In April 2022, a woman received a WhatsApp message explaining the terms to visit a relative detained in Mariona Prison: “Be discreet. Don't comment on social media or to anyone because we’re putting ourselves at risk.” Next, she was told that the rates range from $150 to $500, for 25 minutes or for an hour-long conjugal visit. “This is how we can help,” they wrote. This is one of seven cases of prison corruption that El Faro has documented, including the payment for visitation of hundreds of dollars and the bartering of construction materials or office goods; and, for thousands of dollars, the admission to a private hospital of inmates who are not ill.
El Faro received the testimony and evidence of two businesswomen: Rosa, whose family paid $9,000 to visit two sons detained in Mariona six times at the end of 2022; and Mary, who paid $1,200 to exchange four letters with her husband from Quezaltepeque Prison between August and October 2023. The two women asked not to reveal their full names for fear of being captured under the state of exception, and of reprisals from involved officials. This newspaper also interviewed an inmate from Mariona who paid more than $30,000 to be admitted to a private hospital, even though he did not suffer from any illness. The interview was conducted while he was in hospital, before he returned to prison.
Four other cases of prison corruption were documented with information provided by the Unit for the Defense of Community and Human Rights in El Salvador, or UNIDEHC, an organization that advises victims of human rights violations and has evidence of “donations” to Cutumay Camones Prison, in Santa Ana, in exchange for visits.
In the cases documented by El Faro, corruption networks embedded in the prison system pocketed $48,620 dollars.
This scheme compounds a gaping economic reality for affected families: Mass arrests in three years have slammed the poorest in El Salvador, where seven out of ten adults work in the informal economy and families subsist on dollars a day — some below minimum wage, which ranges from $150 to $365 a month. The mass detentions also led to the ballooning of a cottage industry outside prison gates of care packets with food, clothing, and hygiene products that, combined with travel, food, and other delivery expenses, can cost up to $200.
The corruption network takes advantage of the desperation of family members who have no other legal way of visiting their relatives. These families often cut back meals in an effort to meet their relatives’ basic needs in prison. In some cases, before visiting, they did not even know if they were alive or if they were receiving the care packages. What happens in the regime’s prisons is so clandestine that there is no public information, not even on the distribution of inmates. All requests for information are rejected.
What little is gleaned —testimonies denouncing torture and death inside the prisons— is owed to the choice few who are released and tell what they saw.
On March 24, El Faro called the director of communications at the Prison Bureau and asked him in writing, via an electronic messaging application, for an official interview to talk about the irregular prison visitations, but received no response. In the last three years, silence has been the government’s strategy in the face of corruption allegations.
Top-down prison corruption
Three weeks after Bukele took office in his first term in June 2019, he ordered via Twitter that the directors of all prisons should suspend visits to inmates indefinitely, due to the increase in homicides. El Faro noted at the time that at least four prison surveillance judges did not endorse this measure. However, with the arrival of Covid-19, visits were suspended.
Before the state of exception, which was instated in late March 2022, El Salvador’s 22 prisons had a capacity for 27,000 inmates but registered 37,000. By March 2024, the imprisoned population had risen to approximately 109,000, according to the World Prisons Brief (WPB). This positioned El Salvador as the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 1,659 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants.
Under the state of exception, which has suspended fundamental constitutional and procedural rights, more than 87,000 people have been detained. The monitor Socorro Jurídico Humanitario (SJH) has documented 375 deaths inside prisons. The Attorney General’s Office closed 142 of these cases and has not ruled on the rest.
Prison corruption reaches the top brass, according to official investigations. Prosecutors discovered in 2023, through wiretaps, that Prison Bureau employees facilitated the transfer of two defendants accused of drug trafficking from Mariona to the Baptist Hospital, despite the fact that they did not register any ailments. Previous investigations pointed to Director of Prisons Osiris Luna and his mother in a scheme to syphon pandemic-relief food for needy families. Prosecutors also concluded that Luna spent $278,000 on phantom job posts and that ten supervisors were paid excessive salaries in exchange for giving Luna money.
