Cristosal counts the dead

Hundreds of in-custody deaths, documented in near-real-time. The class gradient is identical to every truth commission in the region.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, the human-rights organization Cristosal compiles and publishes a running register of deaths in Salvadoran custody under the régimen — by year's end the count is in the hundreds, with cause-of-death descriptions including blunt-force injuries, untreated medical conditions, and what coroners euphemistically file as 'mechanical asphyxiation.' State violence under exception travels reliably down the social ladder because the ladder is what determines who has a lawyer, who has media access, who has relatives who can make noise abroad, whose disappearance generates a cable from an embassy. Every truth commission ends up reading like the same demographic report — rural poor, urban informal-sector workers, dark-skinned men under 35. Cristosal's register is, in this sense, not new evidence. It is the same demographic report being filed in real time, while the regime is still being praised.