A prominent Salvadoran lawyer known for publicly accusing President Nayib Bukele’s government of corruption and malfeasance was detained by the authorities on Sunday night, according to the lawyer’s employer, a human rights organization.
Ruth López, who leads the organization’s anti-corruption and justice unit, had not been formally charged as of Monday and her location was unknown, according to a statement from the group.
The arrest was confirmed by the country’s attorney general’s office, which in an online post said the “administrative detention” of Ms. López was linked to her previous work as the “right hand” of a magistrate and former government official, Eugenio Chicas.
Mr. Chicas, a former president of El Salvador’s supreme electoral tribunal who also served as a press secretary to former President Salvador Sánchez Cerén, was arrested in February on charges of illicit enrichment.
“Ruth López collaborated in the theft of funds from state coffers,” the attorney general’s office said in its post.
Ms. López’s arrest prompted immediate outcry within and outside El Salvador from human rights groups and experts. They said that Mr. Bukele, emboldened by his relationship with President Trump since agreeing to imprison migrants deported from the United States, had stepped up attacks on his critics.
“For years, Ruth López has courageously exposed corruption and human rights violations in El Salvador,” Juanita Goebertus, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “Her arrest is not an isolated incident — it marks a dangerous escalation in President Bukele’s effort to silence dissent.”
Since 2022, Mr. Bukele has kept in place a state of emergency that allows authorities to carry out arrests at will, sidestepping due process.
Initially imposed to crack down on gang violence, the state of emergency has led to a dramatic reduction in crime but has also resulted at least 80,000 people being detained and placed in El Salvador’s notorious prison system.
Ms. López’s organization, Cristosal, has emerged as a major force in exposing abuses in the prison system and beyond. The group has repeatedly accused the Bukele administration of holding people in pretrial detention without access to lawyers or their families, in a condition that the group’s director, Noah Bullock, has said amounts to forced disappearance.
Cristosal said that Ms. López had now fallen victim to that crime, which it described as “a serious human rights violation under international law.”
Ms. López has been at the forefront of investigations into potential corruption or negligence by the Bukele government. One inquiry is related to the misuse of pandemic funds and another is tied to the contamination of the local water supply caused by the construction of the country’s mega prison known as CECOT. Another denounced the use of public funds to pay for Pegasus software used to spy on journalists and human rights groups in El Salvador.
“The link with Chicas in Ruth’s case is fabricated — a dubious pretext to imprison her arbitrarily,” said Napoleón Campos, a Salvadoran political analyst. Mr. Campos said the arrest should instead be viewed in the context of “human rights abuses, the harassment of environmental defenders and the broader attack by the Bukele regime on civil society.”
This month, several journalists with the Salvadoran independent investigative news outlet El Faro fled El Salvador after learning that the government was preparing warrants for their arrests. The outlet said such a move would amount to “the most frontal state assault on press freedom in El Salvador since Bukele came to office in 2019.”
El Faro has for years investigated the Bukele administration and its supposed negotiations with the country’s gang leaders and has said its journalists were placed under surveillance and intimidated as a result.
A spokeswoman for the presidency, Wendy Ramos, did not respond questions about what grounds the government had for seeking the arrest of Ms. López or the El Faro journalists.
The Salvadoran government has consistently dismissed critiques of Mr. Bukele and his security policies as efforts by members of the political opposition to tarnish the president.
Mr. Bukele’s approval ratings have consistently remained above 80 percent in public opinion surveys.
Mr. Bullock, Cristosal’s director, has cast doubt on the high ratings, saying that in the face of mass arrests, the Salvadoran public has grown fearful of expressing discontent with the president and his iron-fisted approach.
Annie Correal reports from the U.S. and Latin America for The Times.
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