Under Luna’s tenure, Salvadoran prisons were the scene of the Bukele administration’s covert gang negotiations. In July 2021, the U.S. State Department revoked his visa in its “Engel List” sanctions. Then, in December of the same year, the Treasury Department applied the Magnitsky Act to Luna, blocking all assets and property he may have had in the United States and prohibiting U.S. persons or companies from any transactions with him. In November 2021, an MS-13 leader, Élmer Canales, alias “Crook”, who was detained in 2023 in Mexico and extradited to the United States, was also secretly and illegally released from prison.
A web of intermediaries
In mid-2023, an inmate admitted to Baptist Hospital in San Salvador told El Faro that he paid more than $30,000 to go out for four days and four nights to see his family and to review his defense strategy with his lawyers, since to date he still has not been sentenced. El Faro recorded an hour-long interview with the prisoner, photographed him, and obtained a copy of his release letter issued by Ricardo Salguero Ventura, the former warden of Mariona. The private hospital parking lot was guarded by two officers with logos of the Bureau of Prisons.
The prisoner is a well-known figure in the country's political life and asked, to avoid reprisals from the prison, that no details be published of the date and the exact amounts he paid for his admission to the hospital. “If you find out that I have died, publish everything, even the audio and all the names,” said the source. “I don't need surgery, this [paying to be admitted] is more to see my family and my lawyers. They [the guards and prison authorities] suffocate you, they deny you visits... It even seems like they do a socioeconomic study on you,” he said, referring to the suspicion that the amounts of money needed to leave or receive visits or calls depend on the profile that the guards make of those incarcerated in their facilities.
The cases documented by El Faro depict a network that operates via intermediaries: either private lawyers or former prisoners who have contact with guards, allowing them to approach higher-ranking prison authorities. This makes possible the visitation and exchange of information. Other victims of the scheme receive a phone number from an intermediary who works in the shops selling care packages outside prison, or through other relatives of detainees.
Among the cases documented by UNIDEHC, the family of businessman Fidel Antonio Zavala Pérez bought $450 worth of commonplace office supplies and skin creams and gifted them to Cutumay Camones Prison authorities, according to Ivania Cruz, a lawyer for UNIDEHC. This forced barter allowed Zavala’s mother to visit her son for 20 minutes in Cutumay Camones around July 2022, while Zavala was detained on charges of fraud that were later dismissed.
According to Cruz, Cutumay Camones officials proposed that Zavala address a letter to prison technical staff offering a donation. Next, a woman calling herself a social worker called his family to state that their son had requested a donation. The Zavala family photographed the boxes they took to prison. “When [the mother] delivered them, she said: I won’t hand anything over unless you let me see my son. Her insistence meant that she was able to speak to Fidel,” Cruz explained. Shortly after Zavala’s release, he denounced the donation as “government extortion.”
“Fidel’s case is a somewhat small amount, but we at UNIDEHC have documented other cases of how they operate. The warden is aware of these donations, because there are cameras and the access of these people is recorded,” Cruz added.
While in prison for 13 months, Zavala says he witnessed first-hand beatings and, as an assistant to guards during head counts, kept track of those who died in custody. After his conditional release in mid-2024, Zavala became a human rights activist and spokesperson for UNIDEHC, which represented him in his fraud case and obtained his release. He filed a criminal suit against Director of Prisons Luna and warden of Cutumay Camones for bribery —citing the office supplies and creams as “blackmail” for visitation— as well as torture, coercion, arbitrary acts, and breach of duty. He was re-arrested in February. His mother filed for habeas corpus on March 27, citing fear for his life.
