San Salvador, March 28 (RHC)-- In El Salvador, protesters took to the streets of the capital San Salvador to mark three years since President Nayib Bukele enacted a state of exception that limits constitutional protections and grants unlimited powers to Salvadoran armed forces to arrest people suspected of being gang members. 

The policy has also been used to target human rights advocates, land and water defenders, and others critical of Bukele’s government.

Some 85,000 Salvadorans have been arrested and jailed over the past three years, without due process, as their relatives demand their release.  Human rights groups have documented gross violations, with dozens of Salvadorans reported dead in police custody.

Tens of thousands are being indefinitely held at the same maximum-security mega-prison complex where the Trump administration unlawfully sent hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants and asylum seekers from the U.S.

One protest organizer, Marcela Ramírez, told reporters: “We condemn arbitrary actions taken by President Donald Trump and followed by de facto President Nayib Bukele.  We think it’s a policy to criminalize poverty, a xenophobic policy.  The fact that the Salvadoran state submits to these kinds of measures is an absurd submission to the criminalizing policy of the U.S.”

[ SOURCE:  DEMOCRACY NOW ]