Outside the walls of a Salvadoran prison, `We're all crying mothers'
SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR >> A 19-year-old stumbled out of a police car and fell into the arms of his girlfriend, who stole a desperate kiss. His older sister, watching, cried out. Seconds later, the young man, Irvin Antonio Hernández, was gone, dragged into the prison across the street.
The two women collapsed onto a nearby wooden bench next to strangers who understood better than anyone what had just happened. Their sons had all disappeared behind those same walls.
Following a record-setting weekend of gang killings in March, the Salvadoran government declared a state of emergency and suspended civil liberties guaranteed in the constitution. The campaign of mass arrests that ensued led to the imprisonment of more than 25,000 people in about a month and a half.
Many of those detained have been sent to a prison known as “El Penalito,” or “little prison,” a dilapidated building in the capital, San Salvador, that has become ground zero for perhaps the most aggressive police crackdown in the Central American country's history. It is a first stop in what could be a long stay inside the country's overcrowded prison system.
Many inmates spend anywhere from days to weeks inside El Penalito before being transferred to a maximum-security facility. After the crackdown, relatives of those detained started to gather on the street outside, waiting to find out what would happen next.
On a recent Thursday, dozens of mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and girlfriends crowded around rickety wooden tables facing the prison, hunched over handbags stuffed with the documents they hoped would prove their loved ones' innocence — government identity cards, school records, work badges.
Maria Elena Landaverde took vacation days and persuaded a friend to drive her at the break of dawn to try to catch a glimpse of a boy who was picked up while bringing his family breakfast. Morena Guadalupe de Sandoval rushed over when her son called to say police officers had pulled him off a bus home from his janitor job in the city. Edith Amaya said she saw bruises on her son's face before the cops took him away.
“We want to see him one more time,” said de Sandoval, sobbing next to her own mother, who helped raise her son, Jonathan González López. “Here, we're all crying mothers.”
The question de Sandoval keeps asking herself is whether anyone cares. El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, has conceded that innocents are being swept up in the crackdown, but insists they're a small share of arrests. And the vast majority of Salvadorans — more than 80%, surveys show — support
Bukele and approve of the government's extreme measures.
Hatred of the gangs runs so deep in El Salvador that many want them subdued by any means necessary. Local and international media have broadcast images of family members begging the police for information about their sons and screaming as they're taken away. So far, nothing has turned the tide of public opinion against the campaign of mass arrests or the president leading it.
For now, the women outside El Penalito are focused on keeping their sons fed. Bukele has bragged about rationing food to prisoners during the crackdown, so many families opt to buy their relatives meals from a government-authorized kitchen with a small outpost open outside the prison.
It has been difficult to determine how the Salvadoran police have identified their targets, because the detentions have been so rapid and widespread. The government would not grant an interview with the head of the national police, but relatives of those arrested during the state of emergency said that many were targeted if they had past run-ins with the police.