Lost in the ‘Death Realm’ of El Salvador’s Prisons

José Alfredo Vega’s parents said they could identify their body only by a childhood scar. Otherwise, the body was swollen beyond recognition.

“It was fine when he left,” said his father, Miguel Ángel Vega, remembering the night almost three years ago when police officers broke into the family’s house and took away his son. “I was healthy.”

Now, at 29, José Alfredo was a dead man in a morue.

President Trump’s decision to send hundreds of people to El Salvador, according to gang members, have turned on indignation and approval in the United States. But most Salvadorans have barely registered their arrival and absorption to the country’s criminal system.

Here in El Salvador, where tens of thousands or have had bones sweeps in mass trials in recent years, the disappearance of people who cannot be heard again is disturbingly familiar.

Since 2022, when the government of President Nayib Bukele imposed an emergency state to quell the unbridled violence of gangs, around 80,000 people have been imprisoned, rather than tripling the triplicate of El Salvador in the couple’s population. Thousands of innocent people have been locked without resorting legal or communication with their families, according to their relatives, former prisoners and rights groups.

Hundreds of deaths have been documented within the prisons of El Salvador, and families also report torture and mutilation. Even so, Mr. Bukele and his security strategy remain popular incredibles. The surveys constantly show that more than 80 percent of Salvadorans approve of the young leader, saying that under their administration they recovered a luxurious luxury: the ability to walk safely through their streets.

“Bukele is doing everything right, we are all delighted,” said Daniel Francisco de León, a resident of San Salvador. “It is a completely different mood here. Rob, Rob, Rob.”

The families of the imprisoned say that only they know what the security strategy of Mr. Bukele and its apparent success is.

“I would not tell a single country to do what they did here,” said Mr. Vega, who identified his son’s body this month.

When Mr. Vega responded to Morue’s call, he was his son’s first listened to since his judgment in May 2022, the bodies of four other prisoners lay close. To his son, they told him, he had died of sepsis.

The Christosal Salvadoran human rights group has documented 378 deaths from prisons since 2022, he thought that the director of Chrysal, Noah Bullock, says that the real number is probably much higher. The deaths, said Bullock, are the result of an “intentional denial of access to basic neialitions such as food, water, medical attention, hygiene,” in some cases combined with physical abuse.

Andrés Guzmán Caballero, the Government Human Rights Commissioner, rejected the claims that the prisoners died of intentional negligence or abuse, or a higher rate than the civilian population, including the effects of malnutrition.

“That is completely false,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Guzmán Caballero could not provide an exact number of deaths of prisoners, but said there is a “very low” mortality in the two penitentiary boxes of the country.

American lawyers for migrants sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration and several members of the United States Congress have pressed officials to obtain information about men. Lawyers and family members say they have not had news of them since they were expelled in mid -March.

American and Salvadoran governments have refused to sacrifice the updates of their health or the conditions under which they are detained, apart from informing that the highest profile of men, Kilmar Armando Abrego García, has good health.

In the capital of the country, San Salvador, the lamps of the street adorned with the saving flag light up when the sun sets. People can now remain outdoors at night.

“I like to say that we really released millions,” Bukele told Mr. Trump last month.

Many Salvadorans say they agree. Now they can leave whenever they want, play football, walk dogs. The members of the teenage gangs no longer shake them, they are asked to deliver food or property, or their daughters. The emergency rooms that once overflowed with gang victims are calm.

“You were like a small street animal: there one day and went to the next,” said Teresa Lemus, a street saleswoman. “Now we are 100 percent safe. I can take my cash in my bag.”

Mrs. Lemus’s brother was among those imprisoned for more than a year in the midst of repression despite her disability, a spinal condition that let it depend on orthopedic devices.

“Sooner or later, it will demonstrate innocent,” Count People recalled.

She was right. But the letter that exonerated his brother also arrived, after he died this year in a prison called El Criminalito, at 48. When he saw him in Morgan, he was emaciated. The explanation of his death, he said, was vague: depression, anemia.

