“Escape tender people for this land is cursed
and hope not that tomorrow brings what yesterday did not
There is nothing left to do…
But the dead are in captivity
And they won’t let us leave the cemetery”
—Joan Manuel Serrat
Juan Saúl’s family thought it was suspicious that the guards at Quezaltepeque would have them enter the prison.
In El Salvador, after 31 months of mass arrests amid a slow trickle of releases under the state of exception, it is normal now for a prison, from time to time —especially when no journalists are around— to open its gates and spit someone out, always skin and bones, and on their skin, the scabs of prison scabies. This someone will exit the prison dressed in white, putting one incredulous foot in front of the other, blinded by the light of freedom and searching for something to recognize or someone to recognize him. More often than not, a group of relatives will rush to embrace him, then rush to put him in a vehicle that will peel away burning rubber, before some policeman in the vicinity of the prison decides to arrest him again — a situation that is also quite common.
What is not common in this system of releases is for guards to instruct family members to enter the prison, with their Uber and everything.
Juan Saúl’s mother, Ana, his younger sister, Maybelin, and his cousin, Payo, had waited 17 days for the prison authorities to comply with the release order issued by a judge on September 13, 2024. They waited until October 1, when the guards informed them that they had decided to comply with the law. For context: in El Salvador, release orders signed by a judge are the kind of document that prison authorities tend to brush aside with a snort. Sometimes the authorities take weeks to comply with an order; sometimes months, or even years. And sometimes, the person granted release dies in prison and the order is executed with the beneficiary already a corpse. The point, in any case, is that when the guards heard Juan Saúl’s name, they told the family that the women would wait in the street while his cousin Payo and their Uber driver entered the prison to collect the inmate.
Ana and Maybelin knew that the kindness of the guards was really intended to prevent the crowd of prisoners’ families, which gathers outside the prison every day, from seeing Juan Saúl leave. Their suspicions were confirmed when a guard advised them, for their own good, to avoid making “a fuss” with the press. The signs were ominous, but the family had been waiting nearly two years for this moment and, despite the storm clouds gathering overhead, they savored every minute that brought them closer to Juan Saúl.
When the car came back through the prison gates, cousin Payo got out looking very serious, and tried to cushion the encounter: “Maybelin, it’s very important that you control your mother so he doesn’t see her cry, because what you’re about to see... he’s not what he used to be.”
* * *
The story of Juan Saúl is a story told through the women who came before him. There are a few men, too, but their contributions are mostly limited to leaving their seed only to disappear.
There is the grandmother who worked as a day laborer on coffee plantations, who got her first pair of shoes when she was 15, who gave birth to eight children, half of whom died when they were very young, and who worked as a maid at a military garrison; there is the mother who survived a childhood of extreme poverty and civil war; there is the sister who was beaten by the gang that controlled the canton where they lived, and another who works in a restaurant in Chalatenango. There is the father, too, of course, who works as a security guard at a parking lot and who, when he sees his children and the mother of his children, pretends not to notice them.
Neither Juan Saúl’s grandmother, mother, or sisters, nor Saúl himself finished elementary school. He went through life not knowing how to read or write. Skinny and shy, and suffering from major speech problems —he pronounces “hielo” as “helo,” for example— Jaun Saúl found work as a bricklayer. He helped build the regal highway that leads to Surf City —the flashiest jewel on El Salvador’s tourism crown— and, together with his sister Maybelin, was the breadwinner for their household, which included his mother and nephew.
On October 31, 2022, Halloween day, the National Civil Police raided Juan’s house in the early hours of the morning while he was sleeping in his hammock. Without explanation, they took him outside, barefoot and shirtless, and put him in a patrol car. The following day, Noticiero El Salvador, an organ of the state propaganda system, reported that 72 people had been arrested that night. The paper claimed that all of the accused were members of the 18th Street gang and had been apprehended thanks to the government’s anonymous tip line. In the story, an anonymous policeman boasts: “With this response, we are providing peace of mind to the population, which little by little continues to gain confidence in its institutions.” Juan Saúl is pictured in handcuffs, his head hung in despair as police load him into a patrol pick-up.
