Lost in the 'death area' of El Salvador's prisons

The parents of José Alfredo Vega said they could only identify his body because of a child's tarbe. Otherwise, the body was swollen beyond recognition.

“He was okay when he went,” said his father Miguel Ángel Vega and remembered the night almost three years ago when police officers stormed into the family's house and took away his son. “He was healthy.”

Now, at the age of 29, José Alfredo was dead in a morgue.

President Trump's decision to send El Salvador hundreds of people from whom he says they are gang members triggered outrage and approval in the United States. But most Salvadorans have hardly registered their arrival and admission to the country's impermeable criminal system.

Here in El Salvador, where tens of thousands of men have grown into mass arrests in recent years, the disappearance of men in prisons, of which not should be heard again, is familiar.

Since 2022, when the government of President Nayib Bukele imposed a state of emergency for the subject, rampant gang violence, around 80,000 people have been imprisoned, more than the population of El Salvador's occupants. According to their relatives, former prisoners and rights groups, thousands of innocent people were locked up without legal recourse and without communication with their families.