The following article is published for Issue 43 of Critical Resistance’s cross-wall, bi-lingual newspaper The Abolitionist. Issue 43 – entitled “Seeds through Concrete” featuring pieces on censorship, repression, and prison industrial complex abolition – prints June 23, 2025 and is then mailed to thousands of imprisoned people for free in jails, detention centers and prisons across the US and some internationally. Supporters outside of cages can sign up for paid subscriptions that sponsor free subscriptions for prisoners. Print editions are limited, so subscribe today to receive your own print copy while some are still available.

The Movement of Families: In Defense of the Life of Imprisoned People Under State of Emergency in El Salvador

By Yanci López and Grazzia Grimaldi

March 2025 marked three years of imposition of a state of emergency in El Salvador. In 2022, the Nayib Bukele Administration declared the “war against gangs,” imposing an exceptional regime that has suspended constitutional guarantees under an authoritarian framework. Imprisonment has played a key role in this process; since the declaration, mass arrests have resulted in the imprisonment of more than 81,000 people—around 2.6 percent of the total population—without due process, resulting in the highest imprisonment rate in the world.

This authoritarian consolidation, however, is not simply a return to military strongman rule. It is the outgrowth of decades of US-backed neoliberal governance that has hollowed out public institutions while expanding the repressive apparatus of the state. Bukele’s regime marries authoritarian populism with a neoliberal austerity model that diverts public resources into policing, surveillance, and imprisonment while disinvesting from social services. This model doesn’t just punish the poor; it disappears them through imprisonment, erasure, and death.

Bukele’s so-called state of exception is not an exception at all. Rather, it is the logical consequence of global patterns of governance that manage poverty and dissent through militarized control. The regime’s use of prolonged pretrial imprisonment, mass trials, and communication blackouts in prisons is a laboratory for punitive social control, cloaked in the language of security. These tactics parallel the carceral strategies used across the Americas to criminalize racialized and working-class communities under the guise of public safety. They are also the latest iteration of US imperialism, including the export of counterinsurgency tactics and the “war on gangs” as a proxy for the “war on terror.”

In this scenario, communication blackouts in prisons have largely gone unnoticed; however, they have been essential for the violation of life inside and outside of prisons. In 2016, communications were suspended in maximum security facilities for persons prosecuted as “gang members”; in 2019 and 2020, Bukele’s administration extended this measure to regular penitentiary facilities.

The Movement of Families of Imprisoned People

For the families of prisoners in El Salvador, this new anniversary of the state of emergency is marked by the memory of five years of communication bans with their loved ones inside. The social movement of families came about in 2019 as a means of protesting against Salvadorean imprisonment policies and looking to organize to defend the lives of those affected by them. It emerged as a direct outcome of rapport building among women lined up outside prisons in queues, who would strike up conversations about the reshuffling of their lives because of their family members’ imprisonment, their economic difficulties and emotional challenges, and the hopes of freedom for their relatives inside. After getting in touch with local human rights organizations working on imprisonment-related issues, they established the first digital space among themselves to address the disruption of familial bonds and the impunity of the regime in light of the suspension of all inside-outside communication.

These bans are not just technical restrictions; they are deliberate strategies of dehumanization and disappearance. In a society where state violence is normalized and legal recourse is eroded, communication becomes both a lifeline and a form of resistance. One of the main demands the movement has fought for has been the resumption of inside-outside contact because communication bans have not only disrupted familial bonds, but they have also laid a shroud of uncertainty and impunity over the imprisonment system as a whole.

Local organizations have reported multiple human rights violations in prisons, torture practices reminiscent of the Salvadorean armed struggle period (1980–1992), medical malpractice, and even deaths under the state of emergency regime. These acts echo the legacies of military dictatorship, yet today they are carried out under the guise of so-called modern governance and national security. The use of anonymous judges and mass trials serves as a juridical theater that strips individuals of any semblance of due process, reflecting a deeply anti-democratic use of the legal system to maintain state control. Three years after the state of emergency was declared, local organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario (Humanitarian Juridical Aid) has confirmed the deaths of 380 people under state custody and suggested that the actual figure may be over a thousand because of the government’s concealment of clandestine mass graves inside prison grounds.

