Rights group: Data leak confirms El Salvador abuses
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — Human Rights Watch says it has obtained a database leaked from El Salvador’s government that corroborates sweeping due process violations, severe prison overcrowding and deaths in custody under the emergency powers put in place last March to confront a surge in gang violence.
The global human rights organization said the database from the Ministry of Public Safety lists details about some 50,000 people arrested between the implementation of the state of exception in late March through late August.
El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly approved the suspension of some fundamental rights following an outburst of violence from the country’s powerful street gangs. People no longer have to be told why they are being arrested or what rights they have. The government also suspended the right of association.
Abuses have been previously reported by Human Rights Watch and local civil society organization Cristosal, but the data adds new details, including the names and ages of those arrested and the charges they face.
Among those arrested during the period were more than 1,000 minors who were sent to pretrial detention. In March, the country’s Legislative Assembly lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 12 from 16 for gang-related crimes.
The database also pointed to staggering levels of overcrowding in El Salvador’s prisons. The government is building a huge new facility, but in the meantime, more and more detainees are stuffed into existing prisons while awaiting trial.
As of August, the prison population had grown to more than 86,000, while according to government information in February 2021, they had a capacity of 30,000.
The most common charge those arrested face is “unlawful association,” accounting for some 39,000 of the new cases.
“The use of these broadly defined crimes opens the door to arbitrary arrests of people with no relevant connection to gangs, and does little to ensure justice for violent gang abuses, such as killings and rape,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro recently said that no international organization was going to tell El Salvador how to fix its problems and that the number of detentions shows that the strategy has been successful.