Régimen de excepción

After a single weekend of 87 killings, El Salvador suspends due process. Three years later, around 85,000 people are in custody — roughly 1.7% of the adult population.

On the weekend of 25–27 March 2022, the gang truce that has held under Nayib Bukele's government collapses, and 87 people are killed. On 27 March the Legislative Assembly approves a régimen de excepción suspending constitutional rights of association, communication privacy, and access to counsel within the first 48 hours of detention. The régimen has been extended every month since. By 2025 the cumulative detentions stand at roughly 85,000 — about one in every sixty Salvadorans of adult age. The criteria, as documented by attorneys and human-rights monitors, include tattoos, anonymous denunciations, and the neighborhood of residence. This is the same machine. The enemy has been renamed — mareros instead of Marxists or Senderistas — but the structural inability of the apparatus to stay inside the definition is identical.