El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s draconian mass incarceration policy may have led to crimes against humanity, according to a new study by legal experts.
By locking up 1.4% of the population without due process, Bukele turned El Salvador from one of the most violent countries in Latin America to one of the least violent, but at the cost of human rights and the rule of law.
The report, prepared by an international group of experts brought together by a group of international human rights organizations, documents the arbitrary imprisonments, torture, murders and forced disappearances that have taken place during the state of emergency that began four years ago, and describes them as “the result of a policy known and promoted by the highest levels of government.”
Given these widespread and systematic attacks against the civilian population, the authors conclude that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that crimes against humanity are being committed, and urge the United Nations to create an international mission to investigate.
“The State must protect citizens from organized crime, but with the law and with respect for human rights,” said Santiago Cantón, co-author of the report and secretary general of the International Commission of Jurists.
El Salvador has been in a state of emergency since 2022, when Bukele suspended constitutional rights and unleashed security forces to confront MS-13 and Barrio 18, the gangs that brutalized Salvadoran society for decades.
Since then, some 90,000 people have been arrested. The majority are held in preventive detention, in terrible conditions. Human rights organizations believe thousands of people with no gang ties have been arrested and have documented more than 400 deaths in custody.
Many are in the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), a landmark megaprison built by Bukele specifically for gang members, and also where the Trump administration paid to hold more than 252 Venezuelan immigrants it expelled, who have since spoken of the abuse and torture they faced before being sent back to Venezuela as part of a prisoner exchange.
Bukele’s mass arrests broke the gangs’ territorial dominance, reduced homicides and gave most Salvadorans a kind of freedom they had not known for years. In 2024, they voted to give him an unconstitutional second consecutive term.
The “Bukele model” and its promise of security and popularity have won him admirers among leaders in Latin America and beyond.
“It’s had a huge impact,” Canton said. “Governments – mainly the new right that we are seeing, but also some on the left – are using him as an example. Go to any country that has elections and Bukele is in the streets.”
In Chile, incoming president José Antonio Kast recently described El Salvador as “a beacon in a world roiled by organized crime.”
But at the same time Bukele has dismantled the checks and balances on his power, firing judges who oppose him, changing the electoral system in his favor and persecuting his critics in civil society and the press, many of whom are now in exile.
That includes Cristosal, a major human rights organization in Central America, which fled to Guatemala last July after its top anti-corruption investigator, Ruth López, was arrested.
Almost a year later, López remains in prison, along with 85 other political prisoners, according to Cristosal.
Meanwhile, El Salvador’s Congress, almost entirely dominated by Bukele’s party, eliminated presidential term limits, clearing the way for Bukele to seek indefinite re-election.
“It took us decades to build democracy in all of these countries,” Canton said. “And the Bukele model that these Latin American politicians praise ultimately implies its destruction.”