Even so, Mrs. Lemus does not blame Mr. Bukele.

“I am very clear that the president has not done me wrong in any way,” he said. “Just as he has been somehow, he has helped us in others.”

Her brother, she is sure, would have said the same.

Such complexity can be found on El Salvador, with people praising the drastic measures of Mr. Bukele even when they unucked their personal cost.

Adonay García retired at age 12 due to gangs at war at his school, he said. Now 19 years, you can set up a bicycle interested in the center. However, at the top of the mass judgments, he said, he was arrested for a month, interrogated and beaten by the guards.

“I thought,” I will never see my family again, “he said.

Mr. García’s older brother was arrested shortly after and is still imprisoned.

While surveys show that Mr. Bukele is still popular, some say that high numbers are a sign that people do not feel that they can express what is in fact a public concern about the state of emergency, known here as “the regime of El”.

“You have a population that says:” Of course, we support the president, but he would be afraid to tell him if he did, “said Mr. Bullock, of the Chrystosal Human Rights Group.

Betty, a San Salvador resident who asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of reprisals, competed. “The regime was an excellent movement, but there are many people who have unjustly leg tasks and have died there.”

She gets used to: “People finally wake up and see things for what they really are. That little man is trying to interpret God.”

Those who have spoken include the parents of the disappeared, who march through the capital that wears posters with the photos of their children. Among them are Mr. Vega and his wife, Marta González, who has just built her youngest son. They have another child in prison.

Almost two decades ago, as the threat of gangs grew, they moved to a remote coastal town to keep their children safe, Vega said. He worked in a shrimp cooperative, fished and did strange jobs. His children Anyge joined him.

On weekends, they said, they played football with a rural police force sent by the government to keep gangs away.

Then a new Tok Power president. And new police officers.

José Alberto was arrested, and the next morning while carrying Camarones, his brother, Vidal Adalberto, was also in custody.

Police brought a list of names, their parents said, but for what they know, they are accused or found that he had gang connections.

“We have spent our lives floating so that our children are not trapped in that,” said Vega. “We come here to mention them well, just for the government to kill them.”

From the judgments of young men, his family has sold everything to pay the food and supply packages that are the only things that people can deliver to prisoners.

Of those imprisoned under the state of emergency, only 8,000 people have released bones, according to the government.

A former prisoner, who requested that name with Hero because he feared Trest, said he would never forget his year in two prisons, from 2022 to 2023.

“It’s a kingdom of death,” he said. “The kingdom of the devil.”

His first stop was Esalco, a maximum security prison on the outskirts of the capital.

Upon arrival, the men were stripped of their underwear and forced to walk between rows of guards who beat them with clubs, he said. Three to a litera were crowded, forced to divide rations of magicians such as aqueous beans or instant pasta. The man said he lost 30 pounds in a month.

Finally, he said, he was placed with a group of “civilians without tattoos”, people considered “collaborators, in theory.”

He was then sent to a less restrictive prison center or San Salvador, known as Mariona. There, Detire could leave your cells, kick a ball and play dominoes.

But beyond routine controls, including weighing, there was no medical attention, said the man. Many prisoners suffered “a kind of dianrea that I didn’t know was possible,” he said.

The families of the prisoners sent packages, but the guards eliminated things like oatmeal, corn flakes and cookies, said the former inmate, leaving aside the food rich in calories to look at the inmates.

Mr. Guzmán, the Human Rights Commissioner, denied it.

“Everyone receives food and everyone is fine,” he said. “When it comes to malnutrition, there is no problem. It is not a five -star hotel, but all eat two, three times a day and eat well.”

On a recently morning, outside a prison in the inner city of Santa Ana, a man sitting on the back of a hero in his handcuffed while the vehicle was immobilized. Hello, stored towards his mouth, then hero by his fingers to indicate how many days his leg had since he had eaten: four.