On Wednesday, August 14, two families from Milagro de la Paz, a neighborhood in San Miguel, El Salvador, got into an altercation. Really, tensions between the two neighbors were nothing new, and from time to time, would erupt into actual brawls, complete with insults and threats. Sometimes the verbal spats were between the two matriarchs of the families and sometimes they included their respective daughters. That day was no different: Late in the afternoon, Señora Dora, a 61-year-old seamstress, went to wait for her daughter at the bus stop — but just as she was leaving her house, she ran into Señora Antonia, the manager of a local beer store.
The usual insults and off-color accusations ensued, along with the customary incitement to do things the hard way. Dora’s family claims that she suspected Antonia of carrying a pocket knife in her purse. Antonia claims that Dora grabbed a kitchen knife from a fruit vendor. Whatever the case, the fact remains that in the course of the scuffle, Dora forgot to pick her daughter up from the bus stop and, when the girl made it home, she found her mother in the middle of an argument with her neighbor. Dora’s daughter says that she never saw a pocket knife or kitchen knife. When the two women felt they had said what they must, they each went home.
They could have left things at that, as they had so many times before.
But around 8 p.m., several officers with the National Civil Police (PNC) showed up at Dora’s house, knocked on the door, and, according to her children, said they were looking for a person named Antonia Berríos. But no one with that name lives at that house. To make sure, the officer in charge —who identified himself as Sergeant William Hernández— asked all the women in the house to produce their IDs, and so Dora and her daughter did. Then the sergeant suddenly changed the reason for his visit: he said that they were there to arrest Dora, because they had received a complaint accusing her of making criminal threats.
This is where Henry enters the story.
Henry is Dora’s son. He is 24 years old, a third-year medical student, and an employee at a courier company. He called the family’s lawyer, Otto Flores, a member of the Salvadoran human rights organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, who gave him three pieces of advice: The first was that a citizen complaint is not sufficient evidence to arrest someone, and that, therefore, the case was unusual, at best. The second was that they should not open the door until they saw an arrest or search warrant; and the third was that he should record what was happening on video. Henry followed all three of the lawyer’s recommendations.
Henry and his family decided not to open the door. Meanwhile, from inside the house, he recorded three videos: In the first one, a little over a minute long, he audibly narrates the presence of the police agents and denounces them for trying to arrest his mother. Through the metal bars of the front door, a group of officers stands outside his house, their faces indistinguishable in the dark. In this video, which was immediately shared on Socorro Jurídico Humanitario’s social media accounts, Henry mentions that the officer in charge identified himself as “Sergeant William Hernández.”
This is the only reference Henry ever makes to the officer: “...the sergeant with the last name Hernández, order number 02739... the sergeant who identified himself as Sergeant Hernández, Sergeant William Hernández, to be specific — but we can’t confirm it because he didn’t show us any official identification.” Those 18 seconds are the only time Henry references the policeman and his official police identification number (Orden Numérico Institucional, or ONI). In fact, the number Henry thought he saw on the sergeant’s uniform is not his correct ONI. Court documents show that Sergeant Hernández’s identification number is 21098.
The other two videos, which run 11 and 25 seconds respectively, show that several police officers had already entered the property without a warrant.
The Police deployed an operation involving several agents, then called in reinforcements of soldiers to cordon off the premises while other officers worked to obtain the legal documents that would permit them to enter the house and arrest Dora.
While the authorities waited for their warrant, the family stayed inside the home, surrounded by police and soldiers, while the videos filmed by Henry —accompanied by the public denunciations of Socorro Jurídico Humanitario questioning the elaborate arrest operation— racked up views on social media.
According to Henry, Sergeant Hernández, who was worried about the videos going viral on the internet, approached him to talk: “He asked me to take down the video and said that if I didn’t, he would denounce me because, according to him, it was illegal to record a public official. That’s what he told me, that I wasn’t allowed to record him. I was scared and my voice was shaking,” the young man recalls. But the videos are still available on the NGO’s social media pages.
Sometime after midnight, the documents were delivered and Dora had no choice but to open the door and allow the agents to enter. They ordered her to leave the house while they searched it thoroughly. Her children say that a female officer hit their mother in the lower back and pulled her hair, but that Dora did nothing to resist. Before taking her away, the officers told Henry, without explanation, that he was also under arrest, and demanded that he unlock his phone and show them the videos he had recorded.
