in the Missing Persons Search Unit, a group of relatives of the disappeared. “It was a peaceful march. All of us in the Unit participated,” Verónica told El Faro. Verónica appeared in the media at that march as a “madre buscadora,” a searching mother. She gave interviews.
Fourth wound. Two days later, on Monday, March 11, Verónica was arrested under the state of exception. Yet again, little Valentina was left without a caregiver.
Verónica was arrested as she was washing clothes. She saw the police approaching from an adjacent lot. One officer said they had just been told that marijuana was being sold there.
“There's nothing like that here. I take care of children and look for my daughter.”
“Why are you still looking for her? Stop looking for her, your daughter must be dead.”
Verónica tried to call her lawyer, but a police officer prevented her. He recommended that she call a family member to take Valentina away, threatening to take her to ISNA, so Verónica called Valentina’s great-grandmother. She lived nearby.
When she entered the Apanteos prison in Santa Ana one morning in March 2024, dressed in white and stripped of all her belongings, she was shocked to see the ages of her cellmates. Twenty, twenty-two, eighteen... “Do you know the first thing I thought? I thought of my daughter, Paola. She looked just like all of them, eighteen years old.” She also thought of her granddaughter. “I was worried about her,” she said in July 2024, in an interview with El Faro, two months after her release from prison.
Pain for her daughter. Pain for her granddaughter.
Verónica spent 22 days in prison without ever going before a judge. One day she heard a guard shout her name. “Today you’re free,” he told her. The Bloque de Búsqueda and the Due Process of Law Foundation believe that her arrest could be in retaliation for her work as an activist and human rights defender. Her arrest was purely a police action. The state of exception empowers the police and military to make arrests at will, without cause. In a pinch, the government can send a message by imprisoning those who raise their voices in protest.
Verónica has participated in various activities denouncing the situation of the disappeared and has submitted letters to the Attorney General’s Office asking for swift action to find her daughter Paola. “We have to keep raising our voice,” said Verónica a few days after her release.
This year, on International Women’s Day, Verónica did not join the march. More than half of the members of the Unit did not show up either. I interviewed coordinator Carmen Argueta. I asked her if all the members of the group had attended, but her response echoes the case of Ruth López. She replied that they had not: “There is fear. Remember what happened to Verónica.”
* * *
When Bukele announced that the attorney general was busy raiding the properties of former President Alfredo Cristiani, he spoke of him as if he had already been convicted. Cristiani governed between 1989 and 1994, signed the Peace Accords, and by 2023 was the only former president alive and at liberty in El Salvador. The country’s two FMLN presidents were in exile in the Nicaraguan dictatorship with pending criminal charges in El Salvador—one of them died later—; two other Arena presidents were already dead, one of them while in custody on corruption charges; and a third former Arena president has been in prison since 2018, also for corruption.
Cristiani is —or was— a wealthy businessman, influential politician, and one of the national figures around whom all kinds of plots are thought to have been hatched, although none have been prosecuted or proven. It is a fact that Cristiani reprivatized the state banking system, but in political circles it is said —as claimed by the Mexican magazine Proceso in 1993— that his family may have benefited from the decision. There is also talk of his role as commander-in-chief of the Army when six Jesuits were murdered at the Central American University in November 1989, although the former rector of the UCA, José María Tojeira, has said that there is little suspicion of Cristiani’s involvement. There is also talk of his calculating role in purging the Army at the end of the war, or of his alleged links to drug traffickers, which he has categorically denied.
Some bring up a pharmaceutical dust-up at the turn of the century between the Bukele and Cristiani families over public contracts with the Social Security Institute, of which one of Bukele’s brothers and his father complained publicly.
The Bukele Clan that Rules with Nayib
For all these reasons, or perhaps precisely because nothing has ever been proven, it seemed easy for Bukele to mount an attack against him. Two weeks after Bukele’s speech, without any conviction or charges filed in any court, prosecutors seized 143 properties, 41 vehicles, 27 bank accounts, and a helicopter from Cristiani, valued at $68 million, when the amount that they estimated was tied to corruption was seven times less. The Attorney General’s Office claimed to have reports that Cristiani had companies in tax havens, months after El Faro revealed this.
Bukele’s prosecutor cited asset forfeiture law to skin Cristiani, transferring his properties to the state without the former president ever being convicted in court. By then, Cristiani was already out of the country.
The only lawsuits against Cristiani in court are related to war crimes, such as the UCA massacre, which occurred while he was in office, or El Mozote, a crime that was granted amnesty under a law Cristiani signed while president. These are not for financial crimes. And the arrest warrants against Cristiani have been rejected by Interpol itself as politically motivated.
The rules in El Salvador seem to be different. A year ago, Bukele convened another national broadcast, attended by his cabinet, to showcase his achievements. Very soon, he adopted a threatening tone. Among the guests, in a privileged position, was Delgado. “I want to ask you in public: Let’s investigate everyone here, past and present,” Bukele said. “I will not be remembered as the president who did not steal but surrounded himself with thieves.”
Attorney General Delgado, sitting a few meters away, reacted with a slight smirk, his gaze fixed on the table, his hands hidden on his thighs. Such is justice in El Salvador: a president uses the attorney general —his prosecutor— to make threats.
* * *
A 2015 article in El Faro reads: “The yellow book appeared when a man rented a house in San Salvador, and a document covered in yellow paste fell from the ceiling onto the floor. The man then mentioned it to his friends, who gave it to an organization that collects historical documents —which still has the original book— and the story of a yellow book falling from the ceiling reached the ears of researcher and former political prisoner Carlos Santos.”
The chronicle, “The Secret Archives of the Dictatorship,” tells of seven books that recorded how the Salvadoran Army, between the 1970s and 1980s, relentlessly persecuted dissidents whom it considered communists. Two of these books were compiled by one of the Armed Forces’ counterinsurgency intelligence offices and record 496 arrests, of which 90 people disappeared.
“Today you can see it clearly and sometimes even with data. But back then it was a whirlwind of terrible things. What we have now is not a whirlwind. It’s different: There is less barbarism, but the goal is the same," says Rubén Zamora, a former Salvadoran diplomat who, after 40 years of political persecution, now faces renewed harassment. Zamora was active in the political struggle against dictatorships. He faced death threats, had the front of his house blown up, saw his brother murdered, witnessed the assassination of his comrades in the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FDR), and was kidnapped by the National Guard along with his wife, the academic María Ester Chamorro. She was released, but he was tortured for several days until his release. He suffered exile and lived in Mexico for four years during the war, until 1987.
