This piece appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
In May 2021, a person deprived of their liberty in the Metropolitan Area of San Salvador was working on the roof of a prison warehouse when he came into contact with a high-voltage cable. The accident caused third-degree burns and led to anemia and the amputation of his left leg above the knee. His life partner was denied information about his health and the circumstances of the accident upon his hospitalization, and was only able to obtain updates after applying legal pressure through court filings. The family filed a petition for house arrest from a court overseeing sentence enforcement. Still, two months after the accident, they had yet to receive a response or updates on how their loved one was doing in prison following multiple surgeries and an amputation. In July 2021, in an act of solidarity, a group of family members of people deprived of liberty (PDL) called on the public to denounce the abuses: “Let’s not remain silent about the injustices of the General Directorate of Penitentiary Centers. Our relatives, whether on trial or convicted, are already paying for their crimes through imprisonment. They should not also pay with family separation, with parts of their bodies, or with their lives. ¡Las rejas no callarán la verdad!” The bars will not silence the truth!
In El Salvador, the families of PDL are unequally burdened with the task of looking after their incarcerated loved ones without being able to see or even speak to them. By sustaining life inside and outside of prison in disproportionate ways, these families have generated vital knowledge and practices of denunciation linked to social reproduction that are essential for unraveling and challenging the logics of the Salvadoran prison system.
Since 2019, a movement of PDL family members has been denouncing punitive measures that fracture family bonds while expanding the prison system at the expense of their own resources—especially impacting women’s lives and labor. The movement emerged in the city of Santa Ana as a response to the first prison state of emergency declared by President Nayib Bukele in June 2019. Since then, the movement’s critiques have extended to other key aspects of carceral life, highlighting the knowledge forged in the face of abuse and placing the families of people deprived of their liberty at the heart of these resistances. Any analysis of the Salvadoran carceral project must incorporate their knowledge and lived experiences.
A Movement of Families of People Deprived of their Liberty
The story of the struggle against the Bukele administration’s carceral policies began well before the Salvadoran state of exception captured global attention, with mass arrests of more than 81,000 people without access to due process since March 2022. In June 2019, amid a surge in homicides attributed to gangs, Bukele ordered the General Directorate of Prisons to enforce solitary confinement for gang leaders. That same emergency measure also abruptly suspended phone calls and family visits in regular prison facilities—a policy already in place in maximum-security prisons since 2016, where individuals accused of gang affiliation are held.
The government never restored general phone communication. As for visitation, it was resumed sporadically in October 2019, only to be indefinitely suspended again in March 2020 under the pretext of the Covid-19 pandemic. This year marks five years during which the families of people held in regular prisons have been denied the ability to speak with, see, or hear from their relatives in prison.
In response, a group of PDL family members, composed mostly of working-class women, began organizing to denounce this suspension of communication. Many of them had already met in the long lines outside the prisons, recognizing in one another the shared experience of accompaniment. Some had enrolled in human rights education programs offered by local organizations working on prison issues. In doing so, they joined a broader tradition of collective resistance to prison abuses that already existed among families of those held in maximum-security prisons, as well as in ordinary prisons, albeit individually.
Families of PDL have devised creative ways of gathering information about their relatives in prison in the context of isolation. In 2019, they created the first community spaces through WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages, organized by prison facilities and administered by and for PDL relatives. Since then, these family social networks have multiplied, becoming central to how the families of PDL connect, organize, and expand their reach in the context of the state of emergency. For instance, the Movimiento de Víctimas del Régimen de Excepción (MOVIR)—formed in response to the regime’s arbitrary arrests and which, in their words, “would not exist if Bukele did not violate our rights”—has used these networks to coordinate legal assistance, mutual aid, and self-care activities. They also leverage these platforms to denounce abuses and circulate victims’ testimonies, establishing themselves as a key voice of resistance to the carceral system.
Social media has become a means of building and defending community, offering both emotional and legal support to help families navigate the penal system and advocate for the survival of their loved ones. These platforms also serve as sites for monitoring the political and prison landscape, consistently encouraging the public to challenge the narrative of progress associated with incarceration. They spotlight abuses inside prisons and call for protests, demonstrations, and sit-ins—tactics that form part of a broader strategy to exhaust state institutions. Through this work, families document violations and submit formal complaints, carrying forward a tradition of collective resistance.
Over the years, PDL family members have transformed their demands into legal language, filing a range of actions in response to human rights violations—including constitutional claims, judicial complaints, and petitions of habeas corpus. As an organizational strategy, they have engaged and worn down various institutional channels, including the Office of the President, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, Penitentiary Surveillance and Sentence Enforcement Courts, the General Directorate of Prisons and its Human Rights Unit, and the offices of the Human Rights Ombudsman, among others.
