SAN SALVADOR – In two hearings in which the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has summoned the government of El Salvador to evaluate the human rights situation in the emergency regime, the responses of the Salvadoran government have been silence and absence.
In both, the IACHR has regretted that position. But it was not until November 10 that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele responded about that absence, and the relationship that his government currently maintains with the international organization.
“I have been told about an action that the IACHR wants to take against El Salvador for the fight against gangs, and I wonder what the IACHR did in the last 30 years, when gangs were massacring our people. Why have they never spoken in favor of the Salvadoran people?” the president said at a press conference.
Bukele’s position is that international organizations that watch over human rights are financed by countries that “do violate human rights”, something that in his opinion does not occur in El Salvador, since the Central American country does not have in its jurisprudence the penalty death sentence or life imprisonment.
“Salvadorans applaud the measures of the emergency regime even if the IACHR opposes it. The only thing that the IACHR shows is whose side they are on, are they on the side of honest people or are they on the side of criminals?” she added.
Bukele called on other Latin American countries to monitor the work of the international organization on the issue.
“You are going to see in the next few days if this organization is on your side or on the side of the criminals. If this organization sides with the criminals in El Salvador, don’t doubt that they are on the side of the criminals in your countries as well,” he said.
The IACHR, concerned
One day after President Bukele’s statements, the IACHR expressed its concern “over the persistence of massive and allegedly arbitrary detentions, and the failure to comply with judicial guarantees” in the Central American country.
“Although the Salvadoran State has the obligation to provide security to citizens, it must do so with respect for human rights and the international treaties to which it is a party,” it reads. the notice.
In the last hearing, the commissioner president of the Commission, Julissa Mantilla, recalled that the States are part of the Inter-American System voluntarily and that the hearings are the mechanism that the IACHR has to monitor the situation of human rights in the countries.
El Salvador has been in a regime for seven months that seeks to imprison 80,000 gang members responsible for the latest wave of violence that occurred at the end of March of this year.
The captures since then have not stopped and to date, the Central American government has arrested more than 55,062 people.
According to the human rights organization Cristosal, the emergency regime has left behind three major types of human rights violations: arbitrary or illegal arrests, acts constituting torture and ill-treatment and deaths of people in prisons.
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