From Mass Graves to Mass Incarceration

Host: Let’s say you’re a teenager living in El Salvador. Gen Z. You are creative, into football, kind of shy. You’re 16. And then one day…. soldiers stop you for no reason. They stuff you in a car ...  

Juanita: … and they took him through a road that was empty, that was isolated. 

Host: This is Juanita Goebertus, the America's Director for Human Rights Watch. And this is a true story. 

Juanita: They took him out of the car, pointed a gun to his head, and pretended that they were shooting him, making him believe that he was going to die in that instant. He specifically told us to see the soldier laughing at him of how painful and how in fear he was at this moment. Uh, then afterwards they made him run, uh, with his feet tied up and, and again, continue to laugh at, at him 

Host: Then they take you to jail. That story is the story of what happened to a kid we’re going to call Agustín. And wrapped inside Agustín’s story is the rise of a politician who rode to power on a wave of populism, on the promise to crack down on gang violence, without regard to the thousands of innocent people, innocent kids, who were rounded up along the way.  

This is Rights & Wrongs, a podcast from Human Rights Watch. I'm Ngofen Mputubwele. I am a writer, a lawyer, and a radio producer. Human Rights Watch asked me to look at human rights hotspots around the world through the eyes and ears of the people on the front lines of history. 

Ngofeen: Can you tell me, there's a young man named Agustín.    

Host: So, Agustín, the Gen Z kid we talked about before, he’s been through A LOT…  

Agustín: …Al principio yo me sentía tranquilo.   

Juanita: Agustín grew up in Cuscatancingo .  .  .   

Agustín: …en Cuscatancingo… 

Host: Cuscatancingo - that’s a small town just outside of the capital, San Salvador. Juanita told me it’s a place that was completely controlled by “maras,” or gangs…   

Juanita: They've controlled everything from how people should dress, how they should walk., how they should talk, really. And when he was only 12 years old, they attempted to recruit him.   

Agustín: Esos muchachos...  

Host: These interactions with gangs, they became a regular part of Agustín’s life.  He described them for Human Rights Watch…  

Agustín: Me ofrecieron un cigarro... 

Juanita: He was only 12 years old. They attempted to recruit him. A group of gang members offered sneakers and access to cigarettes and clothing in exchange for him joining the gang.   

Agustín: y yo les dije que no ...  

Juanita: At the time, um, he was able to refuse and continue with his life.  

Host: And Agustín kept refusing.  

Juanita: But a couple of years later, when the pandemic hit, his mother, who helped the police distribute food during the quarantine because of how much people were suffering.    

Agustín:  ... hicieron algo contra mi familia.  

Juanita: Well, of course, gangs were not happy with the fact that she was helping the police distributing the food, and she was directly harassed, threatened that she would be killed if they didn't leave Cuscatancingo. And so they had to migrate for the first time. They went to a town called Mejicanos - close to San Salvador… 

Host: And now, Agustín was different. Suddenly really scared. Scared of going outside. That innocence robbed from him, he started staying home all the time, so he wouldn’t have to look over his shoulder. Thing is, Agustín and his family would have to move again after gang members in in this new town intimidated him and his family. But after this second move, for one brief moment, the family had hope that things would get better… 

Archive/Univision: [tape of Bukele addressing country announcing state of emergency] 

Juanita: Uh, when Agustín was already 16 years old, um, they watched the announcement of Bukele, uh, sharing that, uh, there would be a state of emergency and, um, just a big offensive and war against gangs.  

Host: El Salvador’s new President, Nayib Bukele, was promising what no recent Salvadoran leader had been able to deliver: to take the country back from gang control.  

Juanita: And Agustín told us that he was actually, uh, quite hopeful, uh, that this could actually bring peace to, to his country.   

Host: But, that hope, for Agustín, was misplaced… 

Juanita: Couple of months later, it was members of the police and soldiers that detained him. 

Host: Again, Agustín was just 16 at the time. He’d managed to escape from the gangs, but now, without any evidence, the police think HE’S a gang member. And it’s the government that takes control of his life… 

Juanita: … without any explanation of what was he being accused of and he was just taken away from his family and from his home.   

Host: This is when the soldiers pretended to assassinate Augustin, before clapping him in jail...  

Juanita:  When he finally, uh, reached the place of, of detention... he was a beaten, he basically saw how members of gangs, uh, would be just harassing everyone without any sort of, of intervention by the authorities that were in the, in the jail.  

