By Deutsche Welle
17 Jul 2024, 01:49 AM EDT
Human Rights Watch (HRW) says that more than 3,000 minors are imprisoned in El Salvador under a state of emergency that has been in force since 2022. It also denounced that there are cases of “ill-treatment,” “indiscriminate detentions,” and torture against children and adolescents in the country.
In a report titled “Your Son Doesn’t Exist Here,” the organization documented cases of human rights violations while extraordinary rules to combat gangs are in force in El Salvador.
“The data we have between March 2022 and December 2023 shows that 3,319 children were detained,” said HRW Americas director Juanita Goebertus, presenting the report in San Salvador.
The document details numerous police and army raids in vulnerable communities where gang violence was constant, resulting in more than 80,000 arrests, including minors.
More than a thousand minors convicted
The report also says that more than 1,000 children have been convicted, with sentences ranging from two to 12 years in prison, in some cases “on excessively broadly defined charges.” […] and often on the basis of uncorroborated police testimony.”
“The government should implement an effective security policy that respects human rights,” said Goebertus, who asserted that “it is not true that the Salvadoran people have to choose between security or human rights.”
“Allowing human rights to be violated, supposedly to protect security, quickly begins to erode the rule of law and democracy to such an extent that there are no rights left to protect citizens,” he said.
“Reducing violence at a high human cost”
“It is clear that gang violence has decreased in the country. What is happening is that this decrease in violence has come at a very high and completely unjustified human cost,” emphasized Juan Pappier, deputy director for the Americas at HRW.
He added that “it affects these innocent children and adolescents who had nothing to do with the brutal gangs that operate in El Salvador.”
In March 2022, President Nayib Bukele launched a “war” against gangs under the protection of the state of emergency, which allows arrests without a court order.
War on gangs
It was decreed by Congress after an escalation of violence that claimed the lives of 87 people. The Salvadoran government has not commented on the HRW report.
At the end of June, El Salvador reported a reduction in the homicide rate, with 57 cases recorded so far this year, a decrease of 18 incidents compared to the same period last year.
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