The USA’ involvement with El Salvador has come under scrutiny after further worrying revelations got here to light this week.
Human Rights Watch has found that El Salvador is forcibly disappearing and detaining deported Salvadorans from the US.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Centre – or CECOT, has drawn allegations of torture, sexual abuse, human rights violations and more.
It began receiving Salvadoran deportees from the US under a take care of Donald Trump last 12 months.
A report with relatives and lawyers of 11 deportees taken to the country last 12 months found that the boys haven’t been in a position to communicate with family or legal teams.
Human Rights Watch found that this information blackout on the deportees is akin to forced disappearance.
Of the no less than 9,000 Salvadorans deported to El Salvador since January 2025, only 10.5% had a conviction in the US for a violent or potentially violent crime.
Families who tried to achieve their family members in prison were told by the El Salvador authorities that they ‘lacked the legal mandate’ to search out them, or claimed they’d no record of the boys.
Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said: ‘The desperation of families to search out disappeared family members evokes the darkest days of dictatorships in Latin America.
‘The USA should stop casting people into the black hole of El Salvador’s prison system.’
The Salvadoran government has used the state of emergency put into place in 2022 as an excuse to avoid telling detainees their rights, providing legal represntation and having the proper to a good trial.
International law defines a forced disappearance as a state-sanctioned arrest with the refusal to share the person’s fate or whereabouts.
Forced disappearances have been a problem in El Salvador since before Bukele’s state of emergency declaration in 2022.
Between January 2020 and June 2022, greater than 4,000 people were reported as being forcibly disappeared.
Bukele has defended his actions, saying: ‘While some lawmakers from one other country want us to return to the past of death and destruction that El Salvador lived through…we proceed to exhibit that, without them, we’re significantly better off.’
It’s not only the federal government allegedly behind these disappearances either, but local gangs.
Santiago Canton, General Secretary of the International Commission of Jurists, said: ‘The Bukele model is sustained by the dismantling of the rule of law to systematically violate human rights without institutional restraints.
‘Within the very short term, it could appear to enhance security, but it surely inevitably weakens the very security it claims to guard. The danger is that this approach is increasingly being promoted across Latin America by authoritarian and unscrupulous political leaders as an answer to crime.’
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