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Jesus Joya says his brother is “special”: at 45, he is childish, eager to please. He’s as far from being a gang member as anyone can be. And yet, the last time he saw Henry, he got on a bus to prison. .
“Henry, coming out,” Jesus cried. You didn’t do anything wrong. “
From his seat, Henry responded with a small wave of his hand. A policeman hit him on the head.
Three weeks earlier, on March 26, street gangs in El Salvador had killed another 62 people across the country, sparking national fury. President Nayib Bukele and his allies in Congress launched a war against gangs and suspended constitutional rights.
Almost seven months later, this “state of emergency” is still very popular. But gangsters are the only ones caught in a web that has been random, with fatal consequences.
The arrests of more than 55,000 more people defeated an already defeated corrupt justice system. The accused have virtually no hope of getting individual attention from judges holding hearings for up to three hundred defendants at a time; Overworked public defenders juggle piles of business.
Defendants arrested on suspicion die in prison before any authority investigates their case. At least 80 other people arrested under the state of emergency have died without being convicted of anything, according to a network of nongovernmental organizations seeking to locate them.
The government provided figures and rejected those organizations’ requests for public data on the deaths. The data will be published for seven years, according to authorities.
Life in criminals is brutal; Bukele’s management rejected PA’s requests to dwell on them. The accused disappear into the system, leaving families to locate them. A month after Henry’s arrest, guards at the Mariona prison north of San Salvador told Jesus that Henry was no longer there. That’s all they would say.
A local newspaper photographer had captured the symbol of Henry, already dressed in criminal white, spotting Jesus in the crowd as he was being taken away. For more than two months, Jesus carried a clipping of this photo to each and every one of the criminals. in El Salvador and then to each and every hospital.
Have you noticed this man?” he asked. Have you noticed my brother?
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As police and foot soldiers fanned out across El Salvador to bring their arrests to light, Bukele tweeted the number of “terrorists” detained and spoke bluntly of making their lives impossible.
Police and the army surrounded neighborhoods or villages, set up checkpoints and searched door to door. They pasted the state of other people on the street, going to work, to work, to their homes. Sometimes they were struck by a tattoo, a photo on the mobile phone. Sometimes they kept lists of names, other people who had a background or problems with the law. They encouraged anonymous informants to give a penny to gang members or their collaborators.
Some police commanders imposed arrest quotas and encouraged officials to soften the details.
Temporarily transparent that the president’s plan did not go beyond mass arrests.
Lawmakers bought time by postponing access to lawyers for those arrested, extending the era in which a user can be detained without fee from 3 to 15 days, and raising the limit on how long a user can be detained before trial. Judges almost automatically send arrestees to criminals for six months while prosecutors tried to build cases.
A third of the country’s most experienced judges retired last year through a legislative reform whose real motivation was to fill the courts with Bukele’s allies.
Anonymous judges who rule on hearings out of public view. The reasons why some are being arrested are as unclear as the reasons why others have been arrested.
The remaining judges are under great pressure to meet the president’s goals of protecting their jobs, said Sidney Blanco Reyes, one of the judges forced to resign. “It’s as if the fate of those who were locked up depends on what the president says. “
Judge Juan Antonio Durán is one of the few remaining rulings that has criticized the situation. According to a proposal circulating in Congress, Duran’s judicial career could end early next year if lawmakers reduce the number of years he can serve a ruling. 25 years old.
“The helplessness we feel is enormous,” Duran said. It makes you sad to see how they treat others, because there are so many innocents locked up. “Even those guilty of crimes, he said, deserve because of the process.
Congress removed members of the Supreme Court’s constitutional chamber and replaced them with unwavering judges in May of last year. a constitutional ban, which he showed he would do last month.
The new judges did not file a habeas corpus petition for single people, which requires the government to prove that someone’s detention was justified, for anyone arrested under the state of emergency, Duran said.
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According to the government itself, Salvadoran criminals were already overcrowded before the war against the gangs. The president temporarily announced the structure of a new mega-criminal, but it remains unfinished. Seven months later, El Salvador’s criminal population has more than doubled.
While a small number of inmates have been released on bail in recent weeks, accounts of horrific situations in incarcerated prisons have begun to emerge. But Zaira Navas, a lawyer with the nongovernmental organization Cristosal, said very few people had agreed to speak because of the likelihood they would be sent back to prison.
“They told us they had noticed bodies coming out of some prisons,” Navas said. Prisoners are crammed into cells and defecate in open boxes that are emptied until they are filled. They eat a few corn tortillas a day and lack drinking water.
Typically, deaths are due to neglected injuries sustained during beatings during capture, chronic ailments for which prisoners do not get treatment, attacks on other detainees or poor sanitary conditions, Navas said. Prison guards only allow medical attention when other people sharing the mobile phone are interrupting protest.
Deaths in prisons are almost evident when a funeral home summons a circle of relatives of the deceased. There is no direct communication from the government. ” There is interest in hiding those deaths,” Navas said, for which herbalists are blamed. Causas. No there is an autopsy, there is no investigation.