The cases of prison corruption and other complex UNIDEHC investigations involving the ruling party, such as the bankruptcy of the credit cooperative Cosavi, formerly run by a party financier, have been left in limbo since prosecutors raided the organization’s offices on Feb. 25, 2025 and the homes of lawyers Rudy Joya and Ivania Cruz were raided while they were in Spain to speak about human rights violations under the state of exception. Zavala was arrested at their headquarters. Prosecutors accuse them of alleged irregular land sales at the La Floresta estate in San Juan Opico, where they were advising poor families fighting off eviction.
Cruz believes La Floresta was a pretext to seize information about their investigations: “For me, the La Floresta case is about criminalizing community leaders. With Fidel it’s political revenge, because he tested the system and exposed them through his accusation. We are one of the few organizations that dared to directly denounce Bukele's officials,” she says. The documents were not seized because they were kept elsewhere.
Now, Zavala’s lawyers are asking the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to grant him precautionary measures as a witness and victim of torture and corruption. “He did something that no one had ever done: He challenged the system when he proposed a confrontation to identify the guards. These characteristics make Fidel’s capture very different from all the others, and put his life at high risk,” says Cruz.
Another of the “donations” documented by UNIDEHC occurred in late 2022. The relatives of three former councillors of the Zacatecoluca Municipal Council got a call from Cutumay Camones. The men had been detained in April 2021, one year before the state of exception, and had since not communicated with their families while awaiting trial for alleged public contracting irregularities. Prison officials offered a one-hour visit in exchange for materials to build a prison cell. The officials claimed that the councillors had requested the goods, valued at $1,500, without taking into account the cost to rent a truck to transport the materials. When one councillor’s wife asked for proof, she received a photo of a note with her husband’s signature.
UNIDEHC did not file a criminal complaint because the relatives were afraid of the prison officials, especially given that their relatives were still detained.
The going rates at Mariona
Businesswoman Rosa, whose full name is withheld at her request to avoid government reprisals, says that desperation to see her two sons in Mariona Prison, seven months into the state of exception, led her to place her trust in a lawyer promising access, who identified herself as Maritza Beatriz Ayala Larrama. Rosa does not fully understand how the judicial process works, nor does she know the names of the courts or have copies of related documents. Her formal education ended in fourth grade, having learned to read and write. She spent years as a street vendor until she got a formal job as a merchant.
Rosa’s two sons and husband were captured between August and October 2022, accused of illicit association under state-of-exception rules. Whereas the sons remain in Mariona, the husband is held in Izalco Prison in Sonsonate. El Faro confirmed that none of them have a criminal record for gang-related activities.
On a Wednesday in October 2022, at 11:00 in the morning, Rosa arrived at the main gate of Mariona. She knocked and a guard looked out of a small window. Rosa told him she had come to visit her children. After waiting half an hour, they let her in. She walked up a small slope to the checkpoint, where another officer checked the names of the detainees. No one asked any questions. “They already knew what they were going to do,” Rosa said. Two officers directed her to the “visitors’ room,” which she remembers painted white, where another man was visiting an inmate. A guard stood watching the two other men sitting on white plastic chairs around a table. There were no panels or bars to prevent physical contact. Rosa settled into an empty chair and saw a nearby auto repair shop.
A guard then appeared with her children, handcuffed and dressed in white shirts and shorts. “We hugged and talked a little. They told me they were fine,” Rosa said. After an hour, the guard told her the visit was over. That was the last time Rosa saw her children. Her daughters-in-law, on the other hand, visited them five more times. Rosa has no videos, photos, or recordings of that visit, as she was forbidden to bring a cell phone.
El Faro reviewed a series of photographs taken in different sectors of Mariona, in early March 2025, and spoke off-the-record with a source who regularly enters the prison, but asked for anonymity as he could lose his job. The photos and testimony reinforce Rosa’s account. The source explained that the gate through which she entered is the same one used by the relatives of the inmates to leave food packages, as well as the entrance to ward seven. In the photographs is the “visitors’ room” in question, a small sign announcing “waiting room”. In another image is the repair shop which, per the source, repairs government vehicles.
