Torture in El Salvador’s Prisons
These are the barbarities that survivors of Nayib Bukele’s prison system in El Salvador witnessed: torture and death.
By Oscar Martinez (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES– Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but be explicit, to write and say aloud the cruel words: torture, beatings, corpse.
Last month, I was part of the El Faro team that reviewed again and again the 27 testimonies of survivors of the prisons operating under Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s “State of Exception.” Upon leaving the dungeons, these 27 witnesses had the courage to relate the horrors they experienced.
“They kicked me in the right thigh. I knelt down, doubled over and fell, and they started beating me.” This is how Alexander Eduvay was welcomed to Izalco prison. He’s not a gang member and never has been. Eduvay, 44, was the assistant principal of a public school and owner of a small taxi business. Nonetheless, he was captured and imprisoned on March 27, 2022, the first day of the Bukele regime’s “nationwide crackdown on gangs.”
When he fell to the ground, the prison guards beat him. It was the welcome ritual, they shouted. Just because – because they felt like it, because the Salvadoran regime said they could. The driver of one of Professor Eduvay’s taxis, despite being handcuffed with his hands behind his back, let his body fall on top of the teacher’s. The driver, known as Teco, then received the heaviest blows. After days of agony in his cell, Teco “began to stain, to leave traces of blood,” the professor said. Mr. Eduvay was released days later, but Teco later died in prison. His family received a body marked by bruises and lacerations.
The world today seems accustomed to barbarism, cruelty, injustice. Seeing mutilated children on television is now commonplace and no longer shocking. But even though it may seem that talking about another act of barbarism is like shouting into the wind, it’s our job.
None of the survivors who gave testimony of their suffering was a gang member. Even the Bukele regime, which conducts secret trials and arrests with no evidence in order to support its public discourse, ended up finding them innocent. All of them were freed months or years later, after suffering through these horrors. But thousands of other innocent people remain in those prisons today.
“The girl was pregnant, and that day she was covered in blood. They just threw cold water on her. They kept her hanging there day and night,” stated Dolores Almendares, a 53-year-old union leader, who witnessed this scene during her own imprisonment. She claims that the guards hung some prisoners from a chain-link fence, with their arms stretched upwards and their toes barely touching the floor and left there for up to 24 hours: “like when you’re going to slaughter a pig,” said Dolores.
The perpetrators, the hands that holds the stick, the body that strings up another body, are the prison guards. But they can’t be the only ones held directly responsible. These are not individual sadists exercising their sadism sporadically and in secrecy: these are public employees, who systematically torture and murder with the complicity of an entire government apparatus, led by Osiris Luna, the director of prisons, and at the top of the chain, Nayib Bukele. These are not isolated cases; this is state policy.
The organization Socorro Juridico Humanitario [“Humanitarian Legal Aid”] has recorded more than 435 prisoners that have died in those 22 prisons since Bukele initiated his “nationwide crackdown on gangs” in March 2022. Many of these bodies showed signs of torture – over 90% of the autopsy reports from the Forensic Medicine Institute stated they had died of “pulmonary edema,” which is as vague as saying that they died because they stopped living. The Salvadoran regime endorses the barbarity, and their employees – from the guard with his cudgel to the forensic doctor with his death certificate – carry it out.
“I don’t know why they beat him up so badly, but when they brought him back, they put him in a wheelchair.” Those are the words of Fidel Zavala, a young human rights activist who was first arrested a month before the “gang crackdown” began, for crimes of which he was later acquitted. He spent 13 months in prison and witnessed the horror firsthand, because in prison he was assigned the daily task of counting the prisoners in various cells. He remembers corpses lying in the prison yard in front of the cells. He remembers that many nights one or two prisoners were missing from each cell, and that the guards simply ordered him to make a note of it and stop asking questions.
When he was released from prison, Zavala went to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which by then was fully controlled by Bukele, and denounced the directors of the prisons where he had been held and the Head of El Salvador’s Penal Centers for torture, ill-treatment, and deaths. Shortly thereafter, he was recaptured and is now back in prison, held by the torturers he denounced and being judged in a secret trial.
The prisoners are farmers, teachers, saleswomen, motorcyclists. Most of those interviewed were beaten with batons; 13 of them witnessed murders committed by guards; all suffered extreme hunger; many witnessed sophisticated torture techniques, as if taken from military manuals from the 1980s: bodies hung, suffocation, bodies kneeling on boiling cement.
And all that is barely the little we know. These are only some of the people who have dared to speak. In time, we’ll know more; in the end, you always know more. But with what we now know, I dare to close this column with three words that come to mind, three terrible words: crimes against humanity.
Published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.