These conditions of inhumane treatment and death inside prisons are critical under a politicized judicial landscape in which a penal subsystem hinders access to due process. Judicial reforms under the state of emergency regime have led to the incorporation of anonymous judges and hearsay witnesses, as well as the implementation of mass trials of up to 900 people imposing a single process to those prosecuted for their presumed membership to the same “terrorist” structure or illegal association without the need for the prosecution to present individual evidence. These new evidence policies related to so-called criminal investigation processes are coupled with brand new interpretations of the “crime of illegal association” outlawing gang membership and further extending preventive imprisonment periods.

Mass arrests have affected families who, in many cases, already had someone in prison because of the association established between marginalized communities and “gang” structures. This has overwhelmed families that already suffered from economic limitations, for it is they who support those inside by means of highly feminized, unremunerated labor. Moreover, this adds to expenses related to the judicial process of a person under investigation and in preventive imprisonment. And of course, these economic burdens are not incidental. Rather, they are the privatization of punishment, outsourcing the cost of incarceration to women and families already dispossessed by structural inequality. In this way, the regime weaponizes poverty as part of its broader project of social cleansing. Note that the provision of free legal counsel by the state is severely strained, given the rise in indiscriminate arrests and the downsizing of staff.

Families must also provide clothing, shoes, a certain number of groceries, medicine, personal hygiene supplies, and general cleaning items for the cells, much in spite of all budgetary reinforcements destined to prison expenses, such as food, since 2023, and the production of most of these supplies as part of prison labor under the framework of the Yo Cambio (I Change) prison program, rebranded under Bukele’s first term as Plan Cero Ocio (Zero Leisure Plan).

In 2020, the government’s official propaganda underscored the role played by the Apanteos prison in Santa Ana in the struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic for its production of hand sanitizer, liquid soap, bleach, and detergents used by security personnel and doctors across the country. This year, the government has also highlighted the work of the clothing shop in La Esperanza prison complex in San Salvador, stating that 6,600 prisoners engage in 8-hour shifts, producing more than 600,000 clothing items per month, including uniforms for state workers, school centers, sports leagues, and even staff working in the prison. Despite the government highlighting the prison’s production capacity, families are required to provide essential supplies to their loved ones inside every month, with no certainty if they will ever reach them.

Moreover, these contradictions reveal the regime’s dual strategy: On one hand, showcasing labor of imprisoned people as a neoliberal solution to public needs and on the other, relying on the unpaid, invisible labor of families—particularly women—to sustain the very lives they endanger through imprisonment. In closed-regime prisons, investing in supplies and demanding communication have turned into ways of looking after imprisoned relatives and seeking confirmation of whether they are alive inside. This turns even more complex when, in the process of supporting their loved ones, many women who carry out this work are also seen as “gang” collaborators; the so-called gang support networks enjoyed the participation of up to half a million collaborators in 2021.

In Defense of Life

In the face of risk of imprisonment under the state of emergency regime, the family members’ movement has organized itself around both defending the lives of their imprisoned loved ones and building up systems of community support that have been fundamental for this endeavor. For quite some time, this task was organized through street protests and legal means, filing different recourses—habeas corpus, unconstitutionality demands, and judicial complaints—to put pressure on authorities in view of human rights violations within prisons.

While many of these legal avenues are grounded in rights-based frameworks, the families’ fight is fundamentally abolitionist—centered not just on reforms but on exposing the structural violence of imprisonment and demanding the return of their loved ones. This strategy sought to exhaust all legal remedies at the national level to push the movement’s demands to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR). Even though the Salvadorean state does not have a history of compliance with international decisions, this strategy aimed to exert pressure on governments that are indeed bound by international agreements.