Rosa paid $10,000 for her relatives’ defense. She says the lawyer Ayala asked her for another $9,000 for six visits. She met Ayala in a restaurant in February 2023 to demand a refund for the failed defense, as there had been no result. The lawyer refused, saying she had done her job.
Rosa claims that the woman who identified herself as Ayala’s intermediary, Ángela Nohemy Bardi, was the one who collected the money. El Faro obtained a video from November 2022 of Bardi in a building owned by Rosa, counting banknotes corresponding to a second payment of more than $5,000, for the defense of her husband and children. By then, Rosa claims that she had already paid Bardi $6,000 for four visits to Mariona. In October 2024, prosecutors reported the arrest of ten people involved in real estate fraud. Bardi was among those arrested.
Rosa sent Ayala a WhatsApp message, but it was not received. She also tried to file a complaint, but a lawyer advised her not to. “The lawyer told me that if I did anything that woman could have me imprisoned because she has contacts,” the woman explained. El Faro tried to contact the lawyer Ayala through the telephone number that Rosa provided, but the calls were diverted to voicemail, and the WhatsApp messages were not delivered. Reporters also tried to contact her through two other cell numbers, one of which did not have WhatsApp. Her office was called three times, but no one answered.
Rosa’s children and husband are still in prison. She does not even know if they are alive. The family has decided not to resort to private defenders for fear of being scammed. Two months ago, they sought out the lawyers of the Public Defender’s Office (PGR), but the process is slow. Rosa explained that, in early March, they had the first meeting to locate the files. Then, in order to find out about her husband’s state of health, she was sent to the Human Rights Ombudsman, which in turn referred them to the Institute of Legal Medicine, or coroner, to verify whether he was still alive. “We are waiting for answers,” she says.
Toning down the charges
Rosa is not the only one who paid $1,500 for a visit to Mariona. The wife of a moneylender captured on Sep. 3, 2022, in a municipality south of San Salvador, paid the same amount to visit her relative. This amount included the payment of an administrative procedure to minimize the detainee’s alleged links with the Mara Salvatrucha-13 in Mariona’s internal records.
Officially, the police captured the man for managing the gang’s extortion money, although they have not presented any evidence, El Faro found. The detainee is labeled as a “collaborator.” The prison system uses police information (reasons for arrest, criminal record, tattoos, among others) to classify prisoners. The lender’s wife was offered a series of “packages” over the phone to improve the situation of her relative detained in the prison.
“Her testimony was the most complicated and most expensive case I heard about,” says Cruz of UNIDEHC. “They told her: ‘If you pay $1,000 you will only be able to see him, but if you pay $1,500 I will take him out of a system that we have inside the prison, where we have them by category. I'm going to take him from the middle category to the lower category.’ If she paid $5,000 they could help her more, because they had connections with detectives so that in the court file they wouldn't complicate things too much for her.”
She paid $1,500, but was not given the promised visiting time. When she complained about the breach of the agreement, she was granted a second visit free of charge. El Faro has two audio recordings in which she talks about entering Mariona, which happened in early 2023.
“Thank God everything is fine. I was even able to stay longer because they (the guards) forgot to calculate the time. Everything was quite calm,” she says in one recording. “As far as he is concerned, the first visit I made did him some good. Already today his face was completely different. He was another person.” She also mentions the lack of medical attention for her husband's fainting spells. In the next, the lender’s wife comments that the person who facilitated her entry to Mariona had modified records to minimize the detainee’s alleged gang ties. “The guy who was passing me information told me he had fulfilled his end of the deal, that he had helped me by disassociating him,” she says in the second audio.
