"Bukele must be investigated for torture under the state of exception"

[Judi Lynn]

José Orozco
Monday, April 8, 2024
José Luis Sanz
Leer en español

Over the last weekend in March, 2022, a secret pact between the administration of Nayib Bukele and the gangs of El Salvador violently fell apart. In the ensuing 72 hours, the MS-13 gang assassinated 87 people. The Legislative Assembly, at Bukele’s order, responded by decreeing a state of exception giving extraordinary powers to the Police and suspending procedural guarantees and constitutional rights such as freedom of association and the right to private communications. These measures, which the law prescribes to last for a month, have been extended 24 times and are still in place. In two years, at least 78,175 people have been detained and incarcerated, at times for the mere reason of appearing nervous to a police officer. Today, 2.46 percent of the Salvadoran adult population is in prison.

Juanita Goebertus, director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch (HRW), accuses the Salvadoran government of failing to guarantee liberties and human rights in its security policy: “Hundreds of people continue waiting for something as basic as knowing why a family member was arrested,” she denounces in this interview, and insists that there is documented proof of the “direct participation of guards in acts of torture.” President Bukele, she says, should one day be investigated “for his responsibility in having incited this type of conduct.”

Goebertus, a lawyer and political scientist by training, has worked for 20 years in conflict resolution. She was a human rights and transitional justice advisor to the Ministry of Defense and National Security Council of Colombia during the administrations of Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos, and was part of the negotiating team of the peace accord with the FARC guerrillas. She was also a legislator with the Alianza Verde (Green Alliance) party before joining HRW in 2022. In her new position, she warns of a general backsliding on human rights in Central America and rising authoritarianism, “whether in its most dictatorial form, in Nicaragua, or in its most innovative version in El Salvador”.

Under the Bukele administration, she says, not even the number of detained people or the homicide statistics are verifiable and transparent, and “no citizen today is able to defend their rights from a possible attack by a public official.”

In this interview, given from Bogotá, Goebertus also references the state persecution and exile of human rights defenders, prosecutors, and journalists in the Central American isthmus: “The greatest obstacle for these regimes, what most bothers them, is an active, deliberative, critical civil society,” she says. The response, she adds, especially in contexts like El Salvador, where most of society seems to accept the loss of liberties with a mixture of normalization and resignation, should be to “resist” and win the “narrative fight” against authoritarianism by demonstrating “that human rights are not only for a privileged few.”

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202404/el_salvador/27302/bukele-must-be-investigated-for-torture-under-the-state-of-exception