Clandestine jails and deaths squads in El Salvador

Arnaú Baulenas of the Central American University's Institute for Human Rights (Instituto de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Centroamericana - IDHUCA) and others have presented serious allegations against the Salvadoran security forces. Here's InSight Crime:

Baulenas said that IDHUCA had documented several cases in which young individuals were arbitrarily detained and kept without any justification or record of the detention, sometimes for months.

In addition, Baulenas alleged that police regularly torture suspects, and said that his organization had evidence of 10 cases of extrajudicial killings by police. As InSight Crime previously reported, IDHUCA has brought some of these cases in front of international judges along with another human rights watchdog.

"It looks like a repetition of certain patterns of conduct" seen during the 1980 to 1992 civil war, Baulenas warned.

While most observers of Latin America are focused on the situations in Caribbean, Mexico, Guatemala, and Venezuela, they mustn't keep their sights off El Salvador. Death squads and clandestine detention centers operated by the country's security forces. Death threats against journalists. The FMLN's encouragement of such behavior must be condemned. Corruption is not the only threat to democracy and the rule of law.