In addition, UNIDEHC has documented the “rates” for visits to Mariona by means of screenshots of WhatsApp conversations. The sister of an arrested bricklayer and mother of another detainee in Mariona obtained the number of a person who offers visits over the phone in exchange for money. El Faro has a copy of the screenshots of one of these conversations. They never knew who was in charge of responding to the messages, as they only identified him as a “contact”.
“Please explain the process to me. And how much does it cost?“ wrote the mother of one of the detainees in Mariona. “Be discreet,” came the reply. “Don't comment on social media or to anyone because we’re putting ourselves at risk. For appointments you pay from Monday to Wednesday, and in three days we’ll let you know the date and time you can come.”
The contact in Mariona offered four packages: $150 for a 25-minute visit; $250 for 45 minutes; $350 for an hour; and $500 for a conjugal visit. Payments could be made to a designated name through Western Union at a pharmacy. She must also send the names of her husband and visitor. Neither who received the offer paid for the visit; they did not have the money.
“Nobody will do anything for free”
At the end of April 2022, one month into the state of exception, five policemen took advantage of the fact that the white metal gate of Mary’s house was open, entered without showing a search warrant, and captured a man playing with her eight-year-old daughter in the main room. It was seven o’clock at night. Mary remembers that the officers did not explain the reason for the arrest, saying only that they “would find out later.” He was taken to the holding cell of a police station in a municipality of La Paz and, the following day, transferred to Izalco Prison on accusations of having links with gangs, something that the family rejects.
Despite suffering from high blood pressure, he was detained for 44 days in Izalco, a prison that human rights organizations describe as a torture facility lacking medical care. Mary’s husband was robbed of two care packages, forced to kneel for hours in the sun, and beaten with batons. His right shoulder was dislocated, an injury for which he received no treatment. All this came to light when he was released at the end of October 2023.
In June 2022, Mary’s husband was transferred to Quezaltepeque Prison. His cellmate’s contacts with guards made it possible for him to communicate with his family. “When he was released, he looked for me to ask if I wanted to communicate with my husband. Obviously, I said yes,” says Mary. “At first I didn’t believe him, but he said to me: ‘Write a letter and he will reply to it. You have to know his handwriting.’ Maybe about a month later I was able to communicate with him.”
Up until the arrest, Mary and her husband had a small restaurant and a cargo company that subcontracted with the state. The message Mary sent, like her husband’s reply, was written on bond paper. He told her that a guard gave him pen and paper, on the sole condition that he do so discreetly. Between July and October 2022, they exchanged four letters. El Faro has copies of two: one that Mary sent and another that she received. She left packages and he requested bread, sugar, cheese, salt, milk, oatmeal, cereal, cookies, and disposable razors.
Every time Mary met with the intermediary, she gave him fifty dollars and products from her food business. Then, after sending and receiving the four letters, the family paid another $1,000. In total, for the four letters and brief news of the detainee, the family paid $1,200.
Mary’s husband was detained for seven months under the state of exception. At the end of 2022, an anti-organized crime court granted him pre-trial release due to lack of evidence linking him to gangs. Mary’s husband has resumed his small cargo transportation business and is currently continuing to sign in every 15 days because the court has not scheduled a trial date. Mary contacted one of the Izalco guards again because, months after her husband's release, one of her brothers had been arrested for reasons never explained.
“I told the same person who helped us with my husband that maybe he could help me with my brother. We met up,” she explains. “After 15 or 22 days, maybe when he came on duty, he called me and told me that the person who thought they could help me said no, because the situation there [Izalco] was very difficult. There are cameras even in the cells.”
Mary contacted a second guard and they met in a mall on the outskirts of San Salvador. “He said, ‘Look, things in Izalco are very difficult for us. If they were to move your brother to Mariona, believe me, I’d even get him on a video call. But you know that nobody will do anything for free.’ That doesn't matter, I said. ‘Then pray to God that they move him to Mariona.’”
They did not discuss the price of the video call. “When the time comes,” shrugs Mary, “they’ll say whatever price they want.”
