As El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele embarks on his second term in office, an international rights group has warned that his war on gangs has created a spiralling human rights crisis.
As of February 2024, Bukele’s draconian two-year campaign, which has seen the authorities detain about 78,000 people, has caused 235 deaths in state custody, said Amnesty International on March 27. Citing a local rights group, it also reported 327 cases of enforced disappearances.
Bukele launched his war on gangs in March 2022, slashing homicides to the lowest rate in three decades after imposing a state of emergency that suspended the need for arrest warrants and the right to a fair trial, among other civil liberties. Prison overcrowding currently stands at 148 percent, according to Amnesty.
Read more here.