Agustín: Entonces ellos golpeaban los que no eran nada, les quitaban la comida. Y cuando uno llamaba ... 

Juanita: Finally, after 12 days of being detained because the judge found that there was no evidence he was, he was released.  

Host: Agustín got out. But, he was one of the lucky ones. We’ll hear why he was lucky later in the podcast. You can’t talk about the war on gangs without talking about the gangs themselves, and the profound effect they’ve had on everyday life and politics in El Salvador. And for that I turned to a Salvadoran… 

Jose Miguel Cruz: My name is Jose Miguel Cruz.  

Host: José Miguel Cruz is director of the Latin American Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami. 

JMC: And I'm a researcher on violence and gangs in Central America. I've been doing this work for 25, 30 years, maybe. 

Host: I wanted to get a sense from Professor Cruz of what life in El Salvador was like before Bukele came to power and cracked down on gangs, and what it has been like since. And how all of this has affected young people like Agustín. 

Ngofeen: I live in, I live in New York City, I live in the United States, and I have a mental image of what gangs are in my context. How is what I imagine as a gang living here different than what gangs are in El Salvador? 

JMC:  So you can see them as corner gangs. They are hanging together in the streets. They are talking, smoking, maybe marijuana, or sometimes doing drugs, and in that sense may be similar to what you see gangs in the United States, but the difference is that, actually, they control almost everything what is happening in the barrio, in the neighborhood. 

Ngofeen: Got it. So El Salvador has struggled with gang violence for many years, right? At its worst, just a few years ago, how bad was it? 

JMC: Yeah, it was very bad, especially if you lived in a low income community, this community will be controlled by gangs, right? They will extort you, they will demand money from you in order to be safe. So they will extort money not only from regular citizens, but also businesses, even a large company like a supermarket or something like that, the gang will demand the    company to pay them something in order for their employees over there in the neighborhood to be safe.

If you are a resident of a different neighborhood controlled by other gang, but you were not involved in any way to gangs, but you happen to cross a neighborhood controlling by the opposite gun, by the rival gang, they will attack you just because you're coming from a different neighborhood. You can ask, how would they know where you're coming from? Well, the moment you enter the community or the neighborhood, they will ask for your ID, and your ID says your address, where you live. And if they check your ID and say, ‘Oh, this guy is coming from, let's say El Rosario’.  And El Rosario happened to be under the control of the rival gang. You might be killed in, in the moment. 

Archive/CNN:  It seems El Salvador is headed to become the country of graves. According to police statistics, during the months of January and February, one person has died of a violent crime almost every hour ... 

Host: So, El Salvador had a gang problem, and one of the highest murder rates in the world. In 2015, there were at least 6,656 homicides, and El Salvador is a very small country, with a population of only a little over 6 million.  

Archive/CNN: The fear continues to grow among workers ever since the gangs massacred ten factory employees and one farmer ... 

Host: But the gangs driving this violence didn’t come from nowhere. They have a history. Which I asked Professor Cruz about. He said there were two main causes… 

JMC: One, gangs coming from the United States. 

Host: It’s not like there weren’t already gangs in El Salvador… 

JMC: …but in the 1990s the US started to implement this policy of massive deportation of undocumented immigrants back to Central America. And some of these immigrants were kids who had fled during the civil wars in Central America. And they have grown up in the United States, right? And they joined gangs in the United States.  

Host: So: back in the 1980s, the Cold War is still going strong. In an effort to keep leftists out of power, the U.S. gets deeply involved in backing abusive actors in internal armed conflicts in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador. A lot of Central Americans families flee to the US. Now, some of their kids get involved in gangs in the US, and in the 90s many of them are deported back to countries they barely remember.  

JMC: The most important thing about this phenomenon, about this process is that they took this culture of being gang member that prevail in Southern California, mostly in LA, they took that culture, that ethos, back to El Salvador in Central America. And a lot of kids who already were gang members in Central America adopted those and adopted those, those identities, those norms, those ways to be gang members. And among those, one of the two main identities were the MS13, Mara Salvatrucha, and the 18th street gang, who happened to be rivals, who happened to be enemies here in the United States. 

Host: So basically, the U.S. exported its own gang problem, including the violent rivalry between the gangs… 

JMC: And that started a street war in Central America and in El Salvador, particularly, right? Every small gang that existed either became an MS13 or 18th street gang. So that's one, uh, uh, first important phenomenon. 

