In El Salvador’s prisons there are more than 79,000 people detained during an extended emergency regime, accused of belonging to gangs and illicit groups, and many will not be tried individually but will be prosecuted and sentenced en masse.
Before the emergency regime, approved in March 2022 and continuously extended to the present, detained and accused people were held individually accountable for crimes. But now the authorities are putting together groups of detainees with whom they seek to carry out unanimous convictions.
The first group to be prosecuted in this way was brought before the court in February. In mid-May they announced the process of other groups of detainees.
Mass trials have been legal in El Salvador since mid-2023, but had not been carried out until this year. The reform that made this type of trial possible was initially going to be temporary, but the legislative decree that regulates it does not establish a specific period of time.
According to legislation, mass trials can only be carried out with those detained under the emergency regime. To do this, the Prosecutor’s Office may group the detainees by criminal structure and then present the group at the judicial headquarters so that they can be tried under “a single cause.”
“We are organizing and separating them territorially in the same way they are organized,” said the Prosecutor’s Office in its official account on X.
Some of the criteria for assembling groups are structure, name, territory or place of origin, and others that are applicable at the discretion of the prosecutor. This means that any of the more than 75,000 detainees could be grouped and classified, and then request group sentences.
On May 14, the Prosecutor’s Office required that 1,202 detainees be grouped in a process according to the clique to which they supposedly belong.
For criminal lawyer Marcela Galeas, this type of trial is “dangerous for those people who without ties to gangs are subjected to the process and are convicted in it, she told the Voice of America.
“The criteria for accusation can range from a place of origin, an alleged gang affiliation or being suspected of belonging to a terrorist organization due to clothing,” said Galeas, pointing out that the criteria for including a person are not clear. person in a group of defendants.
The power that the Prosecutor’s Office now has to build collective cases was granted by the Congress of El Salvador, dominated by the ruling party, New Ideas. Legislators justified it as a “transitional measure” that would help “resolve the collapse of the judicial system due to the thousands of arrests during the emergency regime,” but the measure has remained in force since July 2023.
Galeas points out that a detainee must have minimum criminal guarantees, including the principle of defense, a hearing where his case is heard individually, that there is legality and equality in the process and that he also have a defense lawyer to face the tax accusations.
“These guarantees are not respected in collective trials,” added the lawyer.
For the Washington Office on Latin American Affairs (WOLA), One of the rights that are violated in collective trials is that of the defense.
“Forcing people to be tried collectively runs counter to the presumption of innocence,” WOLA said in a report in August 2023.
The US State Department questioned the mass trials in a human rights report published in April 2024.
“The law established the right of any person to challenge the legality of their arrest or detention in court, a right that those captured have lost,” the report explains.
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