Salvadoran Prosecutors Accuse Top Prison Bureau Aide of Selling Benefits to Narcos

Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Efren Lemus and Carlos Martínez*

On May 30, anti-narcotics agents of El Salvador’s National Civil Police (PNC) arrested Wilfredo Hernández Molina, who for the last decade has been an aide to the current Vice Minister of Security Osiris Luna Meza, on accusations of taking bribes to allow men accused of drug trafficking to exit Mariona Prison and receive unauthorized family visits. Hernández Molina was also previously named in Operation Cathedral —a now-shuttered criminal probe into corruption networks in the Bukele administration— as accomplice to two schemes by Luna and his mother Alma Yanira Meza, including the theft and resale of $1.6 million dollars’ worth of pandemic relief food in 2020 from the Bureau of Prisons.

Attorney General’s Office wiretaps reveal that Bureau of Prisons employees charged an alleged cartel smuggling cocaine from eastern El Salvador to the United States thousands of dollars in exchange for prison benefits. One detainee in Mariona —arrested in the possession of hundreds of kilos— was transferred in March 2022 to the private Baptist Hospital in San Salvador, despite showing no signs of sickness, where he met with family.

It was the same hospital where, seven days later, prison system intelligence logs recorded that a top Mara Salvatrucha negotiator with the administration of Nayib Bukele was moved during a massacre that marked the end of the government’s covert talks with the gang.

. . .

Under the state of exception that has been prolonged for 14 consecutive months, authorities have reportedly made nearly 70,000 detentions, giving El Salvador the highest incarceration rate in the world. Detainees’ testimony reported in the press and by human rights organizations have helped document a state policy of systematic torture in prisons —in some cases leading to death— as well as the deprival of medical care, prohibition of communication with family and attorneys, and enforced hunger.

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202307/el_salvador/26917/salvadoran-prosecutors-accuse-top-prison-bureau-aide-of-selling-benefits-to-narcos