At this point, many in the world have heard of the brutality of El Salvador’s prisons. A year ago, my wife, Ruth López, vanished into one.
Ruth is a lawyer who directed the Anti-Corruption and Justice Unit at Cristosal, a human rights organization based in Central America. She led investigations into alleged instances of corruption — among them, misuse of pandemic funds and fraud connected to the government’s introduction of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador. Her work was always meticulous, legal and public.
Ruth is well known in El Salvador and in legal circles abroad; two years ago, the BBC named her one of the 100 most influential women in the world. That kind of international recognition protected her, or so we thought. But that very prominence is likely what led to her arrest, in May 2025, on spurious charges that she has not been given a chance to defend herself against.
In the United States, if people know anything about El Salvador, they usually know about President Nayib Bukele, the popular young authoritarian leader who partnered with President Trump last year to detain hundreds of Venezuelan migrants at Mr. Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. And they may have heard about Mr. Bukele’s crackdown on gangs and crime, which most Salvadorans believe has made El Salvador’s streets safer.
I want Americans to be aware of the cost of that crackdown, and how the government has turned it into a tool for silencing dissent. Since declaring a state of emergency over four years ago, Mr. Bukele has detained some 90,000 people in mass raids — nearly 2 percent of El Salvador’s adult population. A vast majority of detainees have not seen their families and have had no access to legal counsel. Many have languished in prison for years without trial. Their families do not know whether they are still alive.
The raids have swept up both the guilty and the innocent — but in the absence of due process, and before courts too passive and compliant to distinguish between them, the innocent have little hope of a free and fair trial. The government has instead begun processing cases en masse, trying hundreds of prisoners at a time. Many prison terms being handed down are indefinite. In April, Mr. Bukele signed into law changes that allow life sentences to be given to children as young as 12.
Since the state of emergency began in 2022, Cristosal has documented 420 deaths in El Salvador’s prisons, many seemingly caused by torture or the denial of food, water and basic hygiene. From press reports and testimonies, we have learned that prison guards routinely torment prisoners with taunts that they won’t leave the prison by walking out the door — instead, they will leave in a body bag, and no one will even know they are gone.
This is the system into which my wife has disappeared.
Late in the evening on Sunday, May 18, 2025, the police came to our house with some story about our car having been in an accident. When Ruth and I went outside to talk to them, they took her away. She was in her pajamas. They had her change into other clothes on the street, with a photographer documenting her humiliation.
The government later announced that it was charging Ruth with embezzlement related to her role as an adviser to the country’s Electoral Tribunal — a crime she could not have committed, as she did not manage public funds for the body.
For a day and a half, Ruth’s mother and I heard nothing. We could not find her in any of the local holding centers. We thought she had died or had vanished into the judicial black hole of Mr. Bukele’s prison system, never to be seen again.
Our relief upon hearing that she was being held at a local police station was profound but short-lived. Two weeks later, the authorities changed the charges against her to “illicit enrichment,” alleging that her assets did not match up with her income as a public employee, and moved her to the Granja Penitenciaria of Izalco, a prison complex outside San Salvador. She has remained there ever since, while the government claims it is searching for evidence against her. In the year since her arrest, in what one might call the Ruth López effect, dozens of journalists, lawyers and democracy advocates have fled the country, fearing a similar fate.
In one grim sense, Ruth is fortunate: She chose her path. She knew that she was taking a risk by speaking plainly about corruption in El Salvador. Injustice so infuriated her that she could find relief only through action, even knowing that she might someday pay a price.
I have spent months searching for the right words to describe how I feel about Ruth’s situation. I will say it plainly: I am afraid — of a phone call, a piece of news or a silence that lasts too long. This isn’t ordinary fear, for it has no fixed object. I do not know exactly what to fear, nor when. That uncertainty is sometimes worse than any concrete news. The mind, when deprived of information yet sensing danger, invents.
That, of course, is what this government wants. Not only to punish dissent, but to enforce silence. Not only to intimidate, but to impose the habit of fear. Not only to imprison one person, but to warn everyone else.
The time I find hardest of all is at night, when the house falls still, and there is nothing left to do and no one left to call. This was our time, when we talked without haste, when we discussed anything and everything: friends, a book, the world and how it ought to be.
Now when that hour arrives, there are no words, no new things to consider. Only silence.
Louis Benavides is a Salvadoran lawyer. His wife, the anticorruption lawyer Ruth López, was detained by Salvadoran authorities in May 2025.
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