The bishops of El Salvador generated international headlines with a pastoral letter in May that included a call to the Bukele government to cease offering this small Central American nation as an “international prison.” But their letter, “A voice of hope crying out in the wilderness,” offers a far broader and more nuanced critique of contemporary Salvadoran society, calling for greater political freedom, collaboration between government and actors in civil society and new investments in education, job creation and the restoration of the environment.
The bishops indeed strongly challenged Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s collaboration with the Trump administration in the detention of Venezuelans removed from the United States to El Salvador’s high-security Terrorism Confinement Center. “Authorities should not promote our country’s prisons for victims of the anti-immigrant policies of foreign powers,” they wrote.
“Migrants are not criminals or delinquents. They are people seeking better opportunities in life. They are our brothers and sisters.” They added, “A portion of the Salvadoran people are also migrants, and we would not like our compatriots to be imprisoned in other nations.”
They urged the government to review the cases of each immigrant removed from the United States to El Salvador “to ensure that those who are innocent leave as quickly as possible.”
“Do not collaborate in the fight against migrants by the great colonizing countries.”
The bishops called migration a human right—one that should be freely chosen—and shared Pope Francis’ analysis that most contemporary migrants have had little choice in the matter, driven from their homelands by conflict, natural disasters or “more simply the impossibility of living a dignified and prosperous life.”
The letter never mentions Mr. Bukele by name, but seems intended to counter the Salvadoran president’s accelerating authoritarianism, expressing concern with infringements on free expression and an ongoing clampdown on advocates for human rights and the environment that in May included the arrest of a prominent critic of the government.
The letter surveys El Salvador’s stubborn social and political inequities and offers a vision of an alternative path to a just and prosperous future that is rooted in Catholic social teaching—particularly Pope Paul VI’s “Populorum Progressio.”
The letter was published during a perilous moment in El Salvador. Although the president enjoys widespread public support because of his successes against gang violence, he has been criticized for an adjacent suppression of civil society during the “state of exception” he first declared in March 2022.
Since that time, Mr. Bukele has imprisoned some 85,000 alleged gang members and ignored executive term limits established by the Salvadoran constitution. His Nuevas Ideas party has essentially swept all opposition out of the national legislature. The populist movement recently pushed through a “reform” measure that has been compared to legalistic strategies to suppress civil society adopted by Vladimir Putin in Russia and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
That measure, the Foreign Agents Law, requires civil society organizations to join a national registry and disclose foreign donors. It establishes a tax of 30 percent on all disbursements and transfers to El Salvador-based civil society groups from sources outside the country. The new law, pushed through the legislative assembly in just two weeks, is widely perceived as an effort to restrain civil opposition to the Bukele government now that his political opposition has been thoroughly neutralized. The church, in fact, is one of the few institutional critics still standing.
Perhaps emboldened by the loss of an effective opposition, on May 19, Salvadoran authorities arrested a prominent human rights defender, Ruth Eleonora López. Ms. Lopez is a lawyer and a professor at a Jesuit institution, the José Simeón Cañas Central American University near San Salvador. At the time of her arrest, she served as the head of the anti-corruption and justice department of Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights advocacy group.
The arrest was quickly condemned by human rights groups around the world—and closer to home by the leaders of the Central American University. In a statement on June 2, they described the detention of Ms. Lopez as an act of “lawfare.”
“This event occurs in a context of growing erosion of civic space, criminalization of freedom of expression, and harassment of human rights defenders, as well as individuals and groups who speak out on behalf of the most disadvantaged populations,” they wrote.
U.C.A. leaders called for “respect for human rights, freedom of expression, and the personal integrity of all persons under State custody, and for the cessation of any action that directly or indirectly affects the right to protest, peaceful organization, and the demand for justice.”
Cristosal has been counseling the families of Salvadorans imprisoned during Mr. Bukele’s gang crackdown and assisting the 250 Venezuelans removed to El Salvador’s gang prison by the Trump administration. The attorney general of El Salvador accuses Ms. López of participating in the “theft of funds from state coffers,” linked to her past work with former magistrate and government official Eugenio Chicas. He had been arrested under similar allegations in February.
In their letter, Salvadoran bishops urged that “human rights defenders not be persecuted simply for carrying out this function.”
“And, if there are any prisoners for no other reason than defending human rights, their cases should be studied and they should be immediately released.”
The bishops also drew attention to the nation’s impoverished ecology, imploring the government to take measures to restore El Salvador’s forests and farm lands and to cease the repression of defenders of the environment, lamenting a history of violence against environmentalists and ongoing impunity for those crimes.
“They have been murdered for having raised their voices in defense of the environment and in defense of their lives and the lives of Salvadorans,” the bishops said. “We do not want such crimes to be repeated; on the contrary, we demand respect for the integrity of environmentalists and that their voices be heard.”
In their letter, El Salvador’s bishops acknowledged the need to address the nation’s gang crimes and the recent successes of Mr. Bukele in containing crime, but implored that new attention be paid to El Salvador’s widespread poverty, health care incapacity and diminished educational and economic opportunity. The bishops urged the government to consider efforts beyond enforcement and imprisonment, including investments made “to increase healthy recreational spaces, art schools, and sports schools, such as soccer and basketball, among others.”
The bishops warned that poverty and lack of opportunities “lead to ignorance, violence, class hatred, and, consequently, to criminalization, if not to the class struggle that has done so much harm to date in different parts of the world.”
The bishops tied the economic and social obligations of a justly ordered government to a demand for individual freedom, and called the Salvadoran political class to embrace their work as a vocation in service to the common good.
In addition to aspirations to escape the ravages of poverty and inequity, the nation’s marginalized, the bishops argue, quoting Pope Paul Vl, maintain a “legitimate desire not only to enjoy complete political freedom but also to enjoy autonomous and dignified development, socially no less than economically, in order to assure these citizens their full human development and to occupy their rightful place in the concert of nations.”
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