Even before her son was summarily locked up in a Salvadoran prison and cut off from contact with the outside world, Mariela Villamizar was worried about his health. Wladimir Vera Villamizar, a 33-year-old welder from western Venezuela, had recovered from a...
Agreements struck by several Central American governments to receive migrants expelled from the United States are colliding with new legal obstacles. In El Salvador, a letter signed by twelve United Nations experts, made public this week, urgently demands that...
When I had the privilege of studying Henry Kissinger’s thought—particularly his memoirs The White House Years—I came to understand that his political realism, the Realpolitik I so often cite, was never an invitation to a clash of civilizations. Rather, it posits that...
At 2:00 p.m. on Thursday, 26 June, three plainclothes police officers arrested twenty-four-year-old Óscar Bennetto Sánchez, son of César Bennetto Sánchez, a member of the Movimiento para la Defensa de los Derechos de la Clase Trabajadora (Movement for the Defense of...
The police arrested men based on neighborhood gossip or innocent tattoos, the families of those swept up in El Salvador’s mass arrests have long claimed. Now, some police officers who were part of President Nayib Bukele’s sweeping crackdown on gangs are saying the...
Interviews with police officers and internal police documents reveal abusive practices that have led to arbitrary detention and abuse of power in El Salvador. Their accounts provide a rare insight into how the Salvadoran police have fabricated evidence to fulfill...