And he returned.
“What we have now is a typical dictatorship. And it can only be a dictatorship if it is capable of dominating the entire political state,” he says.
Between December 2023 and February 2024, the new judge in San Francisco Gotera issued two arrest warrants against Zamora for the alleged crime of personal concealment: The thesis is that Zamora, as a lawmaker in 1993, passed a law that left war crimes unpunished, including the massacre of campesinos in El Mozote, a case she has been prosecuting since 2021.
But Zamora actually did precisely the opposite of what the judge claims: In 1993, he did not even propose that version of the amnesty; in his speech on the day it was approved, he railed against it and left the chamber in protest before the vote. As a member of the Assembly’s leadership, he did not sign the decree to send it for official publication, either. But the judge insists on a trial. Zamora no longer has an active arrest warrant, but he must report every week to a court in Panchimalco, south of San Salvador, for something he clearly never did.
“They wanted to silence me,” says Zamora, who since Bukele came to power has been an active critic of his authoritarian excesses. Starting in 2022, Zamora participated with the electoral opposition coalition Sumar and the National Alliance El Salvador in Peace September 15. In May 2023, he even proposed himself as a candidate, although the alliance chose someone else.
Sitting at sunset in his home, Zamora said he believes that authoritarianism continues to cling to El Salvador like a moth to a flame, forty years after he experienced its burns firsthand. He says it is because democracy here has been “for show,” and that it is this formality that allows “political games” to be played. That the Army grew so large during the war that this was never reversed. Zamora asserts that during the war he learned that nothing strikes more fear into the Armed Forces and authoritarian governments than social movements: “In the war, that was called taking water away from a fish.”
The 1992 Peace Accords allowed for free elections. Now Bukele insists that those Accords were a sham and that he is not a dictator because dictators shoot people. That no one here is imprisoned for their ideas.
But reports such as the one produced annually by the United States, to assess the human rights situation in countries around the world, tell a different story about El Salvador since 2021. That was the first year of the Bukele era in which the report spoke of “political prisoners and detainees.” It did so again in the 2022 and 2023 editions. The report has documented the trials of 11 people: former mayor Muyshondt; former Health Minister Violeta Menjívar; former Deputy Minister of Agriculture Hugo Flores; former FMLN lawmaker Calixto Mejía; former Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Erlinda Hándal; former Finance Minister Carlos Cáceres; and five environmental activists who have opposed the gold mining industry: Antonio Pacheco, Saúl Rivas, Alejandro Laínez, Miguel Gámez, and Pedro Rivas.
There are more cases. For every political prisoner in El Salvador, there are four who have fled, according to a tally by the Committee of Relatives of Political Prisoners and Persecuted Persons (COFAPPES), which emerged in 2021 following the arrest of the former officials. Their count is the most complete and detailed available. In March 2025, it reported that there were 28 prisoners and 92 people under political persecution. Ninety-five percent of the cases involve “progressives from social movements, trade unions, or environmental groups,” according to the committee. Six cases involve members of the right-wing Arena party.
* * *
“...if the detention has been imposed for purely political reasons without connection to any offense...”
The premises known as “2-29” is an office on Ninth Avenue North in San Salvador, near the city center, where the FMLN headquarters for the capital is located. There, on July 22, 2021, two former congresswomen, Lourdes Palacios and Yanci Urbina, were meeting. It was just after midday when a message popped up on one of the cell phones: “They’re arresting me, fradntadjfa...” The truncated message was sent to a group chat of former party leaders by Violeta Menjívar, former mayor of the capital and health minister in the FMLN government between 2014 and 2019. They made calls and soon confirmed everything: Menjívar’s driver said he was with her on the street when three police officers got out of a private car and told her she had to accompany them because they had some questions for her. The driver followed the car and that was how he learned that Menjívar was taken to a private home, not to a police station.
That same day, former Deputy Minister of Agriculture Hugo Flores was detained by another group of officers while driving in San Salvador. He was told that his car had been reported stolen and that he had to clarify the situation at a police station.
That day, the police arrested three more former officials: Calixto Mejía, a former congressman; Erlinda Hándal, former deputy minister of Science and Technology; and Carlos Cáceres, former finance minister. Five more arrest warrants were issued, including one for former President Salvador Sánchez Cerén, who was already sleeping peacefully under the protection of the Nicaraguan dictatorship. At 2:30 in the afternoon, those at 2-29 learned that the detainees would be taken to the Central Directorate of Investigations. Palacios says he took sheets of paper and markers because he thought they would have to protest, staging a small sit-in with improvised signs. Party activists and middle-ranking officials arrived on the scene.
At the DCI, the doors were closed; they did not even let the lawyers in. It was raining. Police from the Unit for the Maintenance of Public Order (UMO) kept everyone at bay. After almost eight hours, the lawyers were allowed in. The detainees were taken to the Customs Division, but they were hidden from the protesters and taken out through another gate. The initial hearing was on Sunday, July 25, 2021. Palacios says they learned their first lesson that day.
The defense attorneys entered the hearing confident that they would at least get the judge to grant house arrest. That was typical in cases like this. “When we left the hearing, you could see the surprise on their faces,” Palacios says. “We believed that all these cases could be resolved through legal means, but over time we realized that they are political cases,” he says.
That group of relatives stayed in touch. In the first week of August, they decided to meet at 2-29 to write a statement. That is where the idea for the committee and its name came about: COFAPES, the Committee of Relatives of Political Prisoners of El Salvador. At the time, the name was spelled with a single P. Palacios was elected coordinator. In those days, there were no more than 15 members.
Alma Cruz, the mother of Ever Cruz, an FMLN councilor in the Zacatecoluca Mayor’s Office in La Paz, who had been arrested on April 28, two months earlier, also attended those meetings. Cruz had been captured along with 17 other people, including Salvador Hirezi, a well-known FMLN member, party leader, and mayor of Zacatecoluca. The Attorney General’s Office dubbed the case file Monarch.
Palacios recalls that, at first, the Monarca case caused confusion because those involved included an Arena mayor, several businesspeople, councilors from different parties, and even police officers. “We didn't know it had political connotations; it wasn’t clear. It was just a big mess,” says Palacios. That was the second lesson. Conceptualizing and defining who is a political prisoner is difficult, far from a black-and-white issue.
A month later, the court ordered that most of those involved in the Monarca case be released on parole, with the exception of the five FMLN members, including Mayor Hirezi and Ever Cruz. “Only those from the Frente were left in prison,” says Palacios.