Host: The second cause, according to Professor Cruz, was a colossal policy mistake. It started with a crackdown on gangs in El Salvador that took place in the early 2000s. Law enforcement captured and detained thousands of young men who quote “looked” like gang members. 

JMC:  But when they did that, they started having problems in every prison because, you know, kids from different gangs will start rioting and brawling and having problems. So what they did is they created special prisons only for MS 13s and special prisons only for 18 street gangs. 

Host: Big mistake.  

JMC: In doing this, what they did is they concentrated in a single prison or two prisons, let's say, kids that were coming from different parts of the country who, who claimed to be MS13, let's say, but that in reality, they didn't know each other. And they put them, all together over there, 24/7, and they forgot about them. 

Host: Really big mistake. Because these guys in the gang-segregated national prisons, they now were able to develop a national network of gang members.  

JMC: That's what the Salvadoran government did in the early 2000s. So they gave them the opportunity to reorganize, and to even improve their criminal game, because they put them all in prison, even if they weren't serious offenders, right? But you left prison being a serious offender. 

Archival - France 24: Preliminary results gave a commanding lead to 37-year-old Nayib Bukele, a businessman and the former mayor of San Salvador, a prolific social media user who appeals to young voters ... 

Ngofeen: In 2019, Nayib Bukele is elected president.  From what I understand, part of his pitch to the country was I'm going to take care of gang violence. What was the approach that he took to do that? 

JMC: The approach he took is basically to remove any constraints established by rule of law. 

Host: Bukele took over the justice system in the country. He replaced the justices on the Supreme Court and other judges who didn’t fall in line. The Legislative Assembly, which he controlled, decreed a state of emergency.  

JMC: When he decreed this state of exception, he could do whatever he wanted. So, for instance, when he implemented this crackdown on gangs, he ordered the police and the military to detain, again, anybody, anybody who looked like a gang member. 

Host: The same thing the government did in the early aughts. Except this time, Bukele had neutered the judicial system, and due process completely ignored…  

JMC: So you can be detained by the police, go to prison, not seeing a judge for two weeks. And when you see a judge, you will see the judge along with 200 other people and the judge will say, ‘Oh, you all guys are gang members, so you go back to prison and now you are, uh, sentenced to, to two, three, five, six, 10 years in prison, you know, without any evidence’. So that means that, basically he has given power to the police and the military to do whatever they want in the streets. 

Ngofeen: How then, now, after that happening, how has that changed what El Salvador feels like? 

JMC: Well, the immediate effect has been that gang members are either in prison, have fled the country or are completely in hiding. But along with them, also a lot of innocent youth are within prison. So also means that if you sort of resist any detention, the police can just, or the military can just shoot you on the spot and then the police will say, ‘oh, these were gang members who were resisting with, there were armed gang members, we killed them in a confrontation, in a sort of shootout between the police and the, and the gang members’, which many human rights organization have shown that in most cases is not true, right? But since there are no restraints to the security forces, this has been happening. 

Host: So here is where this story gets uncomfortable. The murder rate in El Salvador has plummeted. It’s now the lowest of any country in the Western Hemisphere other than Canada. 

But how? Since Bukele declared the state of exception in 2022, police have arrested over 80,000 people and thrown them in prison. One in 58 Salvadorans are in prison. This is the highest reported percentage of people behind bars in the world. 

From the country of graves to the country of prisoners.  

Archival/BBC: In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele has declared victory in the presidential election  

Ngofeen: So, Bukele is very popular. He was elected, reelected this year with 85

percent of the vote. Um, and so I'm wondering, what do you make of his

popularity? 

JMC: He is popular in large part because of these, of these policies of the state of exception or because of the crackdown on gangs. At the same time, it is important to say that people were so fed up about the control of the gangs in, in these communities, in these barrios, that they got to a point in which many of them have been very happy to trade their liberties in exchange for security.

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Scene on Radio Promo

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Host: If a huge majority of Salvadoran people seem comfortable with this arrangement of trading their civil rights for security– what about Agustín? How many other children have been caught up in the government crackdown?  

JG: Sadly, Agustin is one of more than 2,900 underage children detained.  

Host: Juanita Goebertus, again, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch. 

