Docile little lambs carry bundles of white clothes and bags of food, forming long lines in silence at the gates of the building where their children, parents, and siblings are kept captive. They bow their heads as they pass the armed men who guard the prison —as if looking at the ground would make them invisible— then quicken their pace with expressionless faces, as if standing in line at the bank or to pay a traffic ticket.
It's 7:30 in the morning at Mariona Prison, a brutalist carceral citadel of multi-level buildings, painted a lurid yellow and surrounded by concrete and razor-wire fencing. Days before, authorities removed the metal plates that sealed the windows of the cells facing the street; so today, from behind the bars, eyes and mouths and hands peek out to bathe in a brief moment of freedom. From each floor of the towering building, prisoners scan the crowd for familiar faces. Sometimes, one of them dares shout out a name.
Over the course of a little over a year, the Salvadoran government claims to have detained more than 68,000 people, all of them accused of being gang members or collaborators. The government has imprisoned them under the auspices of a state of exception that has been in force since March 27, 2022. In keeping with the spirit of this régimen de excepción, which consists, at its core, in eliminating civil rights, most of the people arrested have been taken into custody without being given a reason why, and without being accused of any concrete crime. They have been held in absolute isolation and denied the right to communicate with anyone, including lawyers, in prisons like this one, where their families must assume the responsibility of clothing and feeding them.
Numerous journalistic investigations describe conditions of systematic torture, and even cases of murder, inside the prisons. Organizations like Human Right Watch have published reports with titles that leave little room for ambiguity: “El Salvador: Widespread Abuses Under State of Emergency — Enforced Disappearances, Torture, Deaths in Custody, Hundreds of Arbitrary Arrests.” Some of the detained have spent weeks in prison; others have been held for months, or even a year. During the early days of the state of exception, thousands of people — mostly women — would gathered in front of Mariona Prison with megaphones and signs and rage. At some point, it seemed that this wave of protest would overflow into a torrent of rioting, but the protests were nothing that a good dose of tanks and soldiers with rifles and threats couldn’t contain. And then there was this:
Docile little lambs, gazing up at the windows of the prison in longing, waiting for something to happen, and invoking, so that it might happen, the divine power of God. But nothing ever happens.
A woman wanders the perimeter of the prison, selling natural sweets that soothe the throat or sweeten the palate. Penny by penny, she sells her candy until she has enough to buy a bundle for her son, who was born with a mental disability and a chronic heart condition. “There are mothers who don’t want to say anything, out of fear, but I think we have to speak out, because our sons can’t,” she says, and then adds: “I want to ask the president to put his hand on his heart, because he said he would free the innocent. I pray to God that the president will get my son out... I know that God wants to make my miracle come true, but the judges are the ones who won’t let him.” And then she goes back to selling her sweets, on the other side of the sidewalk, to pay for clothes and toilet paper and toothpaste and fungal cream and food for her son, while she waits for God —or rather, President Bukele, or the judges who are preventing her miracle— to have a change of heart.
This new state of affairs has been so normalized that it has created new jobs: for example, the jaladoras, or hawkers: “Looking for a package, sweetie?” A small army of women roams the streets in search of customers, luring them to their employer’s stands to sell them anything from the basic bundle, costing around $35, to the luxury package, which includes a mattress, for $170. 24-year-old Liliana —whose name is not Liliana— is among them, demonstrating her prowess in promoting her employer’s stand. This is the first paid job she has had in her life. Before, she worked as a housewife, managing the money her husband earned from his job as a security guard and taking care of their two girls, ages 4 and 6. Until eight months ago, when her husband was arrested. It didn’t matter that he had consistent employment, or a clean record. Nothing mattered. He was arrested only nine days after Liliana had given birth to her third child. After his arrest, she took the job to kill two birds with one stone: she makes some money to feed her children and her imprisoned husband, and at the same time, she says, it lets her be close to him. “It’s like a kidnapping: they don’t explain anything to you, they just take you away,” she says, trying to stop a tear from smudging her mascara. Being close to the prison, Liliana has come to understand certain things. For example: it’s never worth buying the $170 package that she helps promote and sell, because —and this is a professional secret— the guards never give the inmates the mattresses, and almost never give them the cookies or the boxes of cereal or milk.
Women wearing evangelical headscarves, elderly ladies assisted by relatives, men with hats, men without hats, people arriving by car, people arriving by bus, people arriving on foot… walk back and forth through the market, besieged by the incessant buzz: “¿Busca paquete, amor?” — “Looking for a package, sweetie?”
Elizabeth has a different marketing strategy: she runs her own sales booth, building a loyal clientele based on her low prices: by not hiring a jaladora , she can afford to sell her products for a few dollars less than her competitors. She views the other vendors, who wound up here after they were evicted from San Salvador’s Historic Downtown, as intruders. She, on the other hand, is a native: for 16 years she ran a shop right here, in front of the main entrance to Mariona, but under the state of exception, and despite the fact that she owned the land on which she operated, the guards forced her to leave and threatened to have her arrested. Now she sells her wares under a plastic awning in the middle of the street.
“The president doesn’t know how these people are behaving,” she says, pointing brazenly to the policeman who has come over to listen to our conversation. “They’re abusive, and I think there should be rules for them too,” she says, as loudly as she can, so that the officer doesn’t miss a single morsel of our conversation. She brandishes, in a fury, the bill sent to her by the mayor’s office for the use of the street: $300 that she has no intention of paying, even if it means going to war with the mayor.
Elizabeth is a fervent believer in the effectiveness of the state of exception: “The state of exception hasn’t affected me,” she says. “From what I’ve seen, they’re perfectly right to be taking those guys away. I’m happy because they don’t extort me anymore. I’ve come here to sell things. I don’t care anymore about what’s already happened. The president will need five decades to clean up this country,” she says, with true conviction. Because the thing is, Elizabeth educated her children well, unlike that procession of other women who parade by her stand. When her son was very young, Elizabeth gave him a maternal ultimatum: she told him that if he ever came home with anything that wasn’t his, she would kill him herself, with poison, because she’d rather he be dead than a thief. And the son, now a big, burly man, listens to his mother talk and looks me in the eyes, confirming her claims with a nod. “Some women just don’t know how to raise children.”
From her high horse, Elizabeth looks down on the flock below, convinced that she will never, ever be one of those docile little sheep.
*Translated by Max Granger