Ever’s sister, lawyer Ivania Cruz, took on the defense of some of the detainees in the Monarch case: “I told all the families to stay united in all of this.” Her family had been sympathetic to the Frente, but she never joined. Her law office, called the Unit for the Defense of Community and Human Rights in El Salvador, defended victims of forced eviction. “At that time, there were no organizations. Everything was disorganized, including the FMLN. Everyone was in hiding,” says Ivania Cruz. She soon became the spokesperson for COFAPES.
Shortly thereafter, Cruz experienced her first internal conflicts. She believed she could not speak out on behalf of all COFAPES cases because there were people she was not willing to defend, such as Miguel Menéndez, better known as Mecafé, an official in the first FMLN government who was caught on video handing out gifts to officials. “In some cases, I preferred not to get involved. I didn’t agree that they should be considered political prisoners because I studied their cases carefully. The fact that they are part of the opposition, and are in prison, does not mean that they are political prisoners,” says Ivania Cruz.
She did agree to defend the case of the former FMLN officials arrested in July 2021. There were some inexplicable aspects to the case. Calixto Mejía, for example, a former FMLN deputy, was acquitted by the Supreme Court in an administrative investigation into his assets. In May 2021, the court found that Mejía did not enrich himself illegally. But two months later, he was arrested on the same charge.
The officials were accused of enriching themselves by receiving a monthly salary supplement, in cash, tax-free, commonly referred to as a “sobresueldo.” However, at that time, there were already others (in addition to Calixto Mejía, former officials such as Manuel Melgar, former deputy and former private secretary to the President) who had been acquitted on the same allegations. While the legality of the discretionary bonuses is difficult to call into question, they may be questioned from an ethical and moral perspective. Almost all officials’ asset declarations between 2004 and 2019 reported it in their accounts.
Why, then, did the Bukele-controlled Attorney General’s Office order the arrest of the former FMLN officials in July 2021?
* * *
“...if, for political motives, he or she is detained in a discriminatory manner as compared to other persons...”
The spate of arrests of former officials came after three intense weeks in which the Bukele administration and allies were trying to emerge from a public-image crisis. In early July 2021, the State Department had published the “Engel List” sanctions of officials whom the United States claimed to have evidence of corruption. Many of the officials were Bukele’s: his chief of cabinet, Carolina Recinos; the Minister of the Interior, Rogelio Rivas; the director of the prison system, Osiris Luna; the Minister of Agriculture, Pablo Anliker; and the Minister of Labor, Rolando Castro, among others.
To recover from this blow, the government and its allies responded with a media campaign called “The Real List,” consisting of a series of videos and articles about allegedly corrupt former officials from the 20 years prior to Bukele’s administration. This was used to attack some of the former officials who would be arrested on July 22 in the media. In a bid for control of the narrative, after the blow to its image from the United States, legislators including the president of the Legislative Assembly, publicized the campaign and created websites for the public to include the names of their most hated corrupt officials.
Between December 2021 and December 2023, four of the ten former officials accused of enriching themselves took a plea deal, admitting to illicit enrichment and money laundering and returning the money obtained from the bonuses in exchange for release from prison with community service sentences. Calixto Mejía, a former FMLN deputy, has not yet reached an agreement with the Attorney General’s Office and remains in prison despite the fact that the two-year legal period for preventive detention has expired. The court in charge of his case has already ordered his release, but the prison system has responded vaguely that it cannot comply with the order “due to administrative problems.”
In the Monarch case, too, a court order has been violated. “We are talking about the kidnapping of people who have been tried and should be free,” says Ivania Cruz, who until last year was the defense attorney. Explaining the case is complex, as it has ramifications that are intertwined with other cases of persecution.
In the Monarch case, former mayor Hirezi was sentenced to 18 years in prison in May 2023 (ten years for two cases in which he allegedly agreed to rig a municipal contract, and eight more for two cases in which, according to the prosecution, he took gifts in exchange for awarding it). Three months earlier, in February 2023, the First Sentencing Court of Santa Tecla had ordered his release while he awaited sentencing on $25,000 bail, which his relatives paid. But the court order was never enforced. The day of sentencing arrived in May, and he was given 18 years in prison. The case is under appeal. In November 2023, another court again granted Hirezi conditional release, as the maximum period of preventive detention had expired. But the Bureau of Prisons has failed to comply with the order.
Of the 19 defendants in the Monarca case, three (Hirezi, former municipal councilman Dennis Córdova, and former legislator Jaime Valdez, both from the FMLN) should be on parole, as are 15 other defendants in the case. The last of the defendants is Ever, Ivania Cruz’s brother now in exile thanks to Ivania's efforts. In 2023, the court hearing the Monarch case decided to bring forward a hearing by one month. Ivania was out of the country and unable to represent her brother. Ever refused to accept any lawyer other than his sister, so his file was separated from the case in La Paz and sent to San Vicente. Ivania sued the judge who moved up the hearing, and the case is being investigated by the Supreme Court, which is controlled by Bukele. “When they separated the case and I returned to the country, I received a message from an anonymous account telling me that, now that my brother was out of the process, it would be best for me to keep quiet and not say anything. I felt that this was a form of blackmail. That’s why I got my brother out of the country,” Ivania explained to El Faro.
Two weeks after the interview, on May 5, 2025, a Salvadoran court issued an arrest warrant against Ivania for a case in which Rodolfo Delgado’s office is investigating the alleged illegal sale of land in a place called La Floresta. UNIDEHC was advising residents to prevent eviction from the place they had called home for more than a decade. Ivania Cruz had been seeking political asylum in Spain since April. A former colleague of hers, Fidel Zavala, was arrested on February 25, 2025, in connection with the La Floresta case, and the Attorney General’s Office then accused Ivania of being part of the same network.
Ivania was awaiting the outcome of the hearing against her on May 5 to decide her next step. When her arrest was ordered, she formalized her request for asylum in the Basque Country, Spain. Ivania believes that the arrest of her former colleague Fidel Zavala is also a case of political persecution.
Fidel Zavala had been imprisoned for 13 months, between February 2022 and March 2023, for allegations of fraud of which he was ultimately acquitted. His time in prison coincided with the period when prisons began to fill up with people prosecuted by the regime. Upon his release, he denounced the torture he suffered and the deaths he witnessed. He also filed criminal charges against his torturers and filed a criminal complaint against the prison authorities. “I had to write down the names of those who came out in black bags [dead],” said Zavala.
