The United States’ involvement with El Salvador has come under scrutiny after further worrying revelations came to light this week.
Human Rights Watch has found that El Salvador is forcibly disappearing and detaining deported Salvadorans from the United States.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Centre – or CECOT, has drawn allegations of torture, sexual abuse, human rights violations and more.
It began receiving Salvadoran deportees from the United States under a deal with Donald Trump last year.
A report with relatives and lawyers of 11 deportees taken to the country last year found that the men haven’t been able to communicate with family or legal teams.
Human Rights Watch found that this information blackout on the deportees is akin to forced disappearance.
Of the at least 9,000 Salvadorans deported to El Salvador since January 2025, only 10.5% had a conviction in the United States for a violent or potentially violent crime.
Families who tried to reach their loved ones in prison were told by the El Salvador authorities that they ‘lacked the legal mandate’ to find them, or claimed they had no record of the men.
Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said: ‘The desperation of families to find disappeared loved ones evokes the darkest days of dictatorships in Latin America.
‘The United States should stop casting people into the black hole of El Salvador’s prison system.’
The Salvadoran government has used the state of emergency put into place in 2022 as an excuse to avoid telling detainees their rights, providing legal represntation and having the right to a fair trial.
International law defines a forced disappearance as a state-sanctioned arrest with the refusal to share the person’s fate or whereabouts.
Forced disappearances have been an issue in El Salvador since before Bukele’s state of emergency declaration in 2022.
Between January 2020 and June 2022, more than 4,000 people were reported as being forcibly disappeared.
Bukele has defended his actions, saying: ‘While some lawmakers from another country want us to return to the past of death and destruction that El Salvador lived through…we continue to demonstrate that, without them, we are much better off.’
It’s not just the government allegedly behind these disappearances either, but local gangs.
Santiago Canton, General Secretary of the International Commission of Jurists, said: ‘The Bukele model is sustained by the dismantling of the rule of law to systematically violate human rights without institutional restraints.
‘In the very short term, it may appear to improve security, but it inevitably weakens the very security it claims to protect. The danger is that this approach is increasingly being promoted across Latin America by authoritarian and unscrupulous political leaders as a solution to crime.’
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