The State of Exception Is Long Past the New Normal in El Salvador | The Lighthouse

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Last week, I spoke at a bipartisan Congressional hearing about widespread human rights abuses committed by El Salvador’s government during the country’s ongoing “state of exception” — an emergency decree that has allowed Salvadoran authorities to circumvent due process for over four years now.

I was joined by other attorneys and advocates from internationally recognized organizations, including Cristosal and Human Rights Watch. We described the reality on the ground in El Salvador: arbitrary detentionsenforced disappearances, denial of due process, and torture in prisons.

In response, Bukele claimed we were “defending terrorists.”

In his attempt to redirect public attention away from El Salvador’s harsh new sentencing laws and skyrocketing incarceration ratesBukele is trying to hide the facts of the matter.

El Salvador has both the right and the duty to develop security policies to protect its citizens from gang violence. But these policies cannot be implemented at the expense of human rightsnor by dismantling the essential pillars of the rule of law and democracy — let alone by committing international crimes.

In April 2025, I traveled with a delegation from the Kennedy Human Rights Center to El Salvador, trying to gain access to 10 of our Venezuelan clients who were being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), after being deported from the United States.

Despite exhausting every possible avenue and going through all official channels—including the offices of the Presidency and Vice Presidency, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the embassies of El Salvador and the United States—we were unable to obtain access or determine our clients’ physical or psychological well-being.

But we were able to meet with survivors of the state of exception in El Salvador, as well as with family members of detainees, journalists, and human rights defenders. Since the emergency decree in El Salvador in March 2022, more than 90,000 people have been detained and roughly 500 have died in state custody.

What we witnessed was a society gripped by state terrora society that had traded one form of oppression for another. Instead of gang violence, Salvadorans were now subjected to unchecked state power, exercised under a hardline security policy and justified by the supposedly boundless popularity of its President Bukele.

During that trip, we accompanied a mother to the Centro Penal La Esperanza prison, more widely known as “Mariona.” Her son, just 20 years old at the time of his arrest, had been detained two years earlier. He was still trapped in pretrial detention, without a fair trial, without access to a lawyer, without an effective defensewithout any communication with his family, and without any form of due process guarantees: a Kafkaesque ordeal.

Every month, this mother—like thousands of other women— goes to the detention center where her loved one is presumed to be held. She buys food, basic supplies, and clothing, packs them into a transparent bag, labels it with her full name, and hands it over to an officer at the entrance. The officer gives her a receipt with a cell number and block number where her loved one is supposedly being held.

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That receipt is the only proof of life she has had for years, ever since her son was arrested and his presumption of innocence disappeared under a state of exception that has effectively become the norm. While we waited with her, I couldn’t help but noticed that 95 percent of the people in line were women, mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, who bear the immense burden of this policy of mass criminalization.

At the press conference we held at the end of our trip, in what until recently had been Cristosal’s headquarters in San Salvador, the national police showed up and began photographing parked vehicles as a form of intimidation. Cristosal’s lawyers, including Ruth López, confronted them over these illegal actions.

Much has changed in El Salvador since then. Ruth was arbitrarily detained a few weeks later, in May 2025. She remains in pretrial detention, held incommunicado, and her case is under seal.

In June 2025, the lawyer and academic —and our client— Enrique Anaya was also arbitrarily detained. He remains in pretrial detention, and his life is at risk. Cristosal was forced to suspend his operations in the country and continue his work from exile.

There are now more than 40 journalists in exile and at least 86 political prisoners. In addition, a group of experts has found reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed during the state of exception in El Salvador, which implies individual criminal responsibility for high-level government officials. This could undoubtedly include President Bukele.

This is precisely why our testimony before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the United States Congress made the Salvadoran government so uncomfortable, and why their only response has been to distort the accurate information presented over more than two hours of testimony.

During the hearing, Congressman Cristopher H. Smith repeatedly stressed the importance of President Bukele’s popularity — an argument Bukele himself frequently invokes. This argument is not only dangerous; it is fundamentally flawed. A leader’s popularity cannot give them a blank check to dismantle the rule of law, much less the power to decide whose life is worth protecting and whose is not. Yet that is exactly what the president appears to be doing under the state of exception.

Designating certain groups as terrorists may be a matter of state policy, but it cannot strip them of legal protection or justify the application of a form of “enemy criminal law.” That is an extremely dangerous path, one that invites abuse and crime, and ultimately leads to a point where a state that claims to be fighting terrorism becomes indistinguishable from what it claims to be fighting.

The reality of Nayib Bukele’s government is that we are facing an aggressively authoritarian regime operating under a populist national security paradigm. Its indefinite state of exception against gangs serves as the latest expression of an aggressive reassertion of state sovereignty, beyond the traditional limits imposed by democratic institutions.

Isabel Carlota Roby is a Senior Staff Attorney for Latin America at the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center and lead attorney for 11 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador.