MEXICO CITY — Thousands of poverty-stricken children in El Salvador have suffered arbitrary detention, torture and other abuse as part of President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs,” Human Rights Watch said in a report released Tuesday.
“Children from vulnerable communities in El Salvador are bearing the brunt of the government’s indiscriminate security policies,” Juanita Goebertus, the group’s director for the Americas, said in a statement. “Frequently, such arrests appear to have been motivated by a child’s physical appearance and socioeconomic status rather than by evidence of wrongdoing.”
The 107-page report alleges that minors with “no apparent connections to gang-related violence or criminal activities” have been subjected to often-prolonged detention in overcrowded jails with a lack of adequate food and healthcare — while being denied access to lawyers and their families.
“Many have been convicted on overly broad charges and in unfair trials that deny due process,” according to the report, which Human Rights Watch says is based on scores of interviews conducted in the Central American country in 2022 and 2023, along with a review of case files and other records.
There was no immediate response from Bukele’s government. Messages seeking comment from the president’s office were not returned.
Since Bukele launched the crackdown, tens of thousands of suspected gang members have been arrested, many on little evidence. Many civil liberties have been suspended since 2022, when a state of emergency was imposed. Suspected members and supporters of gangs face 30-year prison sentences.
Bukele, who has dubbed himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” has regularly dismissed criticism of his mass-detention policies.
Despite charges of democratic backsliding, he and his anti-gang crackdown have proved popular in El Salvador. Voters reelected Bukele by a landslide in February, and allies of his New Ideas party also dominate the nation’s Legislature and its highest court.
In addition to adults, about 3,000 vulnerable minors were rounded up as suspected gang members in two years of an ongoing state of emergency, according to this week’s report.
(Presidency of El Salvador / Handout /Anadolu via Getty Images)
In the last decade or so, El Salvador has gone from among the most violent countries in the world to among Latin America’s safest. The country’s official homicide rate dropped from 106 per 100,000 people in 2015 to 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023. But Human Rights Watch noted that “a lack of transparency and reports of data manipulation” have made it hard to assess the true extent of the reduction.
Bukele, who has championed law enforcement’s dragnets and the construction of more prisons, has taken full credit for the reduced homicide rate, though it had begun to drop even before he took office in 2019. He has denied accusations of making deals with gangs to accept truces in exchange for benefits for their members in prison.
Experts trace the gang crisis in El Salvador to the United States’ 1990s-era deportation of Salvadorans suspected of belonging to Los Angeles-formed gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. The deportees returned to a nation in economic, social and political shambles following 12 deadly years of civil war.
Children have been victims of gangs as well as the law enforcement crackdown. For decades, Human Rights Watch noted, “pervasive poverty, social exclusion and a lack of educational and work opportunities have left few viable paths forward for children, enabling gangs to recruit and exploit them and security forces to stigmatize and harass them.”
Human Rights Watch said that since the March 2022 imposition of the state of emergency in El Salvador, the police and military have arrested more than 80,000 people in the crackdown, including at least 3,000 children, mostly on suspicion of being affiliated with gangs.
The report cites a 2022 case in which Salvadoran soldiers stopped a 16-year-old high school student on his way home from a soccer match in Cabañas state. The troops forced him to strip, burned his torso with a cigarette lighter and ordered him to confess to having gang affiliations, Human Rights Watch alleged.
The teenager, who was not identified by name in the report, was sentenced to six years in prison “on the basis of testimony from an anonymous informant,” and remains incarcerated, the report said.
In another 2022 case, the report said, eight minors from a rural town in Sonsonate state were arrested and pressured into pleading guilty to collaborating with MS-13. All of them were sent to prison for a year.
“We didn’t have an option,” a 17-year-old girl, one of the eight youths, told Human Rights Watch. “We all wanted to see our mothers.”
Times special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.