The protagonist of this story stared at the floor of the police station without showing the slightest reaction. He barely raised his head to ask his mother, in signs, something that she interpreted as: “Why can’t I go home?” The protagonist of this story experienced something terrifying on June 22, 2023, when at the beginning of his workday he was arrested by the state of emergency and accused of being a gang member. He would be imprisoned for nine months in the Izalco prison, a place where men are known to enter and emerge as skeletons, only to die days later. We will call the protagonist of this story David; his family fears reprisals if he truly identifies himself. Though it was David who saw emaciated men collapse behind prison bars, this story will be told by his parents, because he was born 34 years ago with several disabilities: he is deaf, he is mute. And, due to those circumstances and his impoverished upbringing, he cannot read or write.
“He doesn’t understand anything said to him. He says yes to everything, even if he doesn’t know what it is. When they tell him something, he wonders what it actually is,” says his father, a man with wrinkled skin and white hair who, up until a few years ago, worked as a bricklayer. He gave up the job since losing mobility from the waist down. Now, he needs a cane to stand and walks slowly. “We understand him because when he is hungry he does this,” he explains, drawing with his wrinkled hands a circle to indicate a tortilla. Then, he crosses his index fingers and explains that this means his son wants to eat fish. “It is very hard to understand him,” he confesses.
On June 22, 2023, David left his house at 6:30 in the morning. Half an hour later he began his shift as a garbage collector for a town in the northern part of La Libertad. Then, without further explanation, the police arrested him for illegal association. His mother agreed to tell the story on the condition that her son would not be photographed or his identity revealed. She does not want to experience the bullying and merciless mockery that her family has received since the news about David, the father of a five-year-old girl, was spread on social media.
In addition to the bullying from anonymous accounts, his mother fears that the police will arrest another member of her family under the state of emergency. This fear is based on the arrest of David, a man who had a formal job, a work card that identified him as a person with a disability, and no criminal record or ties to any gang, according to police records and those of the Bureau of Prisons.
* * *
To get to David’s neighborhood, you must follow a wide gravel road surrounded by dusty bushes. The rural neighborhood has a grid of dirt roads and gutters through which soapy water runs. There are scattered houses, shacks, empty lots, and an evangelical church. In front of the church is a wall that was once painted with the tattooed style of Mara Salvatrucha-13, or MS-13, but now overlaid with a message in white letters on a blue background: “Jesus Christ saves, receive him today.”
The neighborhood was once a stronghold for the gang, as evidenced by various wall paintings and eight documents from police intelligence stating that in this neighborhood and surrounding subdivisions “subjects move around in an armed group and are active members of the criminal structure MS-13.”
Robberies, assassinations, and disappearances have occurred in the neighborhood. On Apr. 19, 2022, at the beginning of the state of emergency, the 28-year-old Eliseo Gutiérrez disappeared. He had gone out to pick up a motorcycle and never returned home, according to documents obtained through the Guacamaya Leaks, a trove that includes 10 million emails from the police and 250,000 more from armed forces. The police documents detail that, between April 7 and May 10, 2022, as a result of house searches, 28 people in that neighborhood and surrounding subdivisions were taken in by police.
“I would say that what Nayib [Bukele] is doing is good. It’s good. We’re thankful because there were times we couldn’t go out, or when someone did leave their home they would never return. But now, you go out with confidence,” David’s mother answers when asked what she thinks of the state of emergency. She then qualifies this opinion because the government also inexplicably took away a person she loves and the economic support of her family: her son.
* * *
The first to receive the notice of David’s arrest was his father. The rest of the family tried to tone down the situation for his mother because she is already on medication for high blood pressure, and her doctor has recommended that she avoid stressful situations. “Don’t worry, don’t be upset,” her husband tried to console her, but she ran desperately to the police station where her son had just been arrested.
“My other son didn’t want to tell me, because I have a heart condition. He said to me, ‘Give me to my dad,’ and they told him that they had arrested him… Dear God, what happened, my dear? He had just left. I didn’t even make breakfast, I didn’t take off my nightgown, I was running with my nightgown and everything. And my son told me: ‘Get changed.’ I went back and put my clothes on. I was running, I was praying. I was asking God to give me strength, but I felt like I was drowning, I felt like I was falling. I felt horrible,” the mother recalls.
When she arrived at the police station, David was sitting on a bench, his head down, confused. His mother remembers the brief conversation she had with one of the police officers. The reasons for the arrest seemed illogical to her.
“Excuse me, I’ve been told you’re holding my son here.”
“Look, ma’am, we are holding him for illicit association,” the officer responded.
