The Government of El Salvador moved its diplomatic machinery at the beginning of July to prohibit the presentation of a work at the International Book Fair of Guatemala, the largest in Central America. The regime of the populist Nayib Bukele demanded that the collection of short stories be suspended from the program liver substanceby the Salvadoran writer Michelle Recinos, who denounces the arbitrariness committed by the authorities during more than a year of a state of emergency imposed by the president to deal with the gang violence that was bleeding the country dry.
The eyes of the censorship rested mainly on the story barbers on strike, a dramatic and terrible story that narrates how men —street vendors, store clerks, barber assistants, public transport drivers— disappear after being arrested for linking them without evidence to the calls gangs. An account of a hellish reality in a country where more than 77,000 people have been detained, citizen guarantees have been suspended, security has been militarized, torture and disappearances have been denounced and censorship is imposed as a State policy.
Bukele, who maintains high levels of popularity that are the envy of other Latin American leaders, imposed an emergency regime since March of last year that has given him the green light to restrict constitutional rights in a country that has not yet managed to heal the wounds of a civil war that, in the eighties, caused more than 70,000 deaths and left a disastrous memory of military abuses. Through the state of emergency, the Salvadoran authorities have unleashed a manhunt that recalls the abuses of that time. Thousands of people are searched and searched daily at military checkpoints across the country, and a manhunt has broken out against young men for living in gang-controlled areas or having tattoos. There are reports of torture and inhumane conditions in prisons, in addition to a hundred deaths in custody due to mistreatment by prison authorities. Censorship is already a norm and the persecution against critical voices, journalists and trade unionists has imposed a state of terror on society.
“Anyone can be arbitrarily captured,” says Abraham Abrego, director of strategic litigation at Cristosal, an organization that ensures respect for human rights in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. “We have found in the complaints received that day laborers, trade unionists, fishermen, farmers, people who have questioned the police have been arrested. There are trade unionists captured for protesting because their salaries have not been paid and more than 3,000 informal vendors have been evicted from San Salvador, the capital, and threatened with capture under the emergency regime if they protest”, explains the activist.
This body released a devastating report at the end of May, in which it denounced that at least 153 inmates died from torture, beatings, strangulation or lack of medical attention. The agency documents that 75 corpses presented lacerations and bruises, injuries with sharp objects or signs of hanging. “Massive and systematic rapes are already a State policy,” Cristosal warned on that occasion. To reinforce his security policy, Bukele ordered the construction of what he has called the largest prison in America, an immense high-security complex where thousands of inmates have been transferred and which is denounced as a torture center. Added to this prison hell is the anguish that the constant presence of the military on the streets of the country generates in citizens.
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The military have the green light to stop buses and get off those they consider suspicious, search houses without warrants, based on anonymous denunciations, or impose states of siege in areas of the country where the population locks themselves up for fear of being captured. “Of the complaints that we have received, more than 3,400, in 98% of the cases there is no evidence that the detainees have ties to the gangs. The procedure used for these arrests shows that there is no prior investigation, nor arrest warrant issued by a judge, but by police operations and arrests at discretion. This level of arbitrariness makes a good part of these captures unsustainable”, explains Abrego. The president, who controls Congress and the courts, has achieved a reform that allows him to carry out massive trials, with hearings of up to 900 prisoners. “These collective trials limit the exercise of the defense, because they give lawyers less opportunity to prove that their defendant is innocent,” warns the activist.
What baffles analysts is that despite the hell unleashed by Bukele in his war against gangs, his popularity ratings remain high, as high as 90% according to some polls. That popularity is due to the fact that many Salvadorans now feel safe, since the gangs they had imposed their law in vast areas of the country, where they even taxed street food vendors, paying a fee to enter or leave a neighborhood, or violent raids that left dozens of dead. El Salvador had one of the highest homicide rates on the continent.
“There are practices of human rights violations that we have not seen since the armed conflict. The exception regime is being used for repression, to limit freedom of expression. The Government has a very strong communication apparatus and a very successful advertising strategy, which generates an important message, with which the idea that security is above rights permeates. The low crime rate makes people feel relieved,” explains Abrego. A relief that, however, keeps Salvadorans in constant tension: no one is safe from being arbitrarily arrested in the hell unleashed by the young president Bukele in the small Central American country.
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