Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele arrived in Buenos Aires on Thursday and will get together with his Argentine counterpart, Javier Milei, on Monday. The meeting, a week after they both criticized the United Nations at this year’s General Assembly, is set to take place against protests regarding human rights violations in the Central American country.

Bukele, who was elected for a second term in February despite the fact it was not allowed by the Salvadoran constitution, is the subject of scorn and celebration for his use of a “state of emergency” to crack down on gang violence. Over 74,000 people were arrested since it began in March 2022. 

Less than a third were estimated to be gang members, charged merely based on the testimony of neighbors, prior arrests, or for simply having tattoos. Around 2% of the adult population is incarcerated.

Milei and his Security Minister Patricia Bullrich are among those who have expressed admiration for Bukele’s methods of mass incarceration, saying that they would like to replicate it in Argentina. However, in February Bukele said that Argentina’s security issue is not “as pressing as El Salvador’s” and that the administration would not need to apply measures as “drastic” as the ones he enforced.

In June, Bullrich traveled to El Salvador and visited the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT, for its Spanish acronym). She also signed a collaboration agreement to exchange information and legal instruments, as well as to undergo joint training between security forces, with her Salvadoran counterpart, Gustavo Villatoro.

Earlier this month, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) released a report examining El Salvador’s state of emergency, stating that it received “numerous reports of human rights violations, including systematic and widespread illegal and arbitrary detentions, unlawful raids on homes, excessive use of force, and violations of the rights of children and adolescents.”

On Thursday, two Salvadoran human rights organizations filed a complaint before the IACHR with 530 “serious cases of abuses” including “forced disappearances, torture and homicide cases against incarcerated people under the state’s custody.” The communiqué, signed by NGOs Tutela Legal and the Movement for Victims of the State of Emergency (MOVIR, for its Spanish acronym), claimed that the rule of law had vanished from the country.

“It has been demonstrated that there is a policy of generalized disappearance, that people are detained and the relatives never hear anything about the person again, not even if they are alive,” David Ortiz, a member of Tutela Legal, said on Thursday during the press conference presenting the complaint.

The González case

Sandra Natalia González lives in the Argentine province of Mendoza and is the mother of Alejo Arias González, a 24-year-old man who was detained in El Salvador in July 2023 and remains incomunicado ever since.

“The lawyers can’t do anything, because the government is in a state of emergency that does not allow them to act,” González told the Herald, adding that inmates are not allowed to have visits and she only hears about her son through the Argentina consul. “Can you imagine what it is like spending more than a year without a ‘Hello mom, how are you?’ from your son? It’s hard,” she added.

González spoke to the Herald over the phone just before traveling from Mendoza to Buenos Aires, where she hopes to hand a letter to Bukele asking him to grant her permission to see her son. “And to please give him a chance to return to his country, to make his life with his family, with his loved one. To continue studying, which was his goal,” she added.

Alejo is currently in pretrial detention over an investigation against a financial firm run by Colombians that allegedly offered shark loans and stole their creditors’ identities if they did not pay. 

“He is being detained for an investigation — he has not been sentenced. They have already extended [the pretrial detention] three times,” González said. His mother claims that he was “tricked,” that he only collected payments, and that he was arrested just three months and a half after arriving in El Salvador.

“If I could speak to [Bukele] it would be like touching heaven with my hands,” she said. “And if he were to receive my letter at least — we have to follow our dreams and see where they take us. Let’s go all out,” she added.