2023-12-01 05:32:02
MEXICO CITY (AP) — The day he was arrested, Luis was in government offices in San Salvador, the Salvadoran capital, waiting to obtain his criminal record certificate. The 23-year-old needed it to apply for a job in a call center, something that would have given him more opportunities than the job as a baker that he already had.
“What I wanted at that moment was something better for my life,” Luis, who prefers that only his first name be used for fear of being recaptured, explains to The Associated Press by telephone.
When his turn came, the person in charge of the paperwork looked at his papers and told him that an agent from the National Civil Police would review him because he had a crime. Luis was stunned. But denying the accusation once more and once more was useless, he recalls, because “by then there were no rights for people.”
He was arrested at the end of April 2022. A month earlier, the government of President Nayib Bukele had decreed an emergency regime to annihilate the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gangs and the two factions of Barrio 18, Sureños and Revolucionarios, which it suspends. fundamental rights such as having access to a lawyer or being informed of the reasons for an arrest.
Luis was accused of the crime of belonging to an illicit group and in less than 24 hours he was locked up in the La Esperanza prison, known as Mariona, the largest in San Salvador.
During the eleven months in which he lost his freedom, Luis was repeatedly afraid of dying. He also developed diabetes and found in faith a pillar to stay firm and not fall into suicidal thoughts.
Under this emergency regime, still in force following more than a year and a half, more than 72,000 people have been imprisoned, according to official figures.
Of these, more than 7,000 have been later released because they were never able to present evidence once morest them to be criminally prosecuted, according to what the Minister of Justice and Security, Gustavo Villatoro, reported in August.
Luis is one of those people.
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“As soon as we arrived at the parking lot of the Mariona prison, the guards were there,” he recalls.
Barefoot and in his underwear, he began to walk in the middle of a double line of correctional officers wielding batons. The first volley of blows did not take long to arrive. And the blows were repeated following leaving the room where the new prisoners have their heads shaved.
“Come up, dog,” he remembers the guards yelling at them to send them to the cells. “Come up dog, you guys are bastards, you guys have to die. “We are going to throw fire at them!”
In the cell, Luis collapsed and lay there until another boy approached him and asked him if he was alive. “I had not noticed that on the floor there was a pool of blood that was my own blood, which I had spilled from all the wounds that I had on my back and head,” he says.
He also says that he no longer wants to remember all the abuses he experienced in confinement, but that he is grateful to be able to talk regarding it now. Not all people detained in the emergency regime managed to survive prison.
According to the report “A year under the emergency regime: a permanent measure of repression and human rights violations”, carried out by the Salvadoran human rights organization Cristosal, 153 people – 149 men and four women – have died under state custody during the first twelve months of validity of that measure.
None of them had been found guilty of the crime charged. All of them lived in poverty or in areas controlled by gangs.
“There are records from the Institute of Legal Medicine in which it is established that the cause of death was strangulation, hanging, blows to the stomach, to the head… That is to say, they are violent deaths,” Zaira Navas, head of the legal and rule of law and security of Cristosal.
The Attorney General’s Office of the Republic of El Salvador publicly declared in mid-June that it had archived 142 cases of deaths in prisons because they did not constitute a crime on the part of penitentiary agents.
The Ministry of Justice and Public Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press regarding its treatment of prison death cases.
“When the State makes the decision to carry out mass arrests without prior investigation, without bringing an independent and impartial judge and dictating detention measures in a generalized manner, it assumes the guardianship of all the people it has detained,” emphasizes the also former inspector general of the National Civil Police.
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From his cell in the Mariona prison, Pedro saw many times how the guards grabbed a prisoner and beat him. He still remembers her screaming.
“They climbed on top of him as if he were a spring, three guards climbed on top of his body to finish his bones; I imagine they broke them because they were unconscious. After a while they said that they had been murdered by the guards,” the 39-year-old man, who prefers that his full name not be used for fear of reprisals by the police, told the AP by telephone.
Originally from the department of San Salvador, Pedro was arrested in July 2022 a few blocks from his home. He had gone out to buy cupcakes for the followingnoon snack. He had only been in his homeland for a few days, where he had returned to renew his passport.
Years ago, Pedro fled to Mexico because gang members had made an attempt on his life. There he obtained a humanitarian visa and over the years, when his daughter was born, he was granted a permanent resident visa.
Like Luis—without prior investigation and without evidence—Pedro was accused of the crime of illicit groups. He was imprisoned for seven months.