Those words and those accusations seem to have cost him dearly.
He was arrested in connection with the La Floresta case in February 2025 and was unable to contact his lawyer until three weeks later, during the first hearing in the case. On the 14th of that month, Zavala faced another hearing for a new fraud case brought against him. At the hearing, despite requesting private lawyers, he was assigned a public defender whom he explicitly rejected. The case moved to the next stage and Zavala was sent to preventive detention. Three days later, on the 17th, the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court ordered a retrial of the case in which he had been acquitted in 2023. The new trial began on April 11, but was suspended that day and the case was placed under total secrecy with no new hearing date set.
* * *
“...when detention occurs in retaliation for fundamental freedoms of individuals: freedom of association…”
At 10:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 30, 2024, a private pickup truck with no police markings parked in front of a house in the La Cima neighborhood of San Salvador. Officers from the Elite Division Against Organized Crime (DECO) got out. They knocked on the door. Liana opened and the police officers mentioned an investigation they were conducting and some questions they needed to ask her husband. Atilio Montalvo was still recovering from recent surgery.
Atilio Montalvo, 72, negotiator of the Peace Accords, founder of the National Civil Police, and former FMLN combatant, believed it was best to cooperate with the officers and get everything over with as soon as possible, because he had his first dialysis appointment at the Social Security office early the next day. With a catheter recently inserted into his stomach, Montalvo answered questions and identified people in photographs shown to him by the police. He was then told that he would be taken to the DECO headquarters on Progreso Street in the capital, without explanation. He was taken away and the house was guarded by police. One of Atilio's sons remained inside and was interrogated by the agents. Two days later, on June 1, the house was raided and computers and other equipment were confiscated from the Montalvo family.
An economist, former leader of the FMLN political commission, and FMLN government official from 2014 to 2019, Montalvo is respected within the party ranks. He was one of the few leaders who openly criticized the million-dollar Alba businesses of some of his colleagues. He resigned from the leadership in January 2022 in protest against a party he considered stagnant. His new trench, he said, would be alongside social organizations.
That night, half a dozen veterans and ex-combatants were also arrested, accused of planning terrorist attacks to boycott Bukele’s inauguration on June 1, and of belonging to a terrorist organization. The case is under wraps and no details are available.
Veterans’ and ex-combatants' associations are among the most active in El Salvador, and their protests and public demonstrations are very common. On the fifth anniversary of Bukele’s government, a leader of one of the veterans’ associations confirmed to El Faro that they had planned to carry out “75 street actions throughout the country.” “These were advocacy activities, blockades, marches, or rallies, but at no time was there any intention to blow things up or anything like that,” he said. Throughout the postwar period, these associations have never detonated a bomb in any of their dozens of demonstrations.
Due to the arrests, they only carried out four of the 75 activities, and from then on, the organization fell into disgrace. Police intelligence documents reveal that the arrests occurred three years after Montalvo and Melara had been profiled as leaders of demonstrations. Montalvo was described in internal police documents as a “leader of organizations affiliated with the FMLN,” linking him to events of “social destabilization.” El Faro had access to some 20 such documents thanks to the release of PNC emails through Guacamaya Leaks.
Santos Melara, Atilio Montalvo’s colleague in the organization, is president of the FMLN's National Association of War Veterans and a former deputy for that party. He also appears in police intelligence documents. The documents show that the police were interested in Montalvo and Melara, above all for their role in the “September 15 National Alliance for Peace in El Salvador,” a broad movement of social organizations that emerged in early 2021 and organized the Independence Day march that year, in which an estimated 8,000 people participated. It was the largest march against Bukele to date. The Alliance is made up of more than 20 sectors, but the most numerous groups are veterans of the Armed Forces, former FMLN combatants, and labor unions. The police documents do not mention any crimes and describe the surveillance as eminently political.
The Alliance was also relevant to the government because it was part of the popular structures that supported the unsuccessful initiative to field a single presidential candidate in the February 2024 elections to oppose Bukele's unconstitutional reelection.
A year after the mass march, the government took steps to prevent such large protests from happening again. After the state of exception was approved in March, the next step was to criminalize protests. Conan Castro, former legal secretary to the president, and Rolando Castro, minister of labor, claimed that “criminals and people who support gangs” would participate in the 2022 Labor Day march. Under the state of emergency, this implied a direct threat to the social movement. Some unions suspended their calls for protests for fear of arrests.
Montalvo and Melara were often mentioned by name, sometimes even with photographs, in internal reports whenever there were protests or when one was planned. Their names appear in tables listing the date, time, and location of various “destabilizing” events during a given period. In addition, the lead organization was usually identified, along with a “brief account” of what happened and the “number of participants.” According to the documents, the activities led by Montalvo and Santos were always the most attended or those where the highest participation was expected. Their demands or requirements were also detailed.
These reports sometimes included files on people “of interest.” According to the emails, the files were created for the purpose of feeding a “matrix of union leaders” maintained by the Subdirectorate of Intelligence. It says a great deal about El Salvador, where the last conflict of the Cold War was fought in the 1980s, that the PNC continues to refer to the leaders of any social movement, whether related to unionism or not, in this way.
In addition to identity information, each file includes the names of the parents, any criminal record, and the academic level. But the most relevant information is at the end: “Information of interest.” This is a two- or three-line section where the internet link to the person's statement, interview, video, or photograph is posted; a political description of the individual is also provided. For example, if they are an activist, what is their cause, who are their political allies, where have they been involved, where have they been seen, have they worked for the state, have they been a candidate, have they run for a secondary office? El Faro was able to see dozens of these files.
In a report covering the period from September 13 to 17, 2021, for example, there are seven new files on people of interest. Four people, including three judges, were described as “close to the Arena party.” They had participated in the delivery of a piece of correspondence to the Assembly. Another judge, a unionist, and a university leader were also described as “close to the FMLN.” They had appeared in the media giving interviews. A person “close to Arena” was also identified and singled out as a participant in the burning of a Chivo Wallet ATM in the Historic Center of San Salvador.
A complete file on Montalvo appears in a document entitled, “Weekly Presentation from February 28 to March 6, 2022,” along with a report on protest activities carried out that week and others planned for the following days. Along with Montalvo's, there are six other files on feminists, environmental defenders, political leaders, and former candidates. Three of these files belong to men; four to women. Montalvo's file includes information about her positions in the FMLN and her war pseudonym, which she still uses as a militant even though she resigned from leadership in 2022.