JG: Sure, gang violence has been reduced in El Salvador, particularly homicides. But at the same time, that has happened in a context of widespread human rights violations. This has particularly affected young men, usually very poor young kids in El Salvador, and we have documented a widespread cases of arbitrary detentions, of enforced disappearances, torture and ill treatment, hundreds of cases of people who have died in jail, and most prominently the complete suspension of due process. So, the case of Agustín is really the result of the fact that the state of emergency allows members of the armed forces to detain without warrant, without informing what are the charges, without having lawyers to defend themselves. In massive hearings of more than 500 people at the same time, without access to family, without access really to a trial. The majority of the cases that we've been able to document, people haven't actually been able to have contact with a judge. And in that case, the case of Agustín is an exception. The possibility that he was actually freed is not the reality for the majority of people that are detained at the moment in El Salvador.  

Host: This is how Agustín was lucky. In the hollowed out and compromised judicial system under Bukele, he actually got a judge to listen to him. And that’s why he was able to tell Human Rights Watch his story… 

Ngofeen: I'm an attorney. You said mass hearings with like 500 people. 

JG: Can you believe that? 

Ngofeen: Can you just describe that? 

JG: These are Zoom hearings. Uh, we've actually been able to see the hundreds of people that are connected to a hearing in which a lawyer would have a limited amount of time, in some cases about 10 minutes, to supposedly defend more than 500 people at a time, which of course violates their right to be able to defend them. There's just a general presumption of because you're there, because the government decided that you're a gang member, then you don't have a right to defend yourself and tell us if the state has made a mistake.  

Ngofeen: What do you say to people who argue that the human rights abuses are the cost that has to be paid for reduced violence? 

JG: That we've seen this happen in Latin America and elsewhere. We know how this story ends. At the beginning, people start justifying it just like that. It's the price that we have to pay. Then they come to the neighbor and people say, ‘Oh, wow, I didn't know my neighbor was a gang member’. And then they come for your child. And then all of a sudden you become a victim and you realize that the existence of due process, the fact that the state cannot arbitrarily detain you without having evidence of actual commission of a crime is exactly what protects us from arbitrary governments that decide to use their popularity to restrict human rights. 

I think at the, at the center of this and particularly of governments across Latin America that are trying to copy the so-called ‘Bukele model’ is the fact that we don't have to choose between security and human rights. We must have effective security policies that counter organized crime that are rights-respecting. We've done it before in Latin America and we should be able to do it again. This is not a choice that we should need to make.

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Mohamed Osman/HRW Promo: Hello, my name is Mohamed Osman, and I have been a Human Rights Watch researcher covering Sudan since 2018. As a Sudanese national, I have experienced first-hand abuses at the hands of the Sudanese authorities. I was arrested in 2011 because of my activism. Thanks to our supporters, I am able to continue my work exposing crimes and abuses that might otherwise go unnoticed. And I continue to pursue accountability for victims, some of whom are my friends, my colleagues, family and people I know.

If you would like support Human Rights Watch in fighting for a fairer, more accountable Sudan, please visit hrw.org/podcast/donate. That’s hrw.org/podcast/donate. Thank you.

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Ngofeen: You said there were models in other countries in Latin America. Can you tell me about those? 

JG: What we've seen that works in the long term, sustainably, to dismantle organized crime is focusing on investigations on issues like money laundering, like the networks of corruption, of the gangs, like access to weapons and weapons trafficking around the region. Those prosecutions against gang leaders and against organized crime leaders are the ones capable of dismantling these kinds of structures and the ways in which they finance, they continue to exist. Massive incarceration of those low-ranking members of different gangs does not sustainably dismantle these organizations. It just creates a headline. It creates a picture that creates very popular leaders that can actually then use that popularity to severage the rule of law, to undermine democracy in our countries. 

Host: So we started this episode with Agustin and his story of being trapped between the gangs and the police. What’s going on with him now? 

JG: Now, when he sees soldiers, when he sees members of the police, he's completely frightened.  And he no longer feels that he's safe anywhere, which is why he has mentioned that they actually want to leave El Salvador and join the hundreds and thousands of migrants that are traveling towards the US. 

Host: You can read more about this in a Human Rights Watch report called “Your Child Does Not Exist Here: Human Rights Abuses Against Children Under El Salvador’s ‘State of Emergency’.” 

You’ve been listening to Rights and Wrongs, from Human Rights Watch. This episode was produced by me and Curtis Fox. Our associate producer is Sophie Soloway. Thanks also to Ifé Fatunase, Stacy Sullivan, and Anthony Gale. The archival clips in this episode are from the BBC, France 24, and Univision.

I’m Ngofeen Mputubwele. Talk to you again in two weeks.