Caribbean & Central America - April 2026

El Salvador’s authoritarian President Nayib Bukele and his Nuevas Ideas (NI) government are facing renewed criticism over the state of human rights under the state of exception first implemented in March 2022 to tackle gangs, which remains in place. This March a panel of international jurists found reasonable grounds to conclude that crimes against humanity are being committed under the state of exception. Also last month a new report by prominent human rights group Cristosal looked at how El Salvador’s judicial system is being used to target government critics. Such concerns are unlikely to cause Bukele to lose much sleep however given his high popularity due to the sharp fall in homicides under the state of exception [SSR-26-03], and his strong alliance with US President Donald Trump.

On 10 March the International Group of Experts for the Investigation of Human Rights Violations under the State of Exception in El Salvador (Gipes in the Spanish acronym) presented a report before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), and during a side event at the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council in Geneva the following day.

The panel, which formed in 2024 due to alarm among the international rights community about the deterioration in democracy in El Salvador, comprises five internationally recognised jurists. These are: Susana SáCouto, the director of the War Crimes Research Office at the American University’s Washington College of Law; Claudia Martin, a resident professor at the Washington College of Law; Gino Costa, a former interior minister of Peru (2002-2003); José Guevara, a former chair-rapporteur of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (2017-2018, 2019-2020); and Santiago Canton, general secretary of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), an international NGO, which was among the groups which launched the panel.

Entitled El Salvador at the Crossroads: Crimes against Humanity under the Public Security Policy, the report states that human rights violations which have taken place under the state of exception include “imprisonment…torture, murder, enforced disappearances, sexual violence, persecution, and other inhumane acts” and is clear that these may constitute crimes against humanity, which it defines as “serious acts committed in a widespread or systematic manner against a civilian population, in accordance with Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC)”.

The report highlights that what distinguishes such crimes from common crimes is “they respond to a State policy or an organization”. It warns that these patterns point “not to isolated abuses but to the implementation of a deliberate policy carried out without effective institutional oversight” and states that the cases “indicate the existence of a policy of police and military action, known and promoted even by the highest ranks of Bukele’s government”.

The report cites as examples of these violations, the fact that under the state of exception, the State has detained over 89,000 people on suspicion of gang membership, “many without a warrant or evidence of their alleged individualized responsibility” and highlights Bukele’s public admission that at least 8,000 of those detained were innocent of the crimes alleged. It identifies the institutional breaking point as May 2021, when the NI-dominated legislature fired the judges of the supreme court’s constitutional chamber and the attorney general. The report also states that civil society groups documented 403 deaths in custody by August 2025, and 540 cases of enforced disappearance as of February 2025.

• Turning point

The report by the International Group of Experts for the Investigation of Human Rights Violations under the State of Exception in El Salvador (Gipes) pinpoints as the institutional breaking point in El Salvador, the May 2021 decision by the Nuevas Ideas (NI)-controlled legislature to fire judges from the supreme court’s constitutional chamber and the attorney general, which had previously shown a readiness to hold President Bukele to account [SSR-21-06]. This was made possible after NI won an unprecedented two-thirds legislative majority in February 2021, less than two years after Bukele took office in June 2019.

Another damning report

Bukele firmly rejected the panel’s findings, which came less than a week after Cristosal released a new report entitled The Price of Dissent: Criminalisation and Political Persecution in El Salvador 2019-2026. Released on 5 March, the report identifies 245 victims of political persecution by the State and 86 political prisoners and warns that for the first time since the 1992 peace accords which ended the 1980-1992 civil war, “there are political prisoners in El Salvador”. The victims mentioned in the report include the head of Cristosal’s anti-corruption unit, Ruth López, who was detained in May 2025 on embezzlement charges and remains behind bars [SSR-25-06].

• Criticism of rights concerns

In a 15 March social media post, President Bukele blasted the international jurists on the Gipes and human rights groups who had expressed concern about rights violations under the state of exception. He complained that “These ‘human rights’ organisations, to which many national and international media outlets (The Guardian, El País, Open Society media, among others) are giving widespread coverage, and which are being cited by thousands of local and foreign journalists, activists and politicians, are demanding that the state of El Salvador free 100% of the captured gang members… [and] return to the state it was in before the state of exception; that is, to the most dangerous country in the world”.

The NGO, which in July 2025 suspended operations in El Salvador after 25 years, now works from its Honduras and Guatemala offices [SSR-25-09], citing threats from the Bukele government and the impact of the May 2025 foreign agents law [SSR-25-06]. It identifies criminal prosecution as the chief instrument of political persecution. It states that of the 245 individuals documented, 180 (73.4%) faced criminal proceedings. Of these, 86 remain in detention and only seven have been convicted, in proceedings which it likens to “those observed in countries such as Nicaragua and Venezuela”. The Cristosal report also highlights that of the 245 cases, 60.4% are human rights defenders, journalists, judicial officials, union leaders, and environmentalists, noting persecution against these sectors “has been constant and increasing between 2019 and 2025”, and that the criminalisation of independent critical voices particularly intensified last year.

Life sentences codified

In a clear sign that such concerns fail to perturb Bukele, on 17 March, a week after the Gipes report was released, the NI-controlled 60-member unicameral legislature approved a reform bill that he submitted earlier that day to amend the country’s 1983 constitution in order to permit life sentences for “murderers, rapists and terrorists”. Earlier that month Vice President Félix Ulloa was cited by the media as saying a supreme court ruling now permits gang members to be handed down accumulated sentences of hundreds of years, despite the constitution hitherto prohibiting life sentences. At the time Ulloa put the former cap on prison sentences at 30 years, despite changes to the penal code last year which raised prison sentences for aggravated homicide to 60 years.

Meanwhile the swift change to the constitution was only made possible due to a controversial vote in January 2025 to reform the constitution to allow constitutional amendments to be approved with a three-quarters majority in one legislative session rather than approval in two consecutive legislative terms as had previously been the case [SSR-25-03].

Deportees

On 16 March US-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a new report warning that El Salvador is “forcibly disappearing and arbitrarily detaining” Salvadoreans deported from the US, one year after some of them were sent to El Salvador. The issue made headlines due to cases such as that of Salvadorean citizen Kilmar Ábrego García, who the Trump administration has since admitted was deported erroneously [SSR-25-05]. The report states that the detained people are among more than 9,000 Salvadoreans deported by the US since the start of 2025, alongside Venezuelans who “were tortured and, in some cases, sexually abused” in the 40,000 capacity mega-jail Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot), according to HRW. It states that the Trump administration has alleged that several of the Salvadoreans are members of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, disclosing that one of them is César Humberto López Larios, a known leader of MS-13. However, according to HRW, neither the US nor Salvadorean authorities have provided evidence to substantiate the claim that any of the others are gang members.