She accepted that her son moved in a group because he could not work alone and he was always accompanied by three or four other people to collect the city’s garbage. She understood that this group was not illegal because the rest of the workers were free and her son was the only one detained. His mother also claimed that it was unlikely that her son was part of an illegal group because he cannot speak, does not have a cell phone, and cannot write. He also cannot hear. How would a man who has trouble communicating with his own family even communicate with an illegal group?
“He doesn’t have a cell phone, so how? He can’t talk. He can’t read. Sometimes, when they send me messages, I show him drawings of my sisters, my uncles, my whole family. I show him photos of the children,” she says.
As is the case with hundreds of other arrests under this regime, police did not explain what the man’s crime was, much less what evidence actually incriminated him. The family was only able to reconstruct what happened from his coworkers’ testimonies. When the garbage truck passed by the police station, David entered the police station and picked up two bags of trash. The officers told him to take the bags to the truck and return. He returned to the police station, but did not come out because he had been arrested. His mother begged in vain for his freedom.
“I felt bad and sat down on a chair and started crying. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘My son’s mistake is not being able to speak or hear. If my son could speak it would be different, because he could defend himself. What can he say to you? He can’t answer you because he can’t speak. I wish God would untie his tongue just so he could defend himself. As a mother it hurts me, it hurts me to see this injustice.’”
Faced with the mother’s pleas, the police made one concession: to buy breakfast for the detainee and allow his mother to enter the facilities to be by his side for a few moments. Mother and son sat on the same bench and there, for a few minutes, maternal caresses served to break a heavy silence.
David asked his mother in sign language if he was going to return home.
“I don't know,” she answered.
Through signs, David inquired what his daughter would eat.
“God will provide,” she said.
David asked, once again through signs, “Why are they going to take me away?”
“I don't know,” his mother answered again.
* * *
When David’s mother left her house to take the first package to the Izalco Prison, the streets were still dark. It was three in the morning on June 30, 2023, and her hope was to be by the prison when the first rays of the sun appeared. She wanted to avoid the long lines and deliver the package she had bought with 150 borrowed dollars. The effort was in vain. The guards told her that her son was no longer there.
She returned to San Salvador to search for David in Mariona Prison, but was told he was being held in Izalco. So she went back to Izalco, where she had been hours before. She recalls the torturous trip. It was raining. “I was walking through a big storm with a package on my head. I returned at eight at night, hungry. In the middle of the big storm I entered the station and told them: ‘I’m not leaving until you tell me where my son is. If possible, I will stay here all night long, because you are the one who took him away; I saw when you put him in the car.’ The officer started dialing and dialing [on a phone] until they told him that, yes, he was in Izalco.”
The Izalco Prison is a pit of horrors, according to testimonies of people who have been detained there: physical torture, general mistreatment, use of pepper spray, beatings that leave detainees on the verge of death. Everyday scenes consist of men licking the ground from hunger, rales of skeletal bodies, and bodies covered in scabies crying out for medical help. In the first two years of the state of emergency, Cristosal, a human rights organization, documented 261 deaths in prisons, the largest portion (77) occurring in Izalco. Seven of them died before reaching the Jorge Mazzini Hospital in Sonsonate. The medical examiner's office, Medicina Legal, took note of these bodies in ambulances and in the hospital parking lot.
“I saw on the news that people were dying, that they were being beaten, that they were going to the hospital,” says David’s mother, who feared that her son’s disabilities would be a double punishment for him. “What pained me was the fact that he is both deaf and mute. What if they asked him questions and he couldn’t defend himself? How was he going to defend himself?”
On top of the uncertainty about David's situation in prison, the family also faced an economic crisis: David paid the water and electricity bills and bought milk for his daughter; the mother sold tortillas and used the little profits to buy her husband’s medicine; the sick father also tried to help out in the face of hardship. “I can’t read. I used to work as a bricklayer, but half of my body has gone numb. Now I have a tiny plot of cornfield, and I plant some corn to eat. I’ve planted some beans in my garden to have a little food.”
David’s arrest complicated the dynamics of living in poverty. There was less money, but more expenses — the purchasing of packages to bring to the prison, for example. His mother borrowed $600 dollars from a cooperative in Apopa to cope with the difficult situation. “I borrowed money and I still owe them back. I borrowed money because his wife got worse. He [David] got worse. I cried a lot, but there is a divine God who will not let me lie. He told me: ‘Don’t cry, he will get out soon, he doesn’t owe them anything.’”
