In November a councillor at San Salvador’s municipal office, Héctor Silva, proposed an emergency plan to deal with disappearances in the metropolitan area. His proposal – which has so far fallen on deaf ears – comes as the government led by President Nayib Bukele, which continues to claim progress in security issues, particularly in relation to reducing homicides, is facing mounting pressure from institutions such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to address the rise in disappearances.
Silva, a councillor for the small opposition party Nuestro Tiempo, called on 10 November for measures including the deployment of at least another 1,000 municipal police (CAM) agents and an increase in video surveillance. He also requested that the CAM director be ordered to draw up a plan within 15 days which would include “identifying high risk zones, an increase in the frequency of patrols in these areas and mechanisms for preventing abductions”. His call comes as figures from the attorney general’s office (FGR) cited by the local media put the number of people registered as disappeared in the first nine months of 2021 at 936, up 150% on the same period in 2020. Figures provided to Spanish news agency EFE by the FGR earlier this year via the law of access to public information, showed the number of disappearances reported in the first four months of 2021 more than doubled compared with the same period in 2020, from 196 to 415.
Also piling pressure on the Bukele government to tackle the phenomenon, on 2 November the IACHR presented a new report on the human rights situation in El Salvador which said that it had received “alarming information on the lack of response by the state officials to the high number of complaints of disappearances in the last few years”. The IACHR urged the government to “make every effort to search for missing people” and recommends that “a regulatory framework for the national search policy be developed and implemented”.
Homicides down
The reports of increased disappearances cast a cloud over President Bukele’s claims of progress with regard to homicides. On 1 November, the day before the IACHR released its report, the Bukele government cited PNC statistics which showed that in the first ten months of 2021, homicides totalled 926, 17.75% less than in the same period in 2020. The government attributes this progress to its security initiative, Plan Control Territorial (TCP) which includes a mixture of preventative and repressive components.
Mixed findings
The IACHR report underlined mixed findings regarding previous efforts to tackle the issue. As regards progress, it reported that, since 2017, the FGR had led a project entitled “Institutional strengthening for cases of disappeared persons associated with organised crime to reduce impunity in El Salvador” for the period 2017-2019. It notes that an urgent action protocol and search strategy for disappeared persons was drawn up and launched in December 2018, and the State announced the creation of a specialised unit for cases of disappeared persons in July 2019, which is dependent on the FGR. The IACHR report also highlighted the donation of an information system for the disappeared and corpses network (SIRDEC) and a forensic dental and clinical information system (Siclico), which will help standardise technical and scientific processes, coupled with the effective search and identification of disappeared persons.
However, the IACHR also observes “significant challenges”. It underlines that “in the absence of a legal definition or status to intervene in these cases, the authorities reportedly have to resort to different criminal categories such as that of “deprivation of liberty.” It warns that this creates major difficulties with regard to the registration and systematisation of official statistics on the number of disappeared persons and cases in which there could be evidence of enforced disappearance, loss, or other types of absence. The IAHCR adds that the absence of a single registry, as well as current rules that clearly determine the powers and attributes of the authorities, allegedly prompt differences in the data collected by each institution such as between the police (PNC) and FGR.