It was not until Henry was already at the police station, sometime around 3 a.m., that he was told he would be prosecuted for recording the agents at the front door of his own home. At the station, the police explained that he would be charged with the crime of divulging confidential information via electronic media. He was taken to a jail cell where he was ordered to change into a white prison uniform and await his initial hearing at the Third Court of Peace in San Miguel.
Henry was formally charged with “undue disclosure of data or information of a personal nature” under Article 26 of the Special Law Against Digital and Other Related Crimes, which states: “Whoever discloses information of a private and personal nature without the consent of its owner, or disseminates or provides such information as referenced in this article, in whole or in part, whether in image, video, text, audio, or other form, and obtained by any of the means indicated in the preceding articles, shall be punished with a period of imprisonment of between three and five years.” Sergeant William Orlando Hernández García presented himself as the victim of the crime.
“Private and personal” information
“My understanding is that there is no restriction on filming police agents in their public function. The law is the law, and the truth is that in all the legal analysis that I’m aware of in El Salvador, there is no law or regulation that prohibits it, except in cases of filming places that have some type of legal protection, whether they’re military sites, police stations or prison facilities, for the security of those facilities. But other than that, there is no restriction,” says El Salvador’s presidential commissioner for human rights and freedom of expression, Andrés Guzmán, who was sworn in by President Nayib Bukele in May 2023.
Commissioner Guzmán insists that in El Salvador there is no legal provision that prohibits “the specific act of recording a police officer conducting his or her duties in public,” adding: “I know of no law that states that doing so is a crime. There is no rule or law that says this.”
Nevertheless, Marvin Reyes, head of the Police Workers’ Movement, the only union representing police and police workers in El Salvador, says that he considers the act of disseminating the video on social media as a possible crime. In his interpretation of the law, “People can document a police action. The problem is when they disseminate it. What they should have done is report the incident to a public authority. People can record, that’s not a problem, but they can’t broadcast it.”
The article that serves as the legal basis for Henry’s indictment prohibits the disclosure of information “of a private and personal nature” if it was obtained by compromising information storage systems. But according to Henry, it was Sergeant William Hernández himself who provided his name.
According to the Police Disciplinary Law (available on the PNC’s official website), all police officers in El Salvador are required to visibly display their ONI number. In fact, according to Subsection 26 of Article 8 of the aforementioned law, failing to display this information is considered a “serious offense.” Thus, an officer’s ONI is not only not considered “private and personal” information, but is, in fact, explicitly public information that all officers must visibly display at all times.
Commissioner Guzmán preferred not to comment on Henry’s specific case: “The case is already in the hands of a judge, and it will be up to the judge to determine... it would be wrong for me to give a judicial interpretation of the case since I’m not a judge,” he said.
Six days after his arrest, Henry was presented before the judge presiding over the Third Court of Peace in San Miguel, who ruled that there was sufficient evidence to indict the young man and moved the case forward to the next phase in the process. The judge also ruled, however, that Henry would not be required to await trial in custody, instead granting him conditional pre-trial release. This fact alone, according to Commissioner Guzmán, “already says a lot about the case.”
The Association of Salvadoran Journalists (APES) has documented 20 cases of police agents preventing or attempting to prevent the work of journalists for no apparent legal reason. Among these are several in which police argued that it is illegal to record them. The most recent occurred on Aug. 23, 2024, when a group of officers arrested a person who was cleaning car windshields near Cuscatlán Park, and a team of reporters from Diario CoLatino approached them to document the arrest. In this case, an agent prevented the reporters from taking photographs without providing any justification, and threatened them, saying that if they published images of the police action, they “already knew” what newspaper they belonged to.
On May 25, 2023, a reporter from El Diario de Hoy was covering the release of women outside Apanteos Prison when he was approached by a group of police officers who demanded that he hand over his phone, claiming that the journalist had recorded them and that this “was a crime.” The police filmed him and took pictures of his documents.
Another similar case happened to a different team of journalists from the same outlet: on July 17, 2023, reporters were covering a march organized by relatives of people detained under the state of exception when they noticed that the Police had detained some of the protestors and stopped to record the incident. The officers ordered the reporters to not photograph the scene and threatened to “aplicarles el régimen” — to arrest them under the state of exception. The police also said they would sue them if they published the photos.
Henry’s case has the potential to set a legal precedent regarding the right of Salvadoran citizens to record police officers in the performance of their duties — or put another way, of the right of police officers to arrest people for recording their actions. The prosecutor in the case declined to speak to El Faro, and no one from the press office of the National Civil Police has responded to requests for official comment.
*Translated by Max Granger
