The U.S. arrest and deportation of Kilmar Abrego, a Salvadoran citizen legally residing in the United States, followed by the deportation of over 200 Venezuelan immigrants and refugees to CECOT, a Salvadoran maximum-security prison, as part of Trump administration’s dealmaking with President Nayib Bukele, have led to a storm of questions about due process (or lack thereof) in both the U.S. and El Salvador. These events have also shined a spotlight on the Salvadoran prison system and public security policies that have been the source of massive human rights violations over the past few years.
The small Central American country of El Salvador was for many years one of the most dangerous places on the planet; in addition to having the highest global murder rate per capita, it also had the highest femicide rate in the world. But, as is now well-known, in 2019 President Bukele came to power, a political ascent that brought with it sweeping changes. Bukele worked throughout his first term to build his Nuevas Ideas political party into a majority, one that by 2021 had come to dominate both El Salvador’s congress and judiciary. The Bukele administration made public security the centerpiece of its policies, implementing draconian measures to reduce gang violence in what it now claims is the safest country on earth.
Public security in El Salvador, which has improved dramatically under Bukele in many ways and positively impacted the lives of many Salvadorans, has, at the same time, come at a dire cost for human rights– and the price has been particularly high for Salvadoran women: thousands of Salvadoran women have been arbitrarily detained and are being tortured –a fact that has remained largely invisible to the public. These abuses have gone hand in hand with an overall reduction in women’s rights in El Salvador and throughout the region; they also coincide with a more general democratic backsliding and increasing authoritarianism in the Americas.
In March 2022, Bukele’s administration made its “war on gangs” official, asking Salvadoran Congress to approve a “State of Exception,” a policy in which constitutional rights and guarantees are suspended in order to confront something deemed to be a national crisis. The State of Exception—which should have been a temporary measure—remains in effect, unconstitutionally, to this day. Since the policy was implemented, security forces have detained over 85,000 Salvadorans for their alleged links to gangs; the majority of these detentions have occurred without credible evidence, and those arrested have been denied due process. For the past three years, thousands of Salvadoran families have had to endure months without seeing their loved ones, since family visitation is prohibited and detainees are held incommunicado. El Salvador now has nearly 2% of its population in prison –the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world.
Of the over 85,000 people detained under the State of Exception, civil society organizations report that at least 7,750 are women. As with most men who have been arrested, the majority of women prisoners are awaiting trial; some detentions have also turned into short-term disappearances, because after being detained, the individuals were held at an undisclosed location for a short period of time (ranging from a few hours to a few days) without any trace or information about their whereabouts available.
Civil society has also collected significant evidence to suggest that torture is widely used against detained women; there are reports of forced nudity, burnings, beatings, suffocation, and mock executions. DPLF interviewed a woman who had been detained for several months in a women’s prison who described rapes and other kinds of sexual aggression being committed against prisoners by prison personnel, including the highest levels of prison leadership. Another woman, a union leader who spent seven months incarcerated, reported witnessing 10 police officers take a woman out of her cell and then saw the prison director hit her in the face with his boot, while a woman guard stood over her and dragged her violently around the floor. And it has been reported that 7% of detainee deaths under the State of Exception—at least 25 individuals—have been women; while five of those deaths appear to have been the result of acts of violence, possibly including torture, the other 20 were the result of failures to provide adequate medical care, chronic illnesses, and medical emergencies.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), in its 2024 report on El Salvador’s State of Exception, noted allegations by multiple women who, while in detention, suffered miscarriages caused by negligence or abuses by prison authorities. This was the case with Dina Hernandez, a human rights activist who was pregnant at the time of her arrest; even though a judge had assigned her house arrest, prison authorities ignored that order, and three weeks after her detention her family was informed of the loss of the baby she was expecting. The IACHR has recommended that El Salvador create systems for monitoring and accountability to enforce the State’s obligation to investigate, using a gender perspective, in all cases where the use of lethal force or sexual violence by the authorities is known to have occurred.
Family members of some people being held under the State of Exception have also reported threats against them when they seek information about their imprisoned loved ones. They have been intimidated by police officers and/or guards, including threats that they would shock their genitals with electricity, rape them with firearms, or disappear them if they continued to ask questions. In other cases, families (often with scarce resources) are forced to use the little money they have, or sell their belongings, to obtain information about whether their detained relatives are still alive.