When he was arrested, Juan Saúl was a 30-year-old man with dark brown skin and a strong back whose only complaint was a slight pain in his right ear.
He spent three days in jail at the police station in Conchalío, in the port municipality of La Libertad, before he was transferred to Ilopango Prison. On Facebook, Maybelin found a man, last name Maravilla, who claimed to be a lawyer and offered to assume the initial work of preparing Saúl’s defense, for a fee of $150 — a fortune. Maybelin sold some shoes; Ana sold 35 chicks she had raised, a blue barrel the family used to store water, and Juan Saúl’s pair of work boots, which she had just finished paying off in installments. They met Maravilla on a street in Puerto de La Libertad and gave him the money. That was the first and last time they saw him. He stopped answering their calls and they never found him again on Facebook.
The boss at the construction site where Juan Saúl used to work told them that he couldn’t give them his outstanding wages, nor his Christmas bonus, because Saúl’s signature was required for payroll and, well… that was impossible.
Maybelin —at first alone, then later with the help of some relatives— assumed the burden of providing the packages of food, hygiene products, and clothing that the prison system requires that families purchase and deliver to their incarcerated loved ones. In December, just days before Christmas, Ilopango Prison announced that it would offer a “Christmas combo” chicken dinner on December 24, available to those who could afford it. The cost was $50, a price the family paid, consoling themselves by imagining Juan Saúl eating a piece of chicken as a stand-in for spending Christmas with family.
Later, when they went to drop off a package at Ilopango Prison, the guards told them that Jaun Saúl had been transferred to Izalco Prison. Then, after a few months, they were told that he had been transferred to Mariona Prison. His family knew as much about him as one knows about a letter dropped in the mail. Three months passed, then five, seven, nine, and eleven — while around Juan Saúl a solid tomb grew, encasing him in silence.
* * *
Eva was 22 years old and her second pregnancy had blessed her with a baby boy. A month and a half after the birth, the child died. According to Eva, her baby died from ojo, a kind of evil spell that kills children when a dark and resentful spirit wishes evil upon their parents, or when someone with a “lofty” gaze looks at the child without touching it. The autopsy, on the other hand, said the baby had died of severe dehydration. Eva lived with her boyfriend in a little house in a rural canton whose name —like Eva’s real name— will not appear in this story.
She became overwhelmed by depression. Sadness crept, malignantly, into her heart, which began to beat wildly, madly. Until, in October 2023, Eva found herself in the emergency room at Rosales Hospital, where the doctors admitted her with high blood pressure and assigned her a bed in a room that she shared with five other people.
Next to her bed was the young man. “He was scrawny, his eyes looked glassy, and they had him chained to the bed all day,” Eva recalls. He was like a wounded animal, sullen and silent, handcuffed to the bed by his left ankle. “Every day at six in the morning the guard would come to uncuff him so he could go to the bathroom, and then they’d chain him back to the bed again. At noon they’d ask him again if he needed to go to the bathroom, then the guard wouldn’t come back again until the next day.”
From the depths of her sadness, Eva got up from her bed and approached him: “Hola, have you been inside for a while?” Juan Saúl told her that he had been in prison for almost a year. “I’m not going to eat my food, I haven’t even touched it, do you want it?” she offered. Juan Saúl threw himself at the plate, devouring it. They spoke on the sly, taking advantage of the long stretches when the guard was out of the room. “When the guard was there, he wouldn’t let anyone talk to him,” Eva explained. And so, by fate or happenstance, these two wounded souls, both victims of misfortune, became friends. It was hard for Juan to speak, so Eva did most of the talking: she told him her story, bought him fruit, gave him some of her perfume.
Until one day, he finally worked up the courage: he asked her to send a message to the only phone number he had memorized, his cousin Payo’s. Payo answered and gave Eva Maybelin’s number. And that was how, one year after his arrest, Juan Saúl was finally able to hear the voices of his family.