The progressive deterioration of judicial independence in the authoritarian regime, along with the growing persecution of activists and collaborators fighting for imprisoned people, has led to the shutdown of many of these organizational avenues. Facing an increasingly repressive regime, the movement of families has learned to search for the blind spots of the prison industrial complex (PIC). This refusal to be erased is itself an act of rebellion. The families’ work maps out an alternative infrastructure of care, truth-seeking, and memory-making in the face of authoritarian control.

For instance, if the government restricts access to information inside, families manage to get hold of information through workers and residents from nearby areas, asking those recently released, as well as guards in prison centers. If prisons hide their relatives, families look for them in photographs, videos, or shared official material when taken outside of prison. While the government has co-opted judicial institutions, families have managed to single out those institutions or judges that do respond to legal recourses, albeit outside of the capital. If the government goes after dissident voices, the movement openly denounces it on social media while changing their mobilization strategy via judicial institutions.

In the context in which life is more at risk inside prison centers, looking after prisoners’ health conditions has been vital for families on the outside, as well as other subtle means of denunciation: Each petition entails an implicit accusation of medical malpractice, unhealthy living conditions, and violence inside prisons. On the other hand, the Movimiento de Víctimas del Régimen de Excepción (MOVIR, Emergency Regime Victims Movement), which emerged simultaneously and is composed of families of persons detained specifically under the state of emergency regime, has the support of the leftist organization Bloque Popular Revolucionario (Popular Revolutionary Bloc) and has been engaged in a struggle centered on the liberation of their family members.

Creating Systems of Care and Popular Education

In the process of building the movement, creating and sustaining a community support pillar among relatives has been key. Since its inception, El Salvador’s Movement of Families has kept a community focus based on prisoner support by slowly creating a process of popular education to teach communities how to resist and protest the disappearance of their loved ones. This is political education as survival: A deeply feminist and abolitionist praxis that equips communities to challenge the expansion of carceral power, not only through advocacy but through embodied solidarity and collective learning. Through social media, families share knowledge about how to move through the PIC. This involves logistical and practical details such as identifying opening hours in prison centers, preparing supply packages, reporting issues such as irregular transfer, navigating the judicial and imprisonment system, and pursuing legal recourse to sue and defend the rights of imprisoned family members.

In 2024, this knowledge was institutionalized through the creation of the first school of popular education organized by and for relatives of those imprisoned in the city of Santa Ana. It emerged with the goal of offering families in the western areas of the country the chance to participate in educational processes within a space of embodied solidarity, or acuerpamiento, in which to share practical and legal resources. In this process, challenging the PIC, raising awareness, and denouncing prison authorities’ decisions has been of utmost importance. Faced with fascist tendencies that value social order over human life, the movement continues to build a politics rooted in radical care and grassroots autonomy. Its work reclaims power from the state’s grip and redirects it toward collective healing, survival, and liberation.

This is political education as survival: A deeply feminist and abolitionist praxis that equips communities to challenge the expansion of carceral power, not only through advocacy but through embodied solidarity and collective learning. 

 This work will be crucial in questioning how the PIC expands at the expense of its economic downturns, as well as in teaching how to recognize and demand the defense of prisoners’ rights. In the same vein, it is also worth understanding how the intensification of imprisonment impacts the families and increases the load of invisibilized and unremunerated care work that has historically fallen on women, now forced to accompany their relatives into prisons, sometimes by obligation, unwilling to, or imposed upon them by their own families. Led mostly by female relatives, the movement is also aiming to generate a consciousness of how the system extends beyond the walls.

Certainly, the Bukele Administration’s expansion of the PIC is not simply a security strategy—it is a pillar of its neoliberal authoritarian project. As the government extends the prison system at the expense of working-class families, it invisibilizes the reinforcement of its neoliberal project, which creates methods of dispossession while dismantling the public system. The families’ struggle is a direct challenge to this strategy and deeper logic. The movement will move forward until it overwhelms the international protection systems and will not back down until all our families are reunited.

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About the Authors:

Yanci López is family of imprisoned loved ones and activist of The Movement of Families of Imprisoned People.  

Grazzia Grimaldi is an anthropologist and member of The Movement of Families of Imprisoned People.