El Salvador Emergency Rule Meets a Growing Human Rights Reckoning

A new report on El Salvador’s extended state of exception reveals a darker side to the country’s praised anti-gang crackdown: disappearances, deaths in prison, torture claims, and a shrinking space for civic life, all happening within a security system closely observed internationally.

A Report Arrives With Heavy Language

On Tuesday, at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ 195th session in Guatemala, a group of international jurists made one of the most serious accusations yet. The report, from the Grupo Internacional de Expertas y Expertos para la Investigación de Violaciones de Derechos Humanos, claims there is solid reason to believe crimes against humanity are happening under the long state of exception pushed by President Nayib Bukele’s government to fight gangs. These acts include arbitrary imprisonment, torture, killings, forced disappearances, sexual violence, and persecution.

The choice of words matters because it changes the discussion. For years, people have seen El Salvador’s emergency regime as a tough but effective way to fight gangs in a country once terrorized by them. GIPES wants to shift the debate to a legal and moral level. It’s not just about whether the policy works, but whether the state’s ongoing actions have become systematic and punishable under international law. This is a much higher bar and a serious risk for a government that has based much of its legitimacy on restoring order.

According to the GIPES report, the emergency regime has generated five hundred forty reported cases of forced disappearance through February 2025 and four hundred three deaths in prisons through August of that year, including four children. The report says it documented torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, including beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, forced nudity, psychological abuse, and a lack of access to food, water, health care, and ventilation. It calls these acts widespread and systematic. Those are not incidental words. They suggest not isolated abuses at the edges of a security campaign, but a pattern embedded in how that campaign is being carried out.

The Cost of Making the Exception Permanent

El Salvador’s government has denied past claims of torture, arbitrary arrests, and deaths in custody. It says the emergency is still needed to eliminate what it calls gang remnants and points to a historic drop in homicides in a country once seen as one of the most violent worldwide. This argument remains powerful because it addresses a real problem. The gangs didn’t just exist—they controlled 90 percent of the territory, enforced their own justice, extorted merchants, and killed those who refused to pay, according to officials.

This is why the story is so hard inside El Salvador and so telling outside it. On one day in 2022, gangs killed 62 people across the country. At the end of March that year, Congress approved the state of exception at Bukele’s request. This measure suspended key rights, such as the right to be told why someone was detained and the right to a lawyer. It also let security forces tap communications without a court order and extended detention without a hearing from 72 hours to 15 days. Since then, officials say they have arrested 91,300 people accused of gang ties, while Bukele says 8,000 innocent people have been released.

At the end of February 2026, Congress approved a new extension of the emergency. It was the forty-eighth renewal, in force from March 2 to March 31, 2026. With that, the policy reached four years of continuous life. This is where the geopolitical meaning becomes hard to ignore. What began as an emergency measure after a massacre has become a governing architecture. The state is no longer merely reacting to a crisis. It is being reorganized around an exceptional logic that normalizes suspended guarantees in the name of security. Across Latin America, that kind of transformation is always watched closely, because success in lowering visible violence can become a persuasive export even when the hidden costs are borne by the disappeared, the imprisoned, and the silenced.

A Security Model the Region Is Watching

The GIPES report also argues that the government focused on neutralizing actors in civic space through systematic campaigns by the highest authorities, casting journalists and human rights organizations as enemies of the people’s progress or as traitors. It says physical and digital surveillance tools were deployed, and citizen scrutiny was criminalized. That detail pushes the report beyond the prison walls. The issue is no longer only what happens to those detained. It is also what happens to the public sphere when a state at war with gangs begins to treat scrutiny itself as a hostile act.

That is why GIPES urged the United Nations Human Rights Council to create an international fact-finding mission and recommended that Salvadoran authorities establish an independent commission, with international support, to review the cases of detained people, address the prison crisis, end the state of exception, and reverse penal reforms it says violate international law. Those recommendations are not just technical. They are an attempt to pull El Salvador’s security debate out of the sealed chamber of domestic popularity and into the wider language of accountability.

Bukele’s approach has always been straightforward: the fear of gangs would outweigh the fear of the state. For many Salvadorans, especially after years of terror, this idea has been appealing. But the GIPES report shows the cost is now clear—in prison deaths, forced disappearances, and rights suspended so long they seem permanent. El Salvador’s emergency is no longer just a local security issue. It has become a test across the region of how much abuse a successful crackdown can hide before the world calls it something else.

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