With the loan money, the mother obtained a police and prison clearance certificate to show that her son has no ties to gangs or criminal record. She then took these documents to public defenders and to El Salvador’s Judicial Center. She also brought copies to Socorro Jurídico Humanitario (SJH), a human rights organization that provided her legal advice and played a key part in resolving her son’s legal problems.
* * *
The dough for the tortillas had already been prepared, but David’s mother did not mind closing her business at noon on Mar. 7, 2024. It was the day she received a call from the Izalco prison informing her of her son’s release.
Judge number one of the First Court against Organized Crime in San Salvador ordered David’s “immediate release” on Jan. 30, 2024. The decision was the result of a document that public defenders presented to the judge that same day stating that “the conditions of the risk of flight have changed.” The judicial system’s decision to release David occurred eight days after Socorro Jurídico Humanitario publicly denounced this case as an arbitrary arrest.
However, for no legal reason, the Bureau of Prisons delayed 37 days to comply with the court order. The disregard of court orders follows a pattern of this institution’s behavior under the state of exception. This is why Socorro Jurídico Humanitario has reported the director of the Penitentiary Centers, Osiris Luna, and the director of Izalco Prison to the Attorney General’s Office for two crimes: arbitrary detention by authority and disobedience of a court order.
The family took a minibus and arrived at Izalco Prison at 5:30 p.m. David was in the prison foyer, sitting next to two guards. The mother rushed over to her son, followed by his father and daughter. They embraced one other and cried. “The girl threw herself at him and I saw how he cried. She hugged my husband, hugged him, and rubbed him. She raised her hands and thanked God that he was with us.”
David lost his job with the town. But since he is a charismatic figure in his community, it didn’t take long for a local businessman to hire him to do odd jobs. The legal process against him continues; every month he has to sign a control document at the court. When David and his mother have some free time, they converse in signs about what happened in prison.
The mother asks, through signs: “Did they hit you?”
“No,” he signs back.
“What happened in the prison?”
They took the chains off his hands and feet. There were many trays, they put the food on the trays and he and the agents distributed the food, but they didn’t hit him.
She asks, again with signs, “What did you see in the prison?”
Many died. Several inmates clung tightly to their cell bars. They would moan and fall to the floor. Their already-dead bodies were then taken outside. Many died there, but David doesn’t know why.
* * *
David is quite a shy person. He keeps a serious face and, according to his parents, locks himself in his room when visitors he doesn’t know come over. On Aug. 1, 2024, when I interviewed his parents, he wasn’t home, but at four in the afternoon he returned from work. The burly man crossed the yard and cracked a soft smile, only raising his right arm to greet us.
A little girl who was playing in the yard with a bag of snacks in hand ran towards him. David took her by the hand. The two crossed the yard and walked into one of the rooms in the house. “The one with the snacks is his little girl,” says his father. “He is a hard worker, if they call him at five in the morning, he leaves at that time. And here in the house he does anything; if I tell him: ‘wash my dishes,’ he washes them. I tell him to mop, I make signs to him, and he’ll sprinkle water and begin to mop,” adds the mother.
Due to his impoverished circumstances, David did not go to school to learn standard sign language. The parents communicate with their son through slow lip movements that simulate words and signs that refer to objects. The learning has been experimental; over 34 years of living together, there are still communication barriers that bring David to the brink of anger and rage. “There are things that I do not understand well, things that I cannot understand. There are times when he tries to say angrily: Papi...! That means that he is not going to talk to me anymore, since I cannot understand him.” The parents have learned that the attempt to articulate the word “papi” means that David is either angry or hungry.
* * *
David’s mother is happy that her son has regained his freedom, even if he still has problems that stem from his arrest. “If I don’t have money to go to court, I’ll borrow five dollars for the ticket. I still owe money from the 600 dollars I borrowed, but I pay it off little by little from the tortillas I sell. I save two dollars here, two dollars there, and so on. And he [David], from what he earns, gives me enough to buy sugar, beans, and milk for his daughter and father.”
Despite suffering from the arbitrary actions of the regime, David’s mother supports the continuation of their current policy, but with certain nuances. “It’s good that they do it, but only for those who deserve it. If I harmed you, you wouldn’t want me to be free. But if I did nothing to you or you did nothing to me, I’d be hurt if they took you away for something you didn’t do, just for fun.”
She says that despite all the deep pain she has felt and all the tears she has shed, she does not feel anger or desire for revenge against the police who arrested her son. “May God take care of everything. They will pay for what they have done to him. If they do not pay, a family member of theirs will pay, sooner or later. God will not sit around and do nothing.”
*Translated by James Langan