Eva was the only channel through which Ana and Maybelin could find news about Juan Saúl, and so they grew close. The man and his despair became Eva’s project, and she became more daring: her next step was to take some pictures of him and send them to his family: Juan Saúl, skinny and angular like the branch of guava tree, dressed in white and always chained to the bed. His right ear covered in gauze.
The next step was a bit riskier: making a video call. Juan refused, fearing the punishment he would suffer if the guard caught him with a phone in his hand, greeting his mother. But Eva had it all figured out: “I told him: I’ll stand watch. Since I could walk, I was going to be the lookout in the hallway, to see if the guard was coming.” Ana and Maybelin were glued to the screen for a few fleeting minutes, when they noticed something strange about Juan Saúl’s face: “It looked like one of his eyes was going sideways. ‘Look at me,’ I’d say, and he would cover his face with his arm,” Maybelin recalls.
Sometimes, Eva would notice him stiffening his face and gritting his teeth: “Sometimes,” Eva remembers, “you could see it on his face. I’d ask him, ‘Is something wrong?’ ‘Yeah,’ he’d say, ‘I can’t stand the pain.’” And then he would push his ear against the pillow, trying, perhaps, to find brief respite from the torment.
Through Eva, Juan Saúl’s family learned that this was the third hospital that Juan Saúl had been admitted to: he had already been to Zacamil and Saldaña hospitals, without any authority thinking it important to tell his family anything. This was too much for Ana. She decided to take a risk, and started planning a daring, ninja-like act: she would go to the hospital, drift in unnoticed, like the wind, find her way to Saúl’s room, and at exactly the right moment, and with Eva’s collusion as lookout, she would approach her son’s bed.
“I asked God to protect us,” Ana recalls, before launching into the story of her mission. She succeeded in entering the hospital and navigating the corridors undetected, invisible as a ghost. Then, at Eva’s sign, she materialized at the boy’s bedside. “I was shocked to see his eyes had changed so much. How is it that he could recognize me and I couldn’t recognize him? It was too much for my heart to take. It was torture.”
Juan Saúl was afraid that the guard would come in at any moment and catch his mother in the act of speaking with the man whom she had given birth to some 31 years ago. He managed to say, frightened: “Mom, don’t let them see you, if the guard comes in, go over there.” Who knows what terrible abyss of experience made Juan Saúl fear for his mother, or what kind of torments he imagined her suffering — in any case, it was his love for her that made him afraid.
“I watched him throw up something yellow. He was just vomiting and vomiting. I got him a Gatorade and put some in his mouth. ‘I’m going to leave you here, papito, with all the pain in my soul,’ I told him. And then I left.” It was only a few seconds, just a few, then Ana was gone again like the wind. Like a ghost.
A few days later, Rosales Hospital discharged Juan Saúl. A guard unchained him from the bed and Eva watched him leave, unable to say goodbye, still pretending not to know him. A few days later, she was discharged from the hospital, too, and returned home where her own emptiness awaited her. “I don’t have any children now. All the ones I had have died,” she said, her child-like face round and sad. She never lost touch with Ana and Maybelin.
Five months after Eva met Juan Saúl, the Police came to her house at night and took her partner, accusing him of being a gang member.
* * *
It was obvious that something was wrong, that something malignant was spreading inside Juan Saúl’s body, so his sister again insisted on hiring a lawyer. “Ay, Maybelin, you saw what happened to us with the other one,” Ana remembers telling her. But Maybelin, we should note, is an especially stubborn and fierce person. So they went back to searching for a lawyer in the only place they knew to find one: social media. They looked on lawyer Facebook, lawyer YouTube, and lawyer TikTok, until they finally decided on one.
Their urgent need to seek a lawyer was also fueled by something they saw on social media: after he was discharged from Rosales Hospital, Juan Saúl disappeared once more into the black hole of the prison system, for months, until one day, Ana thought she saw him on TikTok.
