(New York) – The second season of Human Rights Watch’s biweekly podcast, Rights & Wrongs, will begin on September 23, 2024, with an episode that explores the case of an elected leader who conducts a massive crackdown on human rights but remains wildly popular.
The episode, “From Mass Graves to Mass Incarceration,” describes how the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, rose to power on a promise to crack down on gang violence that paralyzed the country but trampled on the most basic human rights protections in the process, often with children bearing the brunt of the abuse.
Under his rule, El Salvador's homicide rate went from being one of the highest in the world to one of the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. But in the process, Bukele systematically dismantled democratic checks and balances and conducted hundreds of raids on low-income neighborhoods. His administration has locked up more than 80,000 people since March 2022, including thousands of children, and is holding them indefinitely without access to meaningful judicial review. El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world.
“At first, people are grateful and willing to overlook abuses for security,” said Juanita Goebertus Estrada, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, who is interviewed in the podcast. “When the police come for your neighbor, you think, ‘I didn’t know my neighbor was in a gang.’ And then they come for your child, and that’s when you understand that due process exists for a reason – to stop governments from arbitrarily detaining people.”
Rights & Wrongs presents new episodes every other week, exploring human rights hotspots around the world through the eyes and ears of people on the front lines. In “From Mass Graves to Mass Incarceration,” Rights & Wrongs host, Ngofeen Mputubwele, formerly of The New Yorker, introduces listeners to Agustín, a Salvadorian teenager who did everything he could to avoid gangs but wound up wrongfully detained in one of the Bukele administration’s sweeps.
Human Rights Watch researchers work in more than 100 countries across the globe, producing dozens of meticulously researched reports every year. Those reports, grounded in international human rights and humanitarian law, aim to expose and put an end to abuses, including by changing government policies and corporate behavior. Rights & Wrongs brings that research to life in an immersive medium with compelling accounts that are accessible to a general audience.
Subsequent episodes of Season 2 of Rights & Wrongs will explore transnational repression – the practice of governments going after critics beyond their borders, the dangers of holding the United Nations Climate Conference (COP) in authoritarian states, the establishment of the International Criminal Court, and the fight to return to Chagos, Britain’s last colony.