The Department of Operational Tactics is an important unit, but low in the police hierarchy. It reports to the Information-Gathering Directorate, which in turn reports to the Intelligence Subdirectorate, which in turn reports to the General Subdirectorate of the PNC.
Following the capture of the two war veterans, the September 15 Alliance for Peace in El Salvador fell apart. This was confirmed by one of its leaders. “The capture caused everyone to scatter. There is no longer a strong organization as before. It was a big blow, right at the head of the organization.”
The court case for the alleged attack is under complete secrecy. Atilio, Montalvo’s son, is 35 years old and has had his career cut short for several months. He is now trying to restart it in Mexico, where he is in exile. He had to leave El Salvador after becoming the family spokesperson to denounce that his father has had two terminal illnesses since 2023 and that he is in danger of dying in prison. Then the threats began, according to an interview he gave. He began to lose sleep, he lost his appetite, lost his job... “You know when you’re being threatened by a fanatic and when it’s someone in authority,” he said. “On two occasions, [police] officers identified me: ‘We recommend that you leave the country so you don’t get into trouble.’”
He bought a plane ticket and left.
* * *
“...the arrest violates fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of expression…”
Geovanny Aguirre, 32, an employee of the San Salvador City Council, asked to speak one morning in April 2022 during a meeting with ruling-party Mayor Mario Durán. He took the microphone and said publicly that he disagreed with the mayor, that the City Council unions were not obliged to attend any activities to commemorate International Workers’ Day. He said that he and his union would march in the streets, as they did every year. Those words, according to half a dozen union and social movement spokespeople, sealed his fate. Aguirre and his union not only marched on May 1 of that year; during the march he recounted, microphone in hand, that meeting with Durán.
In 2022, the Bukele government had attempted to break up the marches by accusing the organizations that had convened them of supporting gangs. The September 2021 march had drawn more than 8,000 people.
Seven days after the march, on May 8, Aguirre was arrested at his home by the police. According to the police report, the arrest took place at 7:45 p.m. The police claim in that document, released by Guacamaya Leaks, that Aguirre was arrested “on an unnamed street, in front of the Progreso 3 community” in San Salvador. Elena, his mother, denies this and says that he was arrested at his home, from where he was taken away to be detained and put on a minibus. The police report also indicates that Aguirre was accompanied by two other people, identified as MS-13 gang members. Elena, on the other hand, says that the PNC only arrested him and that there were only family members in the house, no strangers.
Socorro Jurídico Humanitario (SJH), a legal-aid organization that assists victims of arbitrary detention, has reported the case to the United Nations. In the complaint form, the SJH detailed that, without a search warrant, the police conducted a search of the home, looked up his name in databases, and, after a few minutes, made phone calls after which they informed Aguirre that they had to take him into custody for belonging to an illegal group. According to another police document listing some 40,000 MS-13 members, with their full names and places of residence, Aguirre was an MS-13 “soldier” nicknamed “Cántaro.” However, the report contains contradictions: it says that he was a ‘collaborator’ with the gang and that his nickname was “Yova.” His mother, the union, and city officials denied that Aguirre was a gang member.
Aguirre was studying at the university and was the family’s breadwinner. He had also been a trainer at the FMLN political schools. At City Hall, his record was clean. He had no disciplinary infractions. After his arrest, he was taken to Izalco Prison in Sonsonate., an organization that assists victims of arbitrary detention,
Nine months after his arrest, the First Court for Organized Crime issued a release letter on February 9, 2023. SJH claims that, on the same day, the police recaptured him outside the prison on another charge: belonging to terrorist organizations. The SJH is providing legal support to the family and says that, prior to the release order, the court had already issued another order that was ignored by the Bureau of Prisons. The case, like all cases under the state of emergency, is completely secret.
Ingrid Escobar, spokesperson for SJH, says they fear for Geovanny’s safety. When his charge was changed sometime in 2023, he was transferred to the Center for Confinement against Terrorism (CECOT), the mega-prison built by the Bukele government where hundreds of Venezuelans sent by the Donald Trump administration are being held. On September 4, 2024, Escobar’s organization filed a complaint with the Attorney General’s Office for the possible commission of the crime of forced disappearance and disobedience of a court order. Socorro Jurídico sued the Minister of Justice, the Director of Prisons, and the directors of the Izalco and Mariona prisons.
“He said things in public and, curiously, only he was arrested,” says Héctor Rodríguez, leader of the Movement in Defense of the Working Class. “They know that, if Geovanny gets out of prison, he will tell everything he saw and the injustices he has suffered,” says Escobar.
* * *
“...if the detention has been imposed for purely political reasons without connection to any offence…”
Mauricio Ramírez Landaverde, director of the National Civil Police between 2014 and 2019 and a minister of justice and security in the second FMLN government, arrived early at the agreed location in the San Salvador metropolitan area one day in April, just before Holy Week. “I do consider myself a political prisoner,” he said, shortly after the conversation began.
A Netflix synopsis would summarize his case as follows: A police chief was imprisoned for three years until his innocence was proven. Now he is seeking to clear his name, but his file is still in the hands of the dictatorship.
But reality surpasses fiction. Moreover, as is often the case, the devil is in the details. There are wrinkles that reveal what political imprisonment is like in El Salvador.
Ramírez Landaverde began to be attacked in the final days of the FMLN government, while he was still a civil servant. The attacks came from the circle around President-elect Nayib Bukele. Former Mayor Will Salgado, a candidate for Nuevas Ideas, accused Ramírez Landaverde, without presenting any evidence, of having profited from the FMLN government through a purchase of electronic bracelets for prisoners made by the security cabinet.
Ramírez Landaverde sued Salgado for defamation and slander, demanding a public apology and $300,000 in damages for moral injury. The case did not proceed because they agreed that no-one would ever mention the issue in public again.
Three weeks after the new government took office in 2019, Bukele and the director of the prison system, Osiris Luna, publicly accused Ramírez Landaverde of another case of alleged corruption. Luna made the accusation in a morning interview on June 27. Hours later, Bukele held a press conference to insist, without presenting any evidence, that Ramírez Landaverde had embezzled money from stores that supply products to prisoners. According to Bukele, this deserved headlines because it was “a corruption scandal.” Throughout the day, various government websites and Twitter accounts such as @Gobierno_sv, @Seguridadsv, and @PenalesSV repeated the version that Ramírez Landaverde had created and directed a structure to embezzle money through an NGO.
Straight from the Bukele playbook: first the public trial, then the criminal proceedings.