It didn’t help that he told the police regarding his Mexican documents and why he had returned to El Salvador. What’s more, the agents confiscated his permanent resident visa in Mexico and, to date, Pedro has not been able to obtain it back.
Both former inmates report that prison officers beat and tear-gassed inmates, that medical care was practically nonexistent, and that hunger prevailed daily.
The guards and prisoners in the trust phase, the so-called “logistics”, kept the most coveted products – such as sugar and ointment to cure skin infections – from the food and hygiene packages sent to them by their relatives. , as they relate.
The two confirm that they were mixed in the same cells with gang members. They say that up to 300 or more prisoners were crowded together, who had to share only two bathrooms.
The Associated Press visited the Terrorism Confinement Center in October and, from what was possible to observe, in this new megaprison everything was clean and the prisoners received medical attention. Only one inmate was allowed to speak to the press.
But during his period of confinement, Luis remembers that there were inmates who slept on the floor of the bathrooms. Because of the chronic dirt, they were the ones who got sick the most.
Pedro says that there was a sink with stagnant, hot water that gave off a rancid smell. That water was used to flush toilets but also for drinking.
“I got a lot of illnesses, fungus, itching on my body, rot, scabies (human scabies), boils on my head: some very terrible balls that were sweating blood,” he says.
For Luis, the fungus invaded the soles of his feet. In the prison clinic the doctor mocked him — “Can’t you hold on? If that’s nothing! ”—And he sent him away with an acetaminophen tablet. After a few days, almost unable to walk, he began to heal as best he might—with his own urine—until he was treated at the clinic once more.
Months later, still in prison, he was diagnosed with prediabetes and then diabetes. Luis, hypertensive since before his arrest, believes that his diabetes ended up developing due to the tensions he experienced in prison: “It was because of those beatings, because of some afflictions one almost died, so we can say that that was why” .
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The majority of those 7,000 people who, according to what the Salvadoran government reported, had been released until August, are not completely free: they have been released with alternative measures to provisional detention and their trial continues. Pedro and Luis, for example, have the obligation to appear to sign from time to time at the Isidro Menéndez Judicial Center, in San Salvador.
Both live with the anguish of being arrested once more.
Pedro – who claims to have been “psychologically destroyed” – spent fifteen days without being able to sleep and without venturing out into the street because the sight of a police officer made him panic and brought back memories of the mistreatment by the guards.
Luis, who was only looking to improve his economic status, now has a serious criminal record.
He has looked for a new job and has not been successful. Of course, he has not been left with nothing: they accepted him back into the same bakery where he was before. But it is clear to him that his work career, for the moment, has been stained by incarceration.
Pedro has not only lost his job as a piece-rate gardener in Monterrey, but the emergency regime banished him from his dream of continuing with his life in Mexico, a country where he misses the food—quesadillas, tacos al pastor—and where he had found refuge when other violence displaced him from El Salvador.
After his arrest, he tried in vain to reclaim his Mexican documents. He went to the Attorney General’s Office for the Defense of Human Rights and the official who assisted him told him that suing a police officer was like suing the government. “Think regarding it,” he told her. He took it almost as a warning.
“I feel desperate because they have violated my immigration rights,” reflects Pedro, who now manages as an informal seller. He needs to pay off the debts incurred by his family to pay the expenses derived from his stay in prison, such as packages with items of first necessity, for example, which sometimes amounted to up to $75 each.
During a virtual hearing with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that took place in July, the presidential commissioner for Human Rights and Freedom of Expression, Andrés Guzmán, denied that torture or violation of freedom of expression exists in the country.
For his part, the attorney general, Rodolfo Delgado, said that his office has not received complaints of torture or degrading treatment once morest Salvadoran citizens.
Luis loves playing soccer. But he stopped doing it a long time ago. Since he is free he no longer goes to the field or the stadium. He also doesn’t go out to enjoy with his lifelong friends. What’s more, following his arrest many of them stopped speaking to him. He also distanced himself.
Your innocence or theirs doesn’t matter. Luis says that he feels strange, but that he understands them. “Something can happen to you because of someone,” he says, repeating the formula of a fear that has become widespread in El Salvador.
“I weigh my freedom or going to the field and knowing that some problem always happens on the field and they can arrest me… So I’d rather be at home,” he reflects. “Better up to here and no more. “I don’t want to suffer once more what I suffered.”
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