The youngest of the Sandovals has profound anemia, a condition that he shares with his three-year-old cousin and that is common among children in the rural area of Ahuachapán, a department in western El Salvador. For five months, the 3-year-old girl has been waking up at night crying and calling who she considers her father: her grandfather, José Alfonso Sandoval.
The Sandovals see in that crying one of the consequences experienced by the 12 children of the family who have been left in the custody of aunts and grandmothers after their fathers or mothers were arrested in the early hours of May 23, accused of belonging to gangs.
These and other 55,062 arrests have occurred during an emergency regime in force in El Salvador for seven months, and whose purpose is to imprison 70,000 gang members or gang collaborators responsible for or complicit in the last wave of violence that occurred at the end of March this year, which left 88 homicides in one weekend.
The non-governmental organization Tutela Legal “María Julia Hernández”, which has supported the case of the Sandoval family, has denounced what it considers to be one of the most unfortunate and unknown effects of the exception regime: minors who have been removed from their parents after they were arrested accused of belonging to gangs.
Among the children who have been left in the care of the rest of the Sandoval family is the son of Elsa Sandoval García, a single mother who used to cultivate a garden with which she provided vegetables to the poorest children in her community.
Sandoval García’s son witnessed how a group of police officers detained his grandfather José Alfonso, his uncles Manuel de Jesús Ramírez and Hugo Ernesto Sandoval, and his cousin Hugo Edgardo Sandoval, while they were walking with their agricultural work tools towards a of the farms they cared for in the municipality of Tacuba, Ahuachapán. The nine-year-old boy also witnessed his mother being taken away by the police. After protesting with shouts and tears, he too was threatened with accompanying her to prison.
These testimonies were reported to the voice of america by a relative of the 12 children, identified only as E. Sandoval. The woman appealed for habeas corpus before the Constitutional Chamber in San Salvador, with which she intends to get her relatives released, but to date the appeals have not been admitted.
Alejandro Díaz Gómez, a lawyer from the legal area of Tutela Legal, told the voice of america that these children “are being violated the right to life, integrity, health and education”, despite the fact that El Salvador is a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and that there are also state institutions in El Salvador Salvador that they must ensure that these rights and those established in local laws are respected.
Cristosal, a non-governmental organization based in San Salvador that watches over human rights, published in its fourth report on human rights violations in El Salvador that, of 2,928 cases of people affected by possible violations of their rights during the regime exceptionally, 1.2% are minors between the ages of 12 and 17 whose relatives were arrested.
The Amate organization, a human rights NGO with a feminist approach, assisted 37 victims, of which 2.7% are between 12 and 17 years old. The Institute of Human Rights (Idhuca) registers 444 victims, of which 3.4% correspond to that age range. The Passionist Social Service records 132 victims, of which 3% are between 12 and 17 years old, and warns that there are “25 cases where minors have been left in charge of other relatives.”
The National Council for Children and Adolescents (CONNA) did not respond to a request for comment from the voice of america. Nor did it respond through the coordination of the international press.
violated rights
About the 12 minors of the Sandoval family and other children whose fathers or mothers have been captured, Díaz Gómez said that “they are totally abandoned, and their parents in arbitrary detention for several months.”
“We consider many of these (arrests) unjust. And this also goes against the American Convention on Human Rights, which states that arbitrary detentions should not take place. (…) and the situation expressed in article 27, which states that the guarantees constitutional fundamentals, even in an exceptional regime, cannot be eliminated”, he pointed out.
The ages of the 12 children in that family range from five months to nine years. As a result of what happened, two of those children are at risk of failing their school year, explained E. Sandoval.
“Elsa’s child has not yet told me if he is going to spend the year or what, but I give him advice every day and I tell him that I want him to be a good child (…) ‘work hard to study, to When you grow up, be someone who can defend yourself against the injustices that exist in this El Salvador,’” said the woman.
The Tutela Legal organization “María Julia Hernández” has been handling the case of the Sandoval family since the end of May.
Authorities have not released any statement on the case.
What they did say was the case of two children abandoned a few days ago in a market in the city of Santa Ana, in western El Salvador. CONNA said that “the case is already being addressed by our Protection Board” and the National Civil Police assured that it was not about children abandoned due to the detention of their parents during the emergency regime, but about children who They often run away from home.
Captures of the Sandoval family, included in an international complaint
At the end of September, the arrests of the Sandoval family were included in a lawsuit filed by Tutela Legal “María Julia Hernandez” and two other human rights organizations against the state of El Salvador before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
In this regard, the lawyer Alejandro Díaz explained that he had requested that the file, which includes 152 habeas corpus petitions for alleged arbitrary arrests that the Constitutional Chamber has not admitted, be sent to the Inter-American Court of Justice.
The appeals were presented with the idea that the Constitutional Chamber would give them an answer as soon as possible, as established in article 11 of the Constitution of El Salvador.
Díaz said that to date, “the Chamber has not admitted these cases nor has it initiated the procedure of requesting a report, much less what is wanted, that it be released due to an arbitrary capture, due to the illegal detention of people, and it has not been achieved. That is why they have gone to the Inter-American Court”.
On September 27, when the lawsuit filed with the IACHR was announced, Ovidio Mauricio, executive director of Tutela Legal, stated that due to the exception regime “many children have been left without parents.”
“What is going to happen to these minors without parents, without those responsible?” he asked.
E. Sandoval thinks he has the answer: “I feel that what they are doing here in El Salvador is creating hatred in all the small things that are growing. Because, who is going to take that from their minds, that they ripped the most loved one from them?
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