This was not an isolated accusation. It was part of a network of messages, videos, publications, and actions on the ground aimed at making the public feel the corruption of previous governments. The new government had just announced the security plan that —although it was still too early to know— would be talked about throughout its entire administration: the Territorial Control Plan. Bukele boasted to the world about his secret plan while pointing to the previous government as corrupt. “The accusation against me was intended to discredit the previous security strategy,” concludes Ramírez Landaverde. Over time, it would become known that the plan announced with great fanfare by Bukele never existed — that homicides had in fact fallen thanks to his pact with the gangs.
The next day, the media reported Bukele’s statements, but few highlighted the fact that Ramírez Landaverde had founded the NGO Asociación Yo Cambio (Asocambio) in accordance with a recommendation from the Court of Accounts to bring more order to the management of prison store funds. Bukele’s officials went to the Attorney General’s Office to request an investigation into Ramírez Landaverde and other former officials, and the police opened a disciplinary file to dismiss him. He continued to work at the PNC General Directorate, “but I really didn’t do anything; they marginalized me,” he says.
For two years —who knows if there were many or few investigations— the case did not progress and seemed to have died in some drawer of the Attorney General’s Office. The case was revived after Bukele’s coup against the Court and the Attorney General. On September 7, 2021, Ramírez Landaverde heard a rumor that an arrest warrant had been issued against him and other former officials. He was at El Castillo, as the police headquarters is known, and decided to notify his superiors. “No, man, how can you believe that?” replied the incredulous Commissioner César Santana Vela, head of police investigations, when Ramírez Landaverde told him he was willing to submit to the process. Santana Vela consulted with Director Mauricio Arriaza, who confirmed everything, and Ramírez Landaverde was detained then and there, in the director’s office.
From then on, a series of arbitrary actions ensued. First, at his initial hearing, Ramírez Landaverde heard the judge scold the prosecutors “for not presenting any evidence to support the charges.” The court did not dismiss the case, ordering it instead to proceed to the preliminary investigation phase and releasing Ramírez Landaverde on probation. But the Attorney General objected to Ramírez Landaverde's release and appealed. That October, the Third Criminal Chamber reversed the measures.
Strangely, the Chamber never notified the parties. Ramírez Landaverde heard rumors that his conditional release had been revoked, so he went to the court to inquire about his status. The first time, he received no response. He waited a few days and returned. On December 7, when he repeated his inquiry, he was detained.
Ramírez Landaverde requested a hearing for the court to review whether the arrest was justified. In January 2022, Second Investigating Judge Edelmira Flores ruled that Ramírez Landaverde should be released, but as with Muyshondt, the Monarch case, and so many others, the Bureau of Prisons ignored the ruling. Before Judge Flores could attempt to enforce her order, she was demoted to a lower bench.
When prosecutors again appealed, in February 2022 the Second Criminal Chamber of San Salvador reversed the release and ordered that Ramírez Landaverde remain in prison. The following year, two years after the former director's arrest, his lawyers once again requested his release, arguing that the maximum period established by law for a person without a conviction to remain in prison had been exceeded. The Fifth Court of San Salvador then ordered the release, for the third time, of former director Ramírez Landaverde and another official, Ramón Roque, a former prison inspector. Once again, the prison system ignored the court ruling.
The court reiterated its order and, in August 2024, after two years and eight months in prison, Ramírez Landaverde was released on parole and awaited trial in November.
The prosecution sought a 16-year prison sentence: 12 years for embezzlement and four for arbitrary acts. The outcome was far from what the prosecution had sought: It was a symbolic sentence. No one was able to prove that Ramírez Landaverde had embezzled public funds. As for the arbitrary acts, the sentence was minimal. Ramírez Landaverde believes that this was the court’s way of not openly contradicting the prosecution’s case, because if stricter standards had been applied, they would have had to acquit him of that crime as well. Throughout the trial, the prosecution changed its explanation of why it considered Ramírez Landaverde to have committed the crime of arbitrary acts four times. First, it said that the arbitrary act had been the creation of Asocambio; then, that the arbitrary acts had been the decisions he took as president of Asocambio; finally, that he had purchased vehicles and registered them in the name of the Prison Bureau.
At the time of the ruling, Ramírez Landaverde had already spent two years and eight months in prison. The symbolic sentence for arbitrary acts was only four months more than that, so the alternative solution found by the judges was to replace the remaining weeks with community service. However, the court has not provided the parties with a written version of the ruling, which prevents Ramírez Landaverde from knowing what work he will have to perform. More importantly, it prevents him from appealing. The case is in limbo.
At the same time, Ramírez Landaverde was expelled from the PNC in an unfair process. When he was recaptured in December 2021, the police reopened a disciplinary case that Ramírez Landaverde had already won months earlier. But this second time, he had the disadvantage of being in prison and was unable to defend himself. In August 2024, when he was released on parole, the deadline to appeal his expulsion had already passed. Ramírez Landaverde was defeated in a process in which he was not even able to defend himself.
Cases that remain in limbo are far from extraordinary. Miguel Díaz Castañeda, a bus entrepreneur, and Edwin Flores Sánchez, former director of traffic at the Ministry of Transportation from 2009 to 2014, were arrested in December 2022 for alleged crimes in the implementation of the SITRAMSS transportation system. In November 2024, Díaz Castañeda was acquitted and Flores Sánchez received a symbolic two-year sentence that he did not even have to serve because he had already been in prison for eight months longer than that. However, neither of them has been released from prison because the sentence was appealed and is now in limbo.
These weaknesses in the SITRAMSS case contrast with the strength with which Bukele and the ruling party promoted it in the media. It was one of the most publicized cases by the Bukele administration to strike a blow against the opposition and was even one of the 12 cases taken up by the International Commission Against Impunity (CICIES) created by Bukele. The attorney general and the government were seeking severe punishments for businessman Díaz Castañeda —up to 20 years in prison for aggravated extortion— and for former Traffic Director Flores Sánchez, between three and six years for arbitrary acts. CICIES, one of Bukele’s main promises in his 2019 campaign, was dismantled by the president himself when it presented cases of corruption in his own government to the presidency.
I asked Ramírez Landaverde why he thought he had been prosecuted and imprisoned. He told me that it had to do with the government’s interest in silencing and instilling fear “so that people don’t raise their voices, so that they don’t say anything.”
* * *
The COFAPES group of relatives of political prisoners continued to meet. Toward the end of 2021, they opened a Facebook page, created a logo —two fists breaking chains over a map of El Salvador— and began to gain media attention. They held press conferences, sent letters to prisoners (in women’s prisons, the letters were never given to the detainees), and held serenades.