The most common cause is pulmonary edema, which fills the lungs with fluid. Nancy Cruz de Quintanilla said that when she went to the morgue and tried to perform a technique on her husband’s body, the staff told her to stay behind because he had COVID-19. Said. But there is no mention of this in the document passed to him. Only pulmonary edema.
Jose Mauricio Quintanilla Medrano, a local small businessman and part-time evangelical preacher, was dining at a local soup kitchen with Cruz and his two children on June 25, when two police officers arrived to get food. After the circle of relatives ended, the police arrived at his desk and asked to see Quintanilla’s identification and cell phone.
The police report would later state that officials discovered Quintanilla in another community after being tipped off by a suspicious person. Cruz said police were only looking to meet their quota.
From the local police station in San Miguel, not far from El Salvador’s eastern border with Honduras, Quintanilla allowed his father to make a brief phone call. Quintanilla told him he would be detained there for 15 days while police investigated and then released him. the last contact a family member had with him. He was taken 3 days later by bus to the Mariona prison in the north of the capital.
Cruz won the funeral home in August. ” Give me my husband,” she shouted.
Cruz that gangs are a scourge. ” The fact is that nobody tells them about grabbing gang criminals, nobody Array. . . The only thing others ask and I said is why don’t they investigate before taking someone away?”
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Guillermo Gallegos, vice president of El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, admits mistakes were made and said it was a “tragedy” when they happened. But he sees no explanation for why lifting the state of emergency anytime soon. He noted that more people were being released. on bail, which he saw as a sign that the formula worked.
He attributed the criminal deaths to rivalries between incriminated gang members. It expressed doubts about allegations of arbitrary detention. It’s very difficult, she said, for a mom to admit that her son is a gang member or collaborated with them.
Gallegos said he expected the state of emergency to continue for six months, long enough, he said, to lock up the 30,000 gang members he said are still at large.
They deserve to be held for as long as possible, said Gallegos, who is also a supporter of the death penalty in El Salvador. “They can’t be rehabilitated, there’s no reintegration. “
If that sounds harsh, it’s not far from the opposite of many Salvadorans when it comes to gangs.
This month, pollster CID Gallup released a poll that puts Bukele’s approval score at 86 percent. In an August poll, CID Gallup found that 95% of Salvadorans rated the government’s security functionality as positive, 84% said security had advanced in the past 4 months, and 85% expressed tougher measures against gang members.
Much of the public is due to brutal gang rule that has lasted for years. After education in Salvadoran immigrant communities in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, gang members brought their criminal networks to El Salvador. They forcibly recruited young men and executed other people at will. They extorted even the smallest business owners to the point that many simply closed.
They also showed that they can function while their leaders are in prison, raising the possibility that the Bukele government will simply avoid getting out of a persistent security problem.
Johnny Wright, an opposition lawmaker, said management will continue to ask for extensions of the state of emergency because it doesn’t have a plan for the future. Bukele came here to talk about rehabilitation, prevention and early intervention in underserved neighborhoods, but that rhetoric has been forgotten, Wright said.
“The main goal of the government is how to get back in power,” Wright said.
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Henry Joya lived in a bachelor room in Luz, a community in San Salvador known for its gangs. Henry and Jesus had been there for about 35 years, and Henry was a well-known, polite, and kind figure. Neighbors gave him small cantidades. de cash to take out his trash and clean his yards.
Jesus Joya paid $50 a month for Henry’s room in a modest lodging in a narrow alley where he said there were no gang members. Henry had a long-time wife who rented a room in the same building.
Two days before Henry’s arrest, Jesus had informed him of the state of emergency and warned him to stay inside. “Be very careful, lie down early,” Jesus said. Henry said he would work.
A neighbor, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of getting police to attention, said he heard 3 loud knocks on Henry’s construction door on the night of April 19. In the room, he shouted “Police!”
The neighbor saw police and soldiers. Henry put up no resistance, and the neighbor didn’t hear him say as he was being taken away. Henry’s partner cried hysterically. The police told him that if Henry had done nothing wrong, they would release him. Next day.
When Jesus ran up the hill from his house, the police and Henry were gone.
Jesus’ search for his brother ended in September. He was forced to go to the morgue and give the secretaries that of his brother: Henry Eleazar Joya Jovel.
They learned that one Henry Cuellar Jovel had died in Mariona prison on May 25, just under a month after Henry pointed to the bus. The government buried him in a mass grave on July 8.
Jesus asked to see the frame and his worst fears were confirmed.
The death officer? Pulmonary edema.
Jesus Joya worked to correct the name of his brother, who he said was misinterpreted by the government to hide his death. He convinced the government to exhume Henry’s frame so he could be buried where his grandparents lived, but first he brought the coffin to his neighborhood. , so that all the friends of man can say goodbye.
Jesus still does not perceive how this happened.
The offender “had my phone number,” he said. “I haven’t changed my number in 15 years here in El Salvador and they never told me, ‘Look, your brother is sick; Look, it happened to your brother.
“He was healthy,” he said. The only thing was his head. “
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