Efren Lemus. El Faro. August 19, 2024
On May 16, 2023, the family of Luis Armando Rodríguez, a 52-year-old Salvadoran man imprisoned in Quezaltepeque under the state of exception, received a document stating that a judge had ordered his immediate release. María Rodríguez, the mother of the detainee, still remembers “the profound joy” of that moment, and how, in the weeks to come, her elation withered into frustration and sadness. “Our lawyer went [to the prison], but they wouldn’t release him. The next day, they said they couldn’t release him because he was a prisoner of the state of exception.” Time passed, until, on June 19, 2023, Rodríguez was transferred from Quezaltepeque Prison to the Rosales National Hospital in San Salvador. He died two days later.
El Salvador’s Bureau of Prisons (DGCP) committed several crimes in failing to comply with the release order, human rights organizations say. And Rodriguez’s case is not the only one. Through a review of court records and interviews with family members, El Faro has documented ten other cases in which the Bureau of Prisons delayed or failed to comply with release orders that were signed and sealed by courts specializing in organized crime, without providing any justification.
In a system shrouded in state secrecy, and in light of these cases and the statements of organizations advocating for the victims of the state of exception for more than two years, it appears that the practice of denying or delaying release is not an aberration, but a pattern.
The Attorney General’s Office keeps all cases related to the state of exception sealed from the public, claiming that disclosing this information could “provoke panic in the population.” With this as its justification, the state is concealing hundreds of cases marred by insufficient or false evidence, including police reports created after the time of detention, or cases in which officers provided vague and ambiguous justifications for the arrest, such as a detainee appearing “nervous” or “suspicious.”
In three of the 11 non-release cases documented by El Faro, the person died in prison, despite having obtained a court order granting their freedom. In three other cases, the person was arrested and charged with the crime of illicit association shortly after being released for the exact same crime. In one case, the person was granted a release order but is still in detention, and his family is afraid to talk about the case for fear of reprisals by the government of Nayib Bukele.
Three other individuals are still being held despite their release orders, according to a complaint filed with the Attorney General’s Office by the Salvadoran human rights organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario (SJH). The last case documented by El Faro involves a minor who, despite being declared innocent by a judge, was kept in detention by the Bureau of Prisons for two months without justification.
Five of the 11 cases documented by El Faro were the subject of complaints filed with the Attorney General’s Office by SJH on July 22, 2024. “You are violating human rights and committing crimes, including forced disappearance, torture, and the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, and you are disobeying court orders and denying support to victims. All of these are crimes,” rebuked Ingrid Escobar, the director of SJH, minutes before entering the prosecutor’s office in Antiguo Cuscatlán to denounce multiple legislative deputies, along with El Salvador’s minister of security, Gustavo Villatoro, Bureau of Prisons director Osiris Luna, and the director of Izalco Prison.
SJH claims that the director of Izalco Prison committed two crimes: arbitrary detention by an authority and disobeying a court order. The group has also accused the Bureau of Prisons director of the crime of deprivation of liberty for his non-compliance with five release orders. The investigation into these complaints has been assigned to the Directorate for the Defense of Social Interests, a division of the Attorney General’s Office, an institution under the control of the Bukele government since May 2021, when legislative deputies loyal to the president illegally imposed the current attorney general, Rodolfo Delgado.
Neither the letters of release sent by several judges to the director of Izalco Prison, nor the SJH complaints, include the name of the public official responsible and, because the internal hierarchy of the Bureau of Prisons is shrouded in total secrecy, El Faro has not been able to identify the name of this individual.
Why would SJH turn to an institution that has been co-opted by the ruling regime? “We know we won’t find justice here. It’s like telling the prosecutor to investigate the person who appointed him. It’s impossible for him to do anything, and we know it. But we have to follow the process, because we’re getting closer to having the Inter-American Court of Human Rights hear our cases, and someday the International Criminal Court as well, but for that to happen, we have to exhaust all possible official avenues [in El Salvador],” Escobar explained.
On the morning of July 30, 2024, El Faro called Alejo Carbajal, director of communications for the Bureau of Prisons, to request an interview regarding the non-compliance of prison release orders. As has been the agency’s standard practice for years, he did not answer or return the call. El Faro also sent an interview request to the agency’s official e-mail account, but received an automated response in English: “Address not found.” In recent years, the communications policy of Bureau of Prisons Director Osiris Luna has been to maintain silence in response to allegations of irregularities on his watch, such as the secret negotiations between the Bukele government and the gangs, theft of food relief during the pandemic, and the hiring of phantom supervisors.
Ordered released, dead in prison
The National Civil Police tried to arrest Luis Armando Rodríguez on April 16, 2022. Police and soldiers came to his home in the Vilma neighborhood of Mejicapa canton, in Santa María, Usulután, an area once controlled by the Mara Salvatrucha-13. María, Rodríguez’s mother, came to the green metal gate at her front entrance and explained to the agents that her son was not a gang member, but a chronic alcoholic who had been suffering from kidney failure for two years. He had even been taking medication for the condition, she told them. The police seemed to heed the mother’s pleas: they took some photographs, but did not arrest her son.
Five days later, on April 21, 2022, police returned to Colonia Vilma and arrested Rodríguez for illicit association. “Now and then he would work for some bricklayers, but he was sick all the time, and was always drunk,” his mother said. “He would just lie around in the streets, the poor thing.” Rodríguez was transferred to Mariona Prison and later to Quezaltepeque. Every month, his family brought him a package of basic necessities and medicine for his kidney condition, but they don’t know if the prison guards ever gave the supplies to him.
María says her family hired a private lawyer and, after jumping through several bureaucratic hoops, managed to obtain a special hearing with an organized crime court in San Miguel, which granted her son conditional release. The family received the official letter on May 16, 2023, and the next day went to the Quezaltepeque Prison to arrange for Rodriguez’s release, but the guards told them that they would need a lawyer to complete the paperwork. The next day, they went to the prison with their lawyer, and the guards told them that they had to return the following day. When they tried a third time, the guards changed their argument: Rodríguez would not be allowed to leave the prison because he was detained under the state of exception.
The arbitrary decision of the Bureau of Prisons overruled the court order, defying the only constitutional entity in the country with the authority to decide who should be incarcerated and who should be freed. Rodríguez did not leave the prison.
One month and three days after the family received the letter of release, on June 19, 2023, the man who, per court order, was supposed to be at home with his family, was rushed from Quezaltepeque Prison to Rosales Hospital, where he died two days later. A doctor with the medical examiner’s office (Instituto de Medicina Legal), recorded the cause of death as “pulmonary edema (preliminary cause, pending report of additional studies).” Employees at the funeral home, however, told his mother that the corpse had arrived with severe bruising around the neck and other wounds on the back — injuries that were omitted from the official autopsy.
As of July 22, 2024, 309 people have died in prison under the state of exception: 305 adults and four babies, according to data from SJH. Though many of the bodies exhibited clear signs of torture, the medical examiner omitted this information in official reports, limiting the reported cause of death to “pulmonary edema” — the official cause widely cited in autopsies of in-custody deaths under the state of exception. The forensic information provided by the state in dozens of cases belies the obvious signs of violence that families have found on the bodies.
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