In 2022, someone recommended that they seek international exposure, and they found support in the American Coordinating Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. “That’s how we understood the concept of the judicialization of politics,” says Palacios, citing cases in Peru, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Argentina.
In 2022, they went to Washington to meet with the State Department and members of Congress. That same year, a second wave of political persecution began in El Salvador, most of them related to alleged illicit enrichment. FMLN leaders such as Eugenio Chicas and Lorena Peña were found to be suspected of illicit enrichment, and the cases were sent to court. The Committee then decided to expand the name of the organization to include those who were politically persecuted. From then on, the committee was spelled with two P’s: COFAPPES.
Lourdes Palacios knows that more cases will continue to come. “Political prisoners are linked to a project of social transformation,” she says, and spends several minutes recalling passages from Central American history where economic, military, and political power united to crush emerging leadership. “We naïvely thought that these cases could be resolved through the courts, but that is not true,” she says. “The courts will resolve nothing, nothing, nothing. Especially now.”
* * *
The man who has governed El Salvador since 2019 says that there are no political prisoners here. That among the 130,000 detainees who have made the country the place with the highest number of prisoners in relation to its population in the world, there is not one who has been imprisoned for their ideas, for expressing them in public, for demonstrating or for disagreeing with the government.
In that same country, things like this happen: Between Sunday, May 4, and Monday, May 5, 2025, 14 public transportation business owners were arrested by the police, accused of disobeying a presidential order issued over social media and charging passenger fares. Free transportation was the Bukele government’s response to a crisis caused by a mountain collapsing onto one of the main access roads to the city. Free transportation was intended to compensate the population for the inconvenience. Transportation companies reacted with doubts: Could a contract be signed beforehand? Can the state pay us what it owes us in subsidies? But it was chaos: Some buses did not run, and images of Salvadorans hanging from swaying buses dominated the news.
Bukele responded with arrests. Then, other business leaders stopped asking questions and directly asked for clemency: “With all due respect, Mr. President, we ask for clemency for the prompt release of our three fellow business leaders arrested last Monday from the National Transportation Board, as well as the other two colleagues from other trade associations.” Five days later, Roberto Jaco, one of those detained, died in circumstances that have not been explained. It is known that on May 11, he began to feel ill and was taken to a hospital where there were no stretchers. He was then taken to another hospital, but died in the early hours of the morning. Two weeks later, the other detained businessmen were released. They left the police station at around midnight without attracting much attention. “They advised us not to make a fuss so as not to upset the government,” said one of those arrested upon his release.
In May, in addition to the transportation owners, lawyer Alejandro Henríquez from the ECOS Association and community leader José Ángel Pérez were arrested after accompanying the El Bosque campesino cooperative in a protest demanding an end to the eviction of their homes. Local families protested near Bukele’s home and the government sent police and riot squads to suppress them. Henríquez was arrested the day after participating in the families’ sit-in. A video released by the media shows police officers asking to speak with him and other community leaders and then suddenly grabbing him by the arms and arresting him.
The case of Alejandro Muyshondt Álvarez, former security advisor to the president, can be summed up as a horror movie: after years of friendship, during which they even posed together in photographs wielding paintball guns, Alejandro Muyshondt and Bukele drifted apart. Muyshondt was accused by Bukele of leaking sensitive information to journalists and a former president and was arrested by the police in August 2023. He turned up dead six months later, in February 2024, before the presidential election.
Days before his imprisonment, Muyshondt used his social media to accuse two of Bukele’s officials —a congressman and the press secretary— of crimes and corruption, and said he had more information about illegal activities involving other people. He hired an agent in the United States to represent him in that country and to serve as a liaison to pass on information about “corruption and drug trafficking” in El Salvador to US officials and congressmen, according to a report by Infobae. There were two months to go before the start of the 2024 presidential election campaign, in which his boss was running unconstitutionally.
Upon his arrest, circumstances changed dramatically: His family never officially knew where he was being held, he became seriously ill, and he did not participate in a hearing where a judge ordered his preventive detention. The judge also denied Muyshondt’s mother information about her son’s whereabouts for “national security reasons.” The file was placed under “total secrecy.”
Muyshondt’s medical records showed that he suffered from meningitis, multiple organ failure, and stomach cancer. He also had a brain hemorrhage that, according to experts who reviewed the file, could have been the result of a beating or ill-treatment. Muyshondt’s autopsy says he died of pulmonary edema, as it does for dozens of prisoners of the regime who died in prison, but at the same time it says that this is a “preliminary diagnosis.” Dying of pulmonary edema is as general as saying that someone died because they stopped breathing. The autopsy results were never released to the family. Photos of Muyshondt’s body in a morgue circulated on social media, showing a thick stitch apparently holding together his bald head.
Fifteen months after his death, the organization Cristosal asked the Attorney General’s Office to investigate the death of former advisor Muyshondt. Cristosal asserts that there is sufficient evidence to believe that he was the victim of enforced disappearance and torture.
Cristosal is the organization where Ruth López worked. As I said, this text closes with her.
* * *
“...if the detention is the result of proceedings which were clearly unfair and this appears to be connected with political motives of the authorities.”
In an audio recording published by El Diario de Hoy, the moment of Ruth López’s arrest on the night of Sunday, May 18, can be heard. Footsteps can be heard, and López can be heard saying, “Here in the ditch, I’m not going anywhere.” A police officer tells her to hurry up and put on her pants. López responds, “Tell Casa Presidencial to wait.” The police officer replies, “I don't work for Casa Presidencial, I’m a police officer.” López responds, “Then to the Attorney General’s Office; this is going to be in Última Hora.” Última Hora is a propaganda site for the Bukele government. The police officer then insists, “Hurry up, put your pants on.” The sound of a cell phone camera taking a photo can be heard several times. The police officer receives a call and says, “I’ll send it to you, I’ll send it to you.”
At 11:07 p.m., the Attorney General’s Office published a photo of her surrounded by two uniformed police officers who had covered the Institutional Numerical Order, the identification code of each police officer, on their shirts. Each carried a rifle —they looked like an M16 and a Galil— in the SUL position, with the barrel pointing toward the ground and their elbows close to their bodies. Behind them, a white pickup truck was parked in front of a neighboring house. There she was, with that insinuating gesture, as if to say: I knew this could happen. And, next to the photo, 152 words written by the prosecutors stating that the crime committed is embezzlement, only detailing that according to “information gathered in raids (...) her active participation in the acts she is accused of has been identified.” She was arrested at night, with rifles in hand, as if it were a risky operation.
