This week’s arrest of a leading human rights activist in El Salvador has cast authoritarian President Nayib Bukele — one of President Trump’s favorite Latin American leaders — in a darker dictatorial light, critics say.
Ruth López, who heads the anti-corruption and justice unit at Cristosal, a prominent Central American human rights nonprofit, was arrested Sunday night.
She was accused of "embezzlement of state funds" stemming from her work in past years with elections in El Salvador. But rights activists say Bukele's government has presented no evidence — and that her detention is instead retaliation for her strong criticism of Bukele's regime, which has been praised for shutting down El Salvador's violent gangs but denounced for shutting down the country's democracy in the process.
López has been especially critical of El Salvador's agreement this year to lock up hundreds of people deported from the U.S. by Trump — many of them falsely accused by his administration of being criminals — in Bukele's notorious CECOT high-security prison.
"She has been one of the most vocal advocates for transparency in El Salvador, pointing out the corruption of Bukele's government," Jose Miguel Cruz, a Salvadoran who heads the Center for the Administration of Justice at Florida International University, told WLRN.
"And the construction of the CECOT prison, including the exorbitant cost and the environmental damage it's done to surrounding communities, has been one of her focuses."
Cruz said other corruption scandals that López and Salvadoran media like the online El Faro have brought to light recently include infrastructure project kickbacks — and new evidence that Bukele's original presidential victory in 2019 was allegedly aided by a covert deal he made with the powerful maras, or gangs.
If he would go soft on criminal activities like extortion, according to former mara leaders quoted by El Faro, they would keep their murders hidden in order to bring down the country's official homicide rate — then the world's worst — under his administration.
Bukele denies it, pointing to the all-out crackdown he started against the gangs a few years ago that even his critics acknowledge has made the small Central American country a much safer place today.
“Bukele is basically losing control of the narrative and I think [López's arrest] is an attempt to send a warning to those who continue criticizing him.”Jose Miguel Cruz
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Still, those reports and the growing controversy over El Salvador becoming a repository for Trump's possibly illegal deportations — especially those of Venezuelan migrants — has put a significant dent in Bukele's once stratospheric popularity.
At the start of this year, Bukele enjoyed an approval rating of about 90% inside El Salvador — but a new poll released last weekend by the independent Centro de Opinión Pública there shows it's plunged to 55%.
“Bukele is basically losing control of the narrative," said Cruz, "and I think [López's arrest] is an attempt to send a warning to those who continue criticizing him.”
In a statement, Cristosal called López's arrest "a new escalation in the repression against critical voices in El Salvador."
El Salvador's Attorney General's Office, while offering no specific evidence against López, said in its own statement only that she was detained for having been an adviser to a former head of the Salvadoran electoral tribunal who himself was arrested earlier this year on alleged embezzlement charges. (Rights advocates say that man, Eugenio Chicas, was also targeted for being a Bukele critic.)
Bukele has become a darling of Trump and the hemispheric right for his dramatic reduction of El Salvador's violent crime. But Salvadoran and international rights groups say he's achieved it at too high a constitutional cost.
His arrest campaign against El Salvador's gangs, they point out, has been carried out so indiscriminately, and with so little regard for due process, that as much as 2% of the country's population has been behind bars in the past couple years — the world's highest incarceration rate.
They also point to his brazen subversion of El Salvador's democratic institutions, including the legislature — in 2020 he sent the military to take control of the Legislative Assembly — and the Supreme Court, where the following year he had the Assembly replace its members with rubber-stamp justices.
They then let Bukele run for a second consecutive term last year — in blatant violation of the Salvadoran Constitution.