Invisible, Feminized Labor
While the demand to reinstate communication with PDL remains central to their organizing, another equally pressing concern is the unequal burden that families carry in sustaining the costs of the expansion of the prison system. This is a persistent source of anger and frustration that surfaces in the everyday spaces where these women gather: on sidewalks outside of courthouses and prisons, institutional store lines, or on the streets during protests. On International Women’s Day this year, a group of relatives of PDL called attention to this struggle:
Our deepest solidarity is with the women deprived of their liberty, before and during the state of emergency, innocent and convicted, with their sons and daughters who accompany them inside and outside of prison. With the women who bear the brunt of financial and caregiving responsibilities… With the women who resist prison-imposed isolation, the disintegration of families, and the financial burden and strain of providing everything that Penales SV [the Salvadoran Directorate of Prisons] fail to provide for their families. Strength and resilience! The Bars Will Not Silence the Truth!
In El Salvador, families of PDL—especially women and sexual dissidents—play a fundamental role in sustaining life, both inside and outside of prison, through invisible, unpaid labor. With the arrest of a family member, they must reorganize their domestic and work lives without the financial support of their detained relatives to sustain their lives outside of prison. Simultaneously, they are tasked with sustaining life behind bars. This includes covering the high costs of their detained relatives’ legal proceedings, which increase with private counsel—often a necessity considering the state’s public defense system is highly overburdened due to mass arrests and public sector layoffs. Taking on debt has thus become a common reality for many families.
Families are also forced to provide clothing, footwear, basic foodstuffs, medication, personal hygiene items, and cleaning supplies for prison cells—causing increased strain for households that depend on the informal economy. The cost of these care packages starts at $50 per month for the most basic version, with an additional $30 every three months if they include uniforms, sheets, and towels. Although families don’t know if the packages will reach their destination, the act of delivering them becomes a vital strategy—not only to help ensure survival, but also to confirm, however tenuously, that their relatives are still alive amid conditions of isolation and inhumane treatment.
In addition to care packages, there is also the burden of deposits in collection centers for use in prison commissaries of up to $500 so that the PDL can purchase supplementary goods. However, these stores have received repeated complaints about inflated prices compared to the outside market, in addition to being sites of institutional corruption. In 2019 and 2020, an investigation revealed that Osiris Luna, the Director General of Prisons and Deputy Minister of Justice and Security, had authorized the “irregular” use of $8.5 million in funds from prison commissaries over a 10-month period—money sourced directly from PDL families. The Attorney General’s Office opened a corruption investigation based on these findings in 2020 and began to build a broader case against Luna. However, the commission was dismantled in May 2021 after the pro-government Legislative Assembly removed the then-Attorney General and replaced him with a loyalist. In December 2021, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Luna for corruption. Despite this, he continues to head the country’s prison system.
Above all, families have played a central role in safeguarding the health of their detained relatives, literally extending the possibility of life in prison by pressuring prison authorities to provide medical care in the face of systemic neglect. These efforts are especially critical in a judicial system that prioritizes pretrial detention over alternative precautionary measures—particularly under the state of exception—and in a context of secrecy where there is no public access to information about people deprived of their liberty.
Behind the sealed gates of institutions that are cut off from the outside world, these women sustain life inside and out. They have forged knowledge about institutional impunity, enforced silence, and the extractive nature of the carceral system—all insights that are crucial for dismantling El Salvador’s prison regime.
A Device of Erasure and Silencing
Despite the communication blackout inside prisons, official media has constructed a triumphant narrative portraying the Bukele administration as a global model in prison reform. For example, an article published in the state-run newspaper Diario El Salvador, launched in 2020, proclaimed at the height of the state of emergency in August 2024 that “Bukele has the best prison system in the world.” These official narratives emphasize harsh punishment for those profiled as gang members, framed as a form of justice on behalf of victims of gang violence, that simultaneously dehumanizes gang-affiliated individuals in racialized ways. Emphasis is placed on corporal punishment, solitary confinement without access to daylight, food rationing, and new prison infrastructures for “terrorist” confinement, among others.
In contrast, the government promotes a narrative of rehabilitation for people in the “confidence” phase—that is, PDL who have served at least a third of their sentence and demonstrated good behavior, qualifying them for benefits such as sentence reduction through labor. These individuals are rebranded as “non-violent criminals” and their productive capacity celebrated, particularly their role as unpaid labor in flagship public works projects like Surf City or in the production of apparel.
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Translated from Spanish by NACLA.
Grazzia Grimaldi is a Salvadoran anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University.
Yanci López is an activist with the Social Movement of Relatives of Persons Deprived of Liberty in Santa Ana and a student of the Bachelor of Legal Sciences program at the University of El Salvador, Western Multidisciplinary Faculty.