Human rights organization WOLA (the Washington Office on Latin America) on Wednesday issued a statement of solidarity with groups within El Salvador fighting for citizens unjustly detained following the country’s major gang crackdowns in March 2022.

In conjunction with 84 other advocacy groups, WOLA criticized the dramatic increases in the surveillance and interference of human rights defenders by police and state intelligence officers. The measures effected in March 2022, known as the régimen de excepción (state of exception), have caused numerous advocacy groups to become the targets of co-ordinated operations aimed at fracturing their efforts, such as the Movement of Victims of the Regime, who were harassed by police offers in July 2023 after a press conference surveilled by government operatives acting as journalists.

The statement also outlined specific requests for assurances of the rigor and transparency of the investigation into human rights attorney Ivania Cruz by the Office of the Attorney General, that protective measures be granted to spokespeople of key human rights groups to protect their safety and exercise of freedom of expression and association and a cessation of security assistance from the US to El Salvador.

WOLA emphasized the importance of human rights watchdogs in El Salvador:

We strongly condemn these violations of the democratic rights of these human rights defenders, legal advocates and community organizers, whose work is essential to a free and just society, and of the use of state funds to surveil and intimidate them and to attempt to circumscribe the exercise of their political rights.

Since March 2022, El Salvador’s government has implemented a crackdown in response to a substantial growth in gang-related killings. To date, there have been twenty-five extensions to the régimen de excepción by the legislative assembly, mostly recently on April 10.