It turns out that, given the near total lack of information from inside the prisons, everyday Salvadorans have created anonymous accounts where they upload photos or videos of inmates admitted to public hospitals. When one of these benevolent souls sees a prisoner in a hospital, they secretly take pictures of him and upload the images to TikTok, in the hopes that some family member will recognize him. Juan Saúl’s family found two such photos: In the first, Saúl is sitting on a bed in Rosales Hospital, shirtless. It’s a bad photo, taken from far away, but you can make out the image: a living skeleton, nothing but a rib cage and two collar bones. His head hanging down. The second photo was taken at Saldaña Hospital. Saúl is unrecognizable: a bald head with sad eyes, a skeleton dressed in white, a small, expressionless mouth, bones curled up in a wheelchair, to which he is chained by his left foot. In both photos, he is alone.
When Maybelin went to Mariona Prison to drop off some packages, the guards told her there was nothing new to report about her brother. But as mentioned, Maybelin is fierce, so she showed them the photos on her phone: “Who is this person, then?” she asked. “Why are you telling me that he’s here if he’s in the hospital? How can your hearts be so cold?” The guards told her, in so many words, to stop being a nuisance and leave.
* * *
The public defender assigned to Juan Saúl’s case —if, in fact, one was ever assigned— never made contact with the family and was never identified by name. But in a twist to an otherwise dark story, and to everyone’s pleasant surprise, the new private attorney they found in the tangled weeds of social media turned out to be a real lawyer, of the sort that does real lawyerly things: He compiled documents to prove that Juan Saúl had no criminal record of any kind and had worked as a bricklayer on public works projects, and he managed to obtain records of his stay at Rosales Hospital (according to the family, both the Zacamil and Saldaña hospitals refused to hand over records) and, armed with the documents he had compiled, the lawyer argued before a judge that the boy was not a danger, that there was no chance he would flee if released, and that he was seriously ill. On September 13, 2024, the court issued an order granting Juan Saúl conditional release and —17 days later— an official at the Bureau of Prisons decided that it was time to comply with the court’s ruling.
When Juan Saúl’s cousin Payo entered Quezaltepeque Prison with his Uber driver, he didn’t have much hope: this was the same prison that had called him weeks earlier, asking him to deliver ear drops and adult diapers. Payo thought that the bad sign was the adult diapers.
But the creature Payo found inside the prison was no longer his cousin. He did not find his cousin’s eyes or his skull or his muscles or his spirit: Juan Saúl was reduced to a collection of bones, held together by tight skin disfigured by scabies. Payo refused to carry him to the car. He was afraid he would break him. It was the driver who lifted Juan Saúl in his arms and placed him in the back seat, like a baby bird, featherless and fallen from its nest, that dies when touched. Which is why, after exiting the prison, Payo tried to warn Ana and Maybelin that the man they would find in the car was only what remained of Juan Saúl after two years in El Salvador’s prisons.
It was hard for him to sit still for long periods. As the bandage was removed from his ear, a gush of purulent fluid spilled onto his sister’s lap. His deformed head, swollen on the right side, could barely be supported by his neck. Talking was painful, eating was painful. Standing was impossible. This was his state when they arrived home to their tin shack, with a dirt floor, no water, and a half-finished outhouse. Juan Saúl managed to tell them that, in Mariona Prison, a guard had abused him by bending his hand, and that it still hurt a lot; he managed to say that in Quezaltepeque Prison they forced him to take a pill that made him sleep, that they barely fed him, that he saw people die. He managed to say that he never knew anything about any $50 “Christmas combo.”
On the third day he had to go to the courthouse to sign some documents. He was lifted from the vehicle that his family had hired, placed in a wheelchair, and rolled into the courthouse to mark his fingerprint on a piece of paper. Ana remembers the shocked look on the court employees’ faces.
