Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele’s “Mano Dura” Policy is an Iron Fist Destroying Human Rights in El Salvador

Before the rise of President Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s failure to address political violence has remained an undeniable and embedded part of its reputation. Despite ending the Salvadoran Civil War (1972-1992) with the armed leftist guerrilla group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front through the Chapultepec Peace Accords, El Salvador failed to stop armed groups from causing political violence in the future. According to the International Crisis Group, El Salvador’s “maras” (powerful criminal gangs) caused over 20,000 deaths from 2014 to 2017. El Salvador, before Bukele’s rise to power in 2019, consistently failed to prevent the rise of and root causes of political violence, such as widespread poverty, weak institutions, and widespread corruption in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches. Before Bukele, El Salvador appeared to do little to put an end to political violence.

While past administrations failed to address gang violence effectively, Bukele has repeatedly abused his March 2022 declaration of a state of emergency to justify the mass incarceration of over 80,000 suspected gang members. In 2024, Nueva Ideas (Bukele’s populist big-tent political party founded for his 2019 presidential run) won a supermajority in El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, approving continuing the president’s state of emergency to justify his crackdown on El Salvador’s criminal organizations. Despite public figures advocating for dialogue between the state and those wrongly swept up by the government’s crackdown on criminal groups, such as Salvadorian Congresswoman Claudia Ortiz, Bukele has consistently ignored calls from his critics to reform his “Mano Dura” policy. Consequently, the Legislative Assembly recently renewed El Salvador’s state of emergency for the forty-second time since 2022 in September 2025, underscoring the Legislative Assembly and Supreme Court’s complicity in dismantling due process curbs and human rights protections for millions of innocent Salvadorians.

The Legislative Assembly has played a central role in indirectly arresting thousands of innocent civilians. On July 26, 2023, the Nueva Ideas party, who dominate the Legislative Assembly, passed Decree No. 804, empowering the Supreme Court to try up to 900 civilians if they are accused of belonging to a criminal group or if they come from the same region.  Additionally, the bill granted the Supreme Court sweeping authority to detain and prosecute entire communities indiscriminately, leaving those accused with little chance to contest the state’s suspicions. The Legislative Assembly granting the Supreme Court the ability to blindly sentence suspects, regardless of actual guilt, conveys how the government can easily target its own citizens. 

Even before Decree No. 804 empowered the Supreme Court, the Court has rounded up thousands since Bukele’s original declaration of the state of emergency. Since 2022, the Supreme Court has ruled against thousands of habeas corpus petitions related to the mass incarceration of citizens. According to a 2024 report by the Due Process of Law Foundation (DPLF) on the Constitutional Chamber’s actions during El Salvador’s state of emergency, between March 2022 and March 2023, the Supreme Court admitted only 1.6% of 6,415 habeas corpus petitions and favored 0.4% of cases. The DPLF’s findings show that, even without Decree No. 804, the Supreme Court’s rulings against cases regarding mass incineration convey their willingness to support Bukele’s strong-handed policies. 

In addition to imprisoning its citizens, El Salvador has also abused civil rights defenders through its unfair judicial system for over three years. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the state has ordered prominent human rights lawyers, including Enrique Anaya, Ruth López, Alejandro Henríquez, José Ángel Pérez, and Fidel Zavala, into pretrial detention. On top of the state sentencing chunks of innocent civilians into overcrowded, unsanitary prisons, IACHR demonstrates how Bukele’s El Salvador opts to imprison its critics as opposed to modifying its approach to tackling organized crime. While El Salvador has suffered from organized crime’s widespread violence, such as the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang’s widespread extortion and drug market operations in Central America, detaining the very actors that could otherwise ensure state compliance with international humanitarian law demonstrates that Bukele’s strategy against organized crime is undoubtedly anti-humanitarian.  

Bukele’s unified government, which continues to justify the existence of a state emergency, ironically overlooks the current humanitarian crisis in its judicial system. The state committing thousands of documented human rights abuses under a unified government demonstrates how the Nueva Ideas party has eroded justice for thousands of Salvadorians. Regardless of who criticizes the president’s strategy, Bukele’s government has consistently ignored calls for reforms and set aside democracy in favor of a surveillance state that targets its own citizens. Unless Bukele’s government releases falsely targeted citizens or has IACHR oversee the state imposing impartial judicial reforms, the Salvadorian judicial system will continue to erode and wither into a dictatorship.

Photo Credit

Alison McKeller, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons