Protest El Salvador government repression

Protest illegal detention and political persecution of former FMLN government officials in El Salvador.

On July 22, Salvadoran police illegally detained five former government officials from the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) party and announced the intention of detaining five others. Arrest warrants were not issued by a judge prior to the arrests and it wasn’t until a press conference following the illegal detentions on July 22, that detainees and their lawyers were made aware of the Attorney General’s intention to charge them with “embezzlement and money laundering.”

At a preliminary hearing on July 28, the judge of the Second Justice of the Peace of El Salvador ordered the five detainees to 6 months of pre-trial detention and issued formal arrest warrants for five others, including former president Salvador Sánchez Cerén. Prisoners have been transferred to La Esperanza penal center, known as Mariona, and the Women's Prison in Ilopango while their lawyers await instructions on the appeals process. Excessive pre-trial detention is a common and unfortunate occurrence in El Salvador’s judicial process as it violates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) with regard to the presumption of innocence. (Click here to download a PDF of this resource.)

See http://www.cispes.org for more details and analysis of this.