José, 12 years old; Sara, 15; and their grandmother Sara, 53, joined “the march for a Christmas without innocent prisoners, victims of the state of exception, and political persecution,” organized by the Committee of Family Members of Victims of the State of Exception in Bajo Lempa prior to International Human Rights Day, held every December 10. Around 50 families joined the march.
As the family walked along the highway from Monseñor Romero Airport to San Salvador, they held up a sign: “Mr. President Nayib Bukele, we ask that you free José Roger, who has been detained unjustly. He has no priors.” They carried documents demonstrating that José had no record of committing any crime or belonging to any gang.
In 2020, Sara Rivas suffered a heart attack that left her hospitalized, forcing her son José Roger to move back to El Salvador to take care of her after spending 12 years in the United States. He returned to El Rosario, the neighborhood in La Paz where he was born, and began work as a taxi driver after buying a car with his savings from his time living in New York. He also attended to his mother until her recovery and helped her set up a small chicken coop in order to have another source of income.
It was not long until gang members began demanding that he pay $10 dollars a day in extortion fees. “My son was worried sick that they would do something to us if he didn’t pay,” says Sara. Even during the pandemic, some transportation unions in El Salvador reported that they were still being extorted by gangs, especially outside of the capital, San Salvador.
José Sr. paid the extortion for a year and a half, even after the state of exception was decreed in March 2022. When the payments became unsustainable, they decided to take out a loan by mortgaging Sara’s home. The bank lent them $8,500 that was used for half the payment to a coyote to take José back to the United States. Upon his arrival, he was expected to work to pay it all off and work to support his mother and two children.
On June 6, 2023, José left his family for the second time. He traveled for a month and a half before making it to San Antonio, Texas. But he was detained and soon deported.
Sara still remembers the fear she felt the morning of Aug. 30, 2023, almost two months after her son left the country, when she received a phone call from an unknown number: “We had spoken a few days ago and we were happy that he had managed to cross, but when the phone rang I thought something bad had happened, and immediately thought of my son.” José was on the other end: “Mom, they deported me.” He explained that he was calling from the phone of a police officer; he had been detained under state-of-exception rules and would be taken to the prison in Ciudad Barrios. The call was cut short without further explanation.
Since then, Sara has had to pay $200 every month to repay the loan. The chicken coop provides $100 that she needs to spend on a monthly prison care package paid for by Salvadoran families.
The march, scheduled to last two days, will end in front of Casa Presidencial with a petition for the government to allow family visits and release innocents detained under the state of exception, now in its thirty-third month. According to official reports, 82,000 people have been detained, thousands of them without a criminal record, like José Roger Rivas.
In this span, organizations like Socorro Jurídico Humanitario have recorded at least 340 in-custody deaths. El Faro has gathered dozens of testimonies of systematic torture of detainees and the uncertainty of relatives with no idea where their family members are being held.
