Humanitarian Legal Relief (SJH), a human rights organization focusing on legal assistance, said in a recent report that at least 241 people have died in El Salvador prisons since the start of President Nayib Bukele's "war on gangs" two years ago.
According to the group's director, Ingrid Escobar, they received 500 reports of deaths in state custody but have confirmed that about half, including two minors.
Last year, the organization documented 126 deaths, just half of the number documented this year.
Bukele announced a "state of exception" in March 2022, which waived many constitutional rights to combat the gangs terrorizing the Central American nation, the Associated Press reported.
The arrests have swollen to 80,000, over 1% of the country's population, most of them often with little evidence of their ties to gangs and almost no access to due process. The prisons were also likened to torture chambers.
"[O]f these deaths, 44% died of violent death, serious torture, 29% due to lack of medical attention," the group's report said.
While the government has been accused of committing mass human rights abuses in their crackdown, Bukele remained highly popular in El Salvador because the homicide rates sharply dipped following the detentions, transforming it from being one of the most dangerous countries in the world to having the lowest homicide rate in Central America.
This resulted in Bukele's re-election last February despite the country's constitution prohibiting second terms for presidents.
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The government already released 7,000 of those arrested due to lack of evidence, and the country's vice president told the AP that the government had "made mistakes" in their arrests.
The rights group also estimated that of the people arrested in the two years of the exception regime, 35% were innocent and affirmed that 94% of the deceased had no gang affiliation.
"The majority were working people such as informal traders, cab drivers and/or informal transport workers, farmers, fishermen, evangelical pastors and preachers, municipal employees and one trade unionist," the report added.
SJH also demanded El Salvador's government investigate "homicides" that have occurred in prisons and "all the forced disappearances of detainees."
The group further intended to present its legal recourse to the Inter-American Human Rights System, where it will request moral and material reparation measures for the affected citizens, teleSUR reported.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International also released a similar statement last month, calling on the international community to condemn Bukele and his government's crackdown on the gangs, claiming that innocent people were affected by the policy.
"Reducing gang violence by replacing it with state violence cannot be a success," Amnesty's Americas director Ana Piquer said. "The international community must respond in a robust, articulate and forceful manner, condemning any model of public security that is based on human rights violations."
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