Parents with children in juvenile detention in El Salvador are calling on gang-busting President Nayib Bukele to scrap a plan criticized by rights groups to send minors to adult prisons. Margarita Ramirez said she has been living a “nightmare” since her 16-year-old son Dustin was arrested in April 2024, after he was accused of belonging to a street gang.
“I feel like they’re taking away my son’s dreams of doing everything he wanted to do,” said Ramirez, 39.”How are the minors going to be with the adults?” asked the recently widowed homemaker. Her son is one of 11 minors from the community of La Nueva Cruzadilla, 100 kilometers (62 miles) southeast of the capital, who have been sentenced to five years’ detention followed by five years’ probation.
The minors were accused of painting gang-related graffiti on the walls of a school, though family members insist they are innocent. The families’ despair deepened in February when Congress, controlled by the ruling party, approved a reform promoted by Bukele to send minors to adult prisons.
“They’re all children. They cannot be held with adults, with criminals,” said Moises Campos, 44, whose 15-year-old son Brandon was among those detained. Authorities say minors will have their own cells, separate from adults. But the promise does not reassure parents, who have not been allowed to visit their children.
Families are also concerned about a lack of rehabilitation and reintegration programs in adult jails for convicted gang members. While Bukele is extremely popular in his country for reducing homicides, rights groups say that many innocent people are imprisoned without the right to defense.
More than 86,000 suspected gang members have been arrested, although several thousand were released after being found innocent. More than 3,000 children have been detained since March 2022, according to the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch, which has called the legislative changes “a massive regression for children’s rights.”
Presidential commissioner for human rights Andres Guzman, however, told AFP that there were fewer than 600 detained minors. The United Nations has criticized the reform as a “significant setback,” while Zaira Navas, a lawyer with the human rights group Cristosal, warned it will push minors toward violence. “In a prison where there are no rehabilitation programs, they’re going to learn violent behavior,” she said.