While the torture of women detained under the State of Exception is an extreme example of gender violence taking place in El Salvador today, women in the country have long suffered inequality and abuses. El Salvador is a highly conservative country and has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world. Women suffering obstetric emergencies are routinely criminalized and treated as murderers, rather than as victims of a health emergency; poor women in particular are targeted for this criminalization. The UN Committee against Torture (CAT) has found that restrictions on access to reproductive healthcare, and the abuses that occur when women seek those services, likely constitute violations of the Convention against Torture because they put women’s health and lives at risk and cause them severe physical or mental pain or suffering. Not only have recommendations made by CAT regarding women’s reproductive rights fallen on deaf ears with the Salvadoran State, but also the current government has instituted norms to remove “gender language” from public institutions. Steps like this aim to decrease female empowerment and are indicators of the larger regression taking place in El Salvador, one in which the patriarchy that is deeply embedded in Salvadoran society has become further legitimized and institutionalized.
Most women detained under current policies are imprisoned in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions, without sufficient access to basic necessities. Lucrecia Lopez (a pseudonym, used to avoid potential reprisals from authorities), reported to civil society that she was transferred to the Jucuapa prison and had to sleep standing up due to overcrowding in her cell. She said she saw her cellmates fall ill, and even witnessed the deaths of some inmates because they weren’t given access to medical care or medication by prison authorities. DPLF and other civil society organizations have also received reports from women stating that since they didn’t have family who could bring them personal hygiene products or food, they were forced to endure sexual abuse to obtain essential goods. Some imprisoned women have also had to undergo unexpected, last-minute transfers from one prison facility to another; without judicial supervision and with little or no warning that they were moving, in several cases, those women reported losing all their personal effects during those transfers. In spite of all these reports, the Salvadoran government has consistently denied the existence of torture in its prison system.
Last March, DPLF publicly denounced the torture being committed against detained women in El Salvador at an event in Geneva with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Alice Jill Edwards, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of that Rapporteurship’s mandate. Special Rapporteur Edwards voiced concern about the human rights situation in El Salvador and committed to continue to follow the ongoing violations occurring. Both the Special Rapporteur and CAT have expressed alarm about abuses under the State of Exception that constitute torture under international law, and have urged the government of El Salvador to respect essential due process guarantees and the fundamental rights of those being investigated and prosecuted.
International standards universally recognize that the right to not be tortured is non-derogable, and that acts of torture are absolutely prohibited. This prohibition is firmly established in customary international law and is considered a peremptory norm (jus cogens). Norms on the treatment of those deprived of liberty, such as the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules) and the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders (the Bangkok Rules) also specifically prohibit the use of torture or other cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment against detainees. Despite the international legal standards and ongoing efforts from human rights advocates and survivors to raise awareness and seek accountability for torture, this crime remains pervasive across the globe, perpetuated with near-total impunity by both State and non-State actors. As we have seen in the cases discussed here, El Salvador is sadly no exception.
Taken together, the State practices and abuses that have been reported demonstrate that public security is not the true, or only, goal of the State of Exception in El Salvador; it can be argued that if that were the case, the policy would have been lifted long ago, when gang-related violence in El Salvador subsided. It appears that the point of current policies and practices is also their cruelty; there is an element of intentionality to the suffering being caused to detainees and their families and communities that cannot be ignored. While in many cases around the world torture is used by State forces as a tool to obtain confessions, in El Salvador it seems that for both detained women and men, it is assumed they are “guilty,” and acts of torture are used to humiliate, subjugate, and punish them –as well as to ultimately control the population by generating terror.
It is also clear that the cases of torture against detained women and their families in El Salvador are going uninvestigated and unpunished; there are no indications that the government is holding security forces accountable for these acts in any way. This failure to investigate and sanction complaints of torture and sexual violence against women detainees sends a dangerous and unacceptable message that these kinds of abuses, when committed in the name of “justice” or public security, are tolerated, and even encouraged. The international community must not remain silent, but rather speak out and utilize the current public attention on Salvadoran prisons—and their inhumane conditions—to highlight the plight of women victims of arbitrary detention and torture, and hold the authorities accountable to their international human rights obligations.