El Salvador's president announces that he will release thousands of prisoners

President Nayib Bukele El Salvador announces that it will release thousands of prisoners As of: October 21, 2026 • 05:05 a.m

Human rights organizations criticize that around half of the 90,000 people in El Salvador's prisons are innocent. Now President Bukele has surprisingly announced that he will release thousands.

When Ingrid Escobar describes how she experienced the beginning of her exile in Mexico last year, she begins to cry.

"My brother is a trader and brought cosmetics from Guatemala across the border. He went through customs and police checks and was then arrested by the military for not having a business invoice with him. A trivial matter for which he was taken to a maximum security prison."

Escobar is a lawyer and director of the human rights organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, or SJH for short. She has documented arbitrary arrests, torture and hundreds of deaths in El Salvador's prisons. That is why she has come into the sights of Nayib Bukele's government.

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El Salvador's President Bukele is known for his tough "law-and-order" policies. When the MS-13 gang committed an unprecedented massacre four years ago, he declared a state of emergency. To date, he has had about two percent of the population of the small Central American country arrested, accusing them of belonging to or cooperating with one of the Mara gangs.

Escobar is under police surveillance and threatened. When she is visited more and more often by the police, more human rights activists are arrested and she develops cancer, she decides to leave the country in 2025.

"There was a risk that they would arrest me, and I thought I'd better go away for a few months and think about how I could help my brother in prison. I took care of my health abroad and had an operation," says Escobar. "Then they killed my brother."

She herself became a victim of the system she fought against. According to her, on the day of her brother's death alone, six prisoners were tortured in the same cell and another man was murdered. They do not appear in El Salvador's crime statistics.

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The state of emergency in El Salvador has been in effect since 2022. A total of over 90,000 people are housed in high-security prisons, which, according to Amnesty International, are sometimes five to six times overcrowded. The Salvadoran human rights organization Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, or SJH for short, has documented at least 554 deaths in state custody. Among other things, for failure to provide medical assistance, violence and torture.

President Bukele, who has always defended his brutal strategy, has now surprisingly announced the release of thousands of people. "About half of the prisoners who worked with the gangs would benefit from early release. They are still guilty, so they should be released on conditions."

His government has set up a commission that works parallel to the justice system. Remarkable for Ingrid Hausinger, regional director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for the region: For the first time, Bukele openly admits that there is no longer a separation of powers in El Salvador, meaning that no independent court decides on detention cases.

According to Hausinger, there are several reasons for Bukele's announcement right now: "I think a lot of it comes from international pressure on the one hand. The second is simply this whole system, which is of course incredibly difficult to manage and incredibly expensive. I think after five years it's becoming a bit unbearable for the government to continue to finance it."

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Also: Presidential elections will take place at the end of February next year. Although Bukele still has high popularity ratings and is very likely to win again, pressure among the population is growing.

"These are the mothers of prisoners who had no rights, no trial. This movement has already done a lot of international lobbying, they are very active. I think one way to silence this movement is to release some of these innocent people," says Hausinger.

Bukele also does not want to make it public that many of the inmates are innocent, even though he once admitted that around 8,000 people were falsely arrested.

It is still unclear who will be released. And the president doesn't comment on the timing either. That's why SJH human rights lawyer Ingrid Escobar, who lives in exile in Mexico, doesn't believe that the people will be released.

"All he sells to our people is hot air. He thinks he can determine whether you have human rights or not," says Escobar. "At some point, when these people are released, traumatized, morally and physically abused, they will hate the institutions. Nobody will help them reintegrate into society."

Regardless of whether Bukele keeps his promise and releases some of the prisoners or whether they are released at some point after the end of his government: El Salvador lacked reintegration programs. The worst thing, Escobar fears, would be if the cycle of violence were to repeat itself.

This topic in the program: tagesschau.de | El Salvador's President Bukele announces release of thousands of prisoners | 9:06 p.m