Despite his mother’s care and Maybelin’s sacrifice, Juan Saúl did not get better, did not eat, did not stop having foul-smelling secretions from his ear, did not stop vomiting yellow liquid. The family took him to San Rafael Hospital where he was given an IV and three blister packs of Amoxicillin and sent home. But he did not get better, so after a few days, they took him back, this time to Rosales Hospital: They arrived at the emergency room at eight in the morning, he was first seen at three in the afternoon, and at ten that night, the hospital decided they didn’t have room to treat him and referred him to El Salvador Hospital. Though the attention there was expeditious, Juan Saúl had already lost his patience: “If they’re going to leave me here, they should have just left me in prison. I can’t stand hospitals anymore, all they’re going to do is poke and prod at me,” and he begged his family to bring him back to the shack they called home.
Before returning Juan Saúl to the care of his mother, the doctors at El Salvador Hospital wrote up his diagnosis, noting that the patient had been in prison for two years. The report also reads: “Eyes: PERRLA [pupils equal, round, and reactive to light], purulent discharge from the right eye. Ear: right retroarticular mass, erythematous, painful on palpation, with an orifice of approximately 5 millimeters in diameter with a yellowish, non-fetid discharge. Mouth: difficulty in mandibular opening due to swelling.” The physicians also reported: “Acute external otitis externa, severe malnutrition, acute renal disease... and conjunctivitis.” The report specifies that Juan Saúl was diagnosed with cancer in February 2024, seven months before his release. It also says that at the time he was reviewed by the doctors at that hospital he was already “beyond surgical and oncological intervention.” A person who works at that hospital and had access to the case explained that the cancer that had originated in his right ear had spread to his throat and had also entered the brain, to the extent that it was no longer operable.
One day, Juan was complaining of stomach pain. Ana remembers that day: “His stomach was really hurting, so I went to buy him some medicine to help him throw up, which cost me almost 10 dollars. He wanted to take it, but how could he need it if he’d gone without food for such a long time? When he said, ‘Ay, mamá, it hurts!’ I told him, ‘Now I’m gonna rub your shins, papito,’ because he had a pain in his shin bones that wouldn’t go away, and his legs were so cold, like a bag of ice, freezing cold. ‘I can’t stand the pain anymore,’ he kept saying. Shin pain like that is so horrible, I know because I’ve had it. He felt like he was cramping up, and I think that it was all too much, that it had gone to his heart. Because the pain was so terrible. He was sweating from his feet. I went out, at dawn, to cut some chichinguaste and to collect some chichipince, oregano, and another plant they call mala madre, which they say is good for cancer. I put the herbs on to boil and brought the pot a little closer to him, so the steam would cover him. It gave him a little relief, the steam getting into his pores and helping him get warm. But then his cold sweat would come back. It was like he was in a refrigerator! When I touched his hands, it was like touching ice water. It was like freezing water was coming out of his hands. His tendons were too tight and he couldn’t stretch his legs, so I told him: ‘Papito, I’m going to give you a massage.’ But I couldn’t stretch them out. He tried to get up and go to the bathroom, but he collapsed.”
Ana called her son-in-law, Maybelin’s partner: “‘Sigfredo, come and see.’ When he saw him, he said, ‘Saúl, don’t leave us,’ and got down on his knees to recite a psalm, but Saúl was already looking up, his eyes rolled back in his head. Maybelin had already called for a car, but he was already was frozen, his body had lost all its warmth, and I yelled at him: ‘Saul! Saul!’ but his jaw was already stiff, and I felt for a pulse and there was nothing.”
When they got to El Salvador Hospital, 13 days after Juan Saúl’s release from Quezaltepeque Prison, at 10:30 p.m., the doctors informed Ana that her son was dead.
The postmortem issued by the medical examiner and signed by Dr. Milagro de los Ángeles Alvarado de Martínez, license number 18289, identified the cause of death as “Pulmonary edema,” a condition caused by other medical complications that, in short, involves a flooding of the lungs — it is the same, in other words, as saying that he died because he stopped breathing. According to the Salvadoran human rights and legal aid organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, pulmonary edema is listed as the cause of death on 90 percent of all autopsy reports issued for inmates who die after being detained under the state of exception.
*Translated by Max Granger
