U.S. Citizens Are Getting Caught Up in El Salvador's Mass Arrests
BY RICARDO J. VALENCIA | MAY 3, 2023
Salvadoran-Americans are finding themselves behind bars, but their fate is not getting enough U.S. attention, writes a longtime Salvadoran observer.
A police officer escorts a detainee suspected of being a gang member in San Salvador, El Salvador on April 25, 2022.
Camilo Freedman/picture alliance via Getty Images
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Since March 2022, when the government of El Salvador imposed a state of emergency to reduce gang killings, the administration of President Nayib Bukele has arrested more than 64,000 people, equivalent to 2% of the country’s adult population. Millions have lost fundamental rights such as the right to legal counsel and due process—and foreign nationals are no exception. In April 2022, two Salvadoran-Americans were arrested along with dozens of others while attending a fundraiser for a man suffering from kidney failure. One of the two arrested was a high school student. After a local newspaper drew attention to the story, they were both set free.
That was likely only the tip of the iceberg. While there are no reliable figures on how many U.S. citizens are in Salvador, or how many have been arrested as part of Bukele’s round-up, it is reasonable to believe the number is important. The current travel advisory issued by the U.S. Department of State says the Salvadoran government has detained “several” U.S. citizens, some “in a reportedly arbitrary manner.” My own efforts to ascertain a number were met by a U.S. official telling me only that the situation is “fluid.” But consider that Salvadoran Americans are the third-largest Latino community in the United States, tied with Cubans, numbering more than 2.3 million people, and the scale of the problem starts to come into focus.
One reason that detentions of Salvadoran-Americans have been underreported might be that many of them are naturalized U.S. citizens and hold dual nationality. But for many Salvadoran-Americans, traveling to El Salvador includes visiting their places of origin in impoverished areas. Bukele’s raids disproportionately target anyone who “looks like” a gang member—which generally means poor, less affluent Salvadorans. White, affluent Americans like Bukele’s crypto and Bitcoin advisers Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert are not targets and have reportedly enjoyed special treatment under the state of emergency.
Meanwhile, the overcrowded Salvadoran jail system has turned the state of emergency into a policy that fosters torture, due process violations, disappearances, and even the deaths of innocent people who had found themselves behind bars. While the Bukele administration brags about the reduction in gang activity, the reported achievements have been tarnished by the leak of police documents to the press indicating that homicide statistics were manipulated to exaggerate the decrease in murders. Indeed, the official numbers showing a decrease in homicides coincide with a dramatic spike in disappearances in El Salvador. The United Nations reported that disappearances under the Bukele administration have worsened to reach 32 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, five times higher than the average disappearances in the U.S.
More:
https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/u-s-citizens-are-getting-caught-up-in-el-salvadors-mass-arrests/
