President Nayib Bukele’s campaign of mass arrest has been marked by allegations of torture and killing. Four years on, 120,000 people are still in prison

At midnight on a Monday in December 2021, dozens of soldiers and police officers stormed into the home of Sandra Carolina Velasco Mena. They were looking for her 22-year-old son, Jefferson Alexánder Hernández Velasco.

“They wanted to arrest young people,” Sandra says. “Two of the policemen said it was because they were short of three people in their quota.”

Im August waren es nach Angaben der Behörde mehr als 50 000 Festnahmen. „Wenn Sie illegal in den USA sind, gehen Sie jetzt“, fordert Heimatschutzminister Mullin.

Weg mit allen Vorschriften: Datenschutz, Transparenz und Staatskontrolle stören nur. Droht Ländern wie Argentinien, El Salvador oder Kolumbien wegen der libertären Welle eine KI-Diktatur?

Diggers are working at what campaigners call a place where ‘human life, biodiversity and the environment will be sacrificed’

On the morning of 16 February, dozens of police officers arrived at San Francisco Ángulo, a small rural community an hour south of El Salvador’s capital. They had come, residents were told, to escort heavy machinery belonging to Cyeemsal, a Mexican-owned company hired to begin construction of a landfill on a site the community considers sacred.

Félix Laínez, 58, president of the San Francisco Ángulo community association, had been warned that this would happen. The community has lost a series of legal appeals against the court rulings authorising the work, and construction is continuing. “It is clear that we will find no support in any state institution,” says Laínez, who has little hope of success in their final constitutional appeal, which is now before the supreme court.

Exclusive: CSI Aviation and GlobalX accused of violating civil rights as part of Trump immigration crackdown

Venezuelan men sent last year to a notorious Salvadorian terrorism prison by the Trump administration are suing the US aviation companies that transported them there.

A lawsuit filed this week in federal court in Washington DC accuses the companies CSI Aviation and GlobalX of violating the Venezuelans’ civil rights, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence and other violations, for their role in flying the three planes that took the men to El Salvador.

Fishers on El Salvador’s largest lake are still looking for answers after the die-off, with no explanation provided by the government

From the village of Copapayo, Noel Avalos recalls the morning they ran to the shore of Lake Suchitlán, El Salvador’s main hydroelectric reservoir, also known as Cerrón Grande, and its largest body of freshwater, to find thousands of dead fish had washed up overnight.

By August 2025, nearly 70% of the lake’s 135 sq km (33,000 acres) surface was carpeted with an invasive species, water lettuce (Pistia stratiotes). In the following months, plastic waste accumulated along the shoreline, dead fish became more frequent and residents who rely on fishing the lake for income reported that their livelihoods were deteriorating.

Abelardo de la Espriella, promising an iron-fist approach to crime, leads polls in Colombia’s presidential runoff election

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Abelardo de la Espriella, the far-right lawyer who is leading the polls ahead of Colombia’s presidential runoff election, has marketed his rum, wine and menswear brands – as well as his novels and albums on which he croons popular classics – under the label “de la Espriella style”.

His shift from business suits to T-shirts, baseball caps and a meticulously trimmed beard suggest the influence of El Salvador’s populist autocrat Nayib Bukele.

Andry José Hernández Romero was deported from the US to El Salvador’s notorious Cecot prison before he was allowed to return to Venezuela

One of the Venezuelan men sent from the US to El Salvador’s most notorious prison by Donald Trump has moved to Spain to request asylum after concluding that he did not feel safe back home and did not trust US authorities sufficiently to return to fight his legal case.

Andry José Hernández Romero left Venezuela for Spain in early February and is due for his first asylum hearing in court there in a few days, hoping that the country’s liberal approach to immigration will afford him kinder treatment than the US or his own country had provided him, he revealed to the Guardian in his first interview since leaving for Europe.

José Callejas hat eine Frau, drei Kinder und ein Haus – in Houston, Texas. Bis dieses Leben, für das er Jahrzehnte lang geschuftet hat, an einem Dienstagabend im November jäh endet.

The Right Rev Evelio Menjivar-Ayala vows to ‘keep talking’ as West Virginia bishop, amid tension between Trump and the Vatican

The new bishop appointed to lead West Virginia Catholics has pledged to continue speaking up for immigrants in the mould of Pope Leo, who appointed him last week amid ongoing tension between Donald Trump and the Vatican.

The Right Rev Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, 55, is not planning to hide his views after being elevated from assistant bishop in Washington DC to lead the diocese that covers West Virginia – the first Latino American bishop from El Salvador, who left Central America as a teenager and arrived in the US smuggled in the trunk of a car.

Leo, who has criticized Trump’s hardline immigration policy, selected Evelio Menjivar-Ayala as state’s new bishop

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Pope Leo XIV has appointed a man who had once entered the United States as an undocumented immigrant, hidden in the trunk of a car, as the new bishop of West Virginia.

The pope approved the resignation of Bishop Mark E Brennan of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia, and selected Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, 55, of Washington to take his place, reported OSV News.

Human rights groups have warned that the collective prosecutions violate due process and block defendants from accessing legal counsel

A Salvadoran court on Tuesday began a collective trial of 486 alleged gang members, in one of the biggest mass trials under president Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gang violence through controversial emergency powers.

Prosecutors say the charges against alleged members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, or MS-13, span more than 47,000 crimes committed between 2012 and 2022, including a weekend that was El Salvador’s bloodiest since its civil war.