US Tries Not to Offend Bukele in Annual Human Rights Report

SATURDAY, MAY 25, 2024

EL SALVADOR / POLITICS

Wednesday, May 22, 2024
José Luis Sanz
Leer en español

Thousands of illegal arrests, surveillance of journalists and dissidents, warrantless searches, political prisoners, mass trials held online, in which defendants cannot speak to their lawyers, inmates beaten to death by guards, pregnant prisoners suffering miscarriages due to a lack of medical care, babies dying in prison. The State Department’s latest annual Human Rights Report, released on April 22, paints a brutal picture of El Salvador’s justice system and details grave rights violations and abuses committed by the government in 2023. It is perhaps the most scathing compilation of the darker aspects of President Nayib Bukele’s anti-crime policy published by a foreign government to date. And yet, the 2024 report still attempts to wash the face of the Salvadoran government enough to avoid a diplomatic confrontation.

One Biden administration official who spoke to El Faro portrayed the 44-page report as a balancing act in which “everyone can find what they want to read.” Criticism of the state of emergency, which has restricted basic rights in El Salvador for more than two years, is evident and damning: “In the majority of hearings, judges ordered defendants to remain in detention even when the Attorney General’s Office failed to provide sufficient evidence demonstrating defendants were affiliated with a gang,” the document reads. But this blunt description of a country where citizens are guilty until proven innocent starkly contrasts with other sections of the report, such as those dedicated to the fight against corruption, which reveal the desire of the United States to cushion the blow for Bukele, in keeping with a strategy of détente promoted since the arrival of Ambassador William Duncan in San Salvador in early 2023.

The report’s executive summary, for example, opens with the fact that the reduction in gang violence in recent years has guaranteed the right to life for millions of Salvadorans, and closes with the questionable claim that “the government [of El Salvador] took credible steps to identify and punish officials who may have committed human rights abuses,” in clear contradiction to page six of the same document, where the State Department reports that “impunity was a problem in the General Directorate of Penal Centers,” as well as in the Police and Army.

“The government [of El Salvador] did not always observe the requirements of the law and constitution,” reads the section on arbitrary detentions, which now total more than 78,000. Mass arrests have been key to dismantling the criminal power structures of the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th Street gangs over the course of the past two years, but those structures has now been replaced by a new regime of fear of police abuses. Echoing the denunciations of international organizations like Human Rights Watch, the United States notes that “as of November [2023], no case from the state of exception had gone to trial.”

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202405/el_salvador/27420/us-tries-not-to-offend-bukele-in-annual-human-rights-report