Two months earlier, when López gave statements to the media in front of the Government Ethics Tribunal, after asking that office to investigate contracts in which the Minister of Health participated during the pandemic response, she noticed that police officers were photographing her from across the street. López crossed the street, walked 30 meters down the sidewalk at a quick pace, and approached the officers, who were members of the Unit for the Maintenance of Public Order, to give them a copy of the press release that Cristosal had issued. Three months earlier, on X, the police intelligence file they had created on her had been circulated.
López was an advisor to Eugenio Chicas at the TSE between 2009 and 2014. In the 2014-2019 FMLN presidential administration, she was a legal advisor to Social Security. Chicas was a deputy in the Assembly and the Central American Parliament for the FMLN, a magistrate and president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, and former secretary of communications for the presidency. Chicas is in prison on charges of illicit enrichment in a secret case, and now López is accused of helping him commit crimes in another case that, nine days after her arrest, remains a mystery because the evidence against her has not been presented to a judge.
Chicas’ history with Bukele is an uncomfortable one. In 2018, when Bukele was a presidential candidate, Chicas sued him for slander. Bukele claimed on a television program that Chicas had raped a minor. Once the elections were over, and Bukele was already president-elect, the case ended in Chicas’ favor, and Bukele was forced to pay him $50,000 after it was proven that he had lied about the FMLN member. The trial had damaged Bukele’s image: In June 2018, on the day of a hearing, Chicas confronted him in a court hallway, calling him “Mr. Loose Lips,” and challenging him “like a man” to submit to a doping test. In videos from that moment, Bukele can be seen interrupting his statements to journalists and starting to walk toward the exit, while Chicas shouts, “Don’t run away, coward.”
In February 2019, an audio recording published by El Faro revealed that Bukele acknowledged he had been wrong when he said that Chicas had raped someone, but that he would not apologize publicly because it would damage his campaign. In March, now as president-elect, during the final hearing, Bukele appeared in court with several wads of cash in his hands to give to Chicas. He made an apology.
Chicas continued to be a thorn in Bukele’s side after he took office. During an appearance before Nuevas Ideas lawmakers investigating corruption in previous administrations in 2021, Chicas played the song “La feria de Cepillín” at full volume on his cell phone. Cepillín is a character that social media users have used to mock President Bukele. On the day of his summons before the deputies, Chicas brought a laptop with him and placed a huge sticker on the lid with a large B, like the logo of the cryptocurrency bitcoin, but enclosed in a red circle to signify prohibition.
Months later, the retaliation began. In 2022, Bukele’s Supreme Court declared that there were indications of illicit enrichment in Chicas’ assets, and the former official was sued by Bukele’s Attorney General’s Office in civil court. The prosecutors accused him of taking $202,000 along with his family to enrich himself during his years as an official. This process is still ongoing because it is under appeal in the Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court.
Normally, according to the law, it is only after a civil court has proven that an official has illegally enriched himself that the Attorney General’s Office can file a lawsuit in a criminal court; the civil process seeks to return the stolen money to the state, whereas the criminal process seeks to punish a crime of corruption with imprisonment.
Chicas was charged in a criminal court in February 2025. With no evidence against him and the civil proceedings still ongoing, Chicas was arrested on February 13, 2025, for illicit enrichment. He had just dropped his son off at school when he was arrested. The case is now under seal at the request of the Attorney General’s Office, as in so many other cases.
On the day of his transfer to the hearing, Chicas appeared in handcuffs and shouted, “I am a political prisoner of Bukele.” A video from that moment shows police officers wearing vests from the Secretariat for the Investigation of Corruption (SICC) hurrying him along as cameras film him and journalists ask him questions. Chicas can be seen being pushed, and someone tells the journalists, “You can’t pass.” But some cameramen manage to slip through, so there are other shots showing Chicas raising his arms, showing his handcuffs, surrounded by police officers pushing him to walk.
Three months later, prosecutors carried out López's arrest, and he and Chicas are now charged with embezzlement.
Although it is not a gang-related crime, López is being prosecuted under rules that apply only to cases under the state of exception. Instead of being brought before a judge within 72 hours, the authorities seem willing to use the 15 days of administrative detention allowed by law for cases against gangs. Something similar happened to Luis Alexander Rivas, a Twitter user who was arrested in September 2022 for expressing his opinion on social media. His case was not related to gangs, yet he was held in administrative detention for almost two weeks before being brought before a judge.
López was named one of the 100 most influential women in the world by the BBC, and her arrest has sparked a massive wave of protests from governments, international organizations, United Nations rapporteurs, lawyers, business leaders, unionists, and civil society organizations. Before her arrest, she had been the target of all kinds of attacks on social media, where she was very active.
López, a lawyer, led a team of lawyers and forensic experts at the Cristosal organization, where she was head of a team investigating corruption since 2019, filing reports and complaints with various state agencies about its findings. Cristosal said she was leading the investigation into 15 cases of major corruption. For example, she filed complaints for alleged fraud related to Chivo Wallet, the failed digital wallet that the Bukele government created for cryptocurrency exchanges. She also reported irregular real estate transfers, the creation of ghost jobs in state institutions, and filed complaints for alleged illicit enrichment of officials. She also denounced the use of Pegasus spyware against journalists, activists, and environmental defenders.
During the first 36 hours of her detention, López’s family was unsure of her whereabouts. They received scant information but could not confirm it in any way. His mother, Eleonora, said a day after the arrest that she believed Bukele was responsible for his capture. “We know where this is coming from,” she said.
* * *
“El Salvador has left behind its past, which we vowed never to return to. In the new El Salvador, there is room for everyone,” Bukele said at the United Nations in September 2024. “In El Salvador, we do not imprison our opposition, we do not censor opinions, we do not confiscate the property of those who think differently, we do not arrest people for expressing their ideas,” he added, as he took office for his unconstitutional second term in 2024 at the National Palace, in his ornate black-and-gold suit.
On Bukele’s side, there are only brief statements posted on social media by the Attorney General’s Office, which he controls. On the other side: ignored court orders for release, nighttime arrests, secret trials, evidence of political persecution by the police, and the ever so few words from political prisoners who have managed to speak out. Like those spoken by Ruth López to the police before being taken to the holding cell: “Have some decency, one day this will all end. You can’t lend yourselves to this.”