José Alfredo Vega’s parents said they were able to identify his body only because of a childhood scar. Otherwise, the corpse was swollen beyond recognition.
“He was OK when he left,” said his father, Miguel Ángel Vega, recalling the night nearly three years ago when police officers barged into the family’s home and took away his son. “He was healthy.”
Now, at 29, José Alfredo was dead in a morgue.
President Trump’s decision to send to El Salvador hundreds of people he says are gang members has ignited outrage and approval in the United States. But most Salvadorans have barely registered their arrival and their absorption into the country’s opaque penal system.
Here in El Salvador, where tens of thousands of men have been swept up in mass arrests in recent years, the disappearance of men into prisons not to be heard from again is disturbingly familiar.
Since 2022, when President Nayib Bukele’s government imposed a state of emergency to quell rampant gang violence, around 80,000 people have been incarcerated, more than tripling El Salvador’s inmate population. Thousands of innocent people have been locked up with no legal recourse and no communication with their families, according to their relatives, former prisoners and rights groups.
In the capital, San Salvador, people can now go out at night, play soccer and walk dogs without fear of crime.
