Irma Landaverde didn’t dare wrap her son’s shoes in plastic, fold up his clothes, or store his colognes and sheets in a drawer until October 2024, eight months after she last saw him.

“I didn’t think this would last so long,” she sighs.

Irma has been torn apart over the arrest of Gerson, her 14-year-old son, for his alleged links to the Mara Salvatrucha gang — or MS-13 — in El Salvador. He’s one of 10 detained minors who are victims of Nayib Bukele’s war against the gangs, which has been waged at all costs. Irma is trying to draw attention to her son’s case.

Since Valentine’s Day last year, Gerson’s bedroom has become his mother’s prayer room. She constantly asks God that her son’s scent not leave his shirts, at least not until he leaves the juvenile detention facility where he’s being held. At least until the authorities realize that he’s innocent.

The main evidence in the case is a 10-second-long video recorded by Roberto, one of the detainees, who was 15-year-old at the time. It shows four teenagers in the courtyard of a public school — Centro Escolar Héroes del 11 de Enero — in Chalatenango, a town in the north of the country. Roberto films the group a few minutes after the end of a physical education class. One of the boys gestures to the camera — movements that the prosecution describes as typical MS-13 signs — and laughs shyly. Another one covers his face, while the others don’t even realize that they’re being filmed.

According to his lawyers’ testimony, Roberto accidentally sent this video to a muted WhatsApp group and deleted it minutes later. But someone managed to download it, add music that’s associated with gangs and upload it to social media. Hours later, it went viral. Comments abounded: they called for a heavy hand, extremely harsh sentences, and even death. The accused minors range in age from 12 to 17.

Neither Gerson nor Roberto appeared in the video, but they’ve both been locked up in a juvenile detention center for over a year now. Their case — known as that of the “children from Chalatenango” — symbolizes what goes on in the shadows of the state of emergency that Bukele declared in March 2022. The emergency measures were introduced three years ago, in response to a gang massacre. Since then, the president’s administration has imprisoned 84,000 people, drawing criticism from human rights defenders who have documented arbitrary arrests, police abuse and nearly 300 violent deaths in the country’s prisons.

After more than two weeks in detention and an initial hearing held on March 7, the Second Court against Organized Crime in San Salvador ordered the release of seven of these youths, due to lack of evidence. Gerson, Roberto and Guillermo, however, continued their detention. The Attorney General’s Office appealed and — by the end of the year — the 10 were ordered to attend a final hearing, which only included documentary evidence and witnesses provided by the prosecutors. According to the defense attorneys, the boys’ cases were rejected. Even so, they managed to get seven of the young people acquitted again, but the rest were sentenced to between three and five years in prison, along with five years of probation.

“To date, we’re still waiting for the [official] verdict to appeal on their behalf,” explains Jayme Magaña, a defense attorney who has presented the case to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) and the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

A high-profile case

The viral spread of the recording of the teenagers from Chalatenango gave legitimacy to a government obsessed with the idea that the country’s violence can only be addressed with an iron fist. Many comments on social media condemned the young people. One user asked that they be sent “to the hotel that Uncle Nayib Bukele built for them.”

By early-2024, Bukele’s government was embroiled in a Bitcoin crisis, over the plummeting value of the cryptocurrency, which was putting it “in a very bad position.” This is according to Ingrid Escobar, director of Humanitarian Legal Aid (SJH). “This was their smokescreen,” she affirms. “With the arrests, they send a message of fear to the people and put their prison policy back on the agenda. This is how they divert attention.”

Minister of Security Gustavo Villatoro was particularly vocal about this case. He even requested 20 years in prison for the young people before the preliminary hearing, despite knowing that the law only provides a maximum of 10 years in prison for minors accused of associating with gangs. “We won’t allow this cancer to once again spread in our communities and among our youth, threatening the peace and security that we’ve restored to our people,” he wrote on social media.

The photo of the Chalatenango children’s arrest also illustrates the Legislative Assembly’s recent reforms to criminal law. For defense attorneys Otto Flores and Jayme Magaña, the youths are Bukele’s “false positives.” This term refers to the Colombian civilians who were presented as combat casualties during president Álvaro Uribe’s administration (2002-2010): the victims were accused of being guerrillas.

“Bukele wants to reach 120,000 detainees; he assumes that there are this many people when you add up gang members, their family members and collaborators,” Magaña explains. “The government ordered six arrests per day, per police station. And, from the beginning [of the state of emergency], they began doing raids in areas with extreme poverty, where the residents were victims of the gangs. Now, they’re victims of the government. It’s locking up impoverished populations,” she insists.

“The regime has ensured that evidentiary material is no longer required to sentence people,” Flores concludes.

The video was the “strongest evidence” in court. After searching the cell phones of the boys, they found no gang-related phone numbers, photos, or incriminating chats. In Roberto’s case, a red T-shirt from the Italian brand MSGM was recovered as “evidence.” The first two letters were enough to link him to MS-13. In other cases, it was enough to have the number 13 on their Instagram handles, or to find conversations in which the boys called other friends “dawg” or “dumbasses.”

“Is that a big deal?” asks Roberto’s 83-year-old grandmother, Maria Adela Alfaro. “Maybe I’m wrong, but how can they keep him in prison for a year for that?” The Ministry of Justice and Public Security did not respond to questions from EL PAÍS.

A brigade of mothers

The arrest of these classmates was a turning point at the school. Since the entire grade saw some of their friends being taken away, several mothers decided to stop sending them to school. Others — like the mother of one of the freed children — have been taking turns watching the school hallways for a year, so as to prevent any police officers from entering.

“They scare us now,” one of the mothers notes. The creation of a “brigade of mothers” turned the act of resistance into a collective process. “They left them in a state of shock; my son is scared to death, but we can’t keep letting them take them away,” says another of the volunteer guards.

Guillermo was snatched from his bed at 6:00 a.m. Roberto was picked up from school. Gerson was summoned from the soccer field in his municipality, after a dozen uniformed officers forced their way into his home. In some cases, their mothers were not present. And, in other cases, they were forced to obey the authorities, who promised that they only wanted to ask their sons a few questions, only to then go ahead and lock them up.

For Magaña, the root of the problem is that the case was handled with an adult-centric approach. “[The authorities] analyzed the video without understanding the context of the children’s everyday relationships and their way of playing or joking around,” she explains. “We can’t analyze an action without understanding what’s happening in the context of the moment, but that’s what the Attorney General’s Office did.”

Failure to distinguish between adults and minors is at the heart of the numerous reforms that have been made to criminal laws during Bukele’s term. Amendments to the Penitentiary Law, the Juvenile Criminal Law, as well as the Law against Organized Crime have harshened sentences and made reintegration far from the ultimate goal of incarceration. And, since February of 2025, the Central American country has allowed for the transfer of children and adolescents — who have been detained or convicted for offences related to organized crime — to adult prisons.

Furthermore, access to prison benefits — such as parole — has been eliminated, whether the detainees are minors or adults. According to Human Rights Watch, as of December 2023, at least 3,319 minors had been imprisoned at some point during the state of emergency.

Amnesty International has criticized this as undermining the possibility of resocialization, while also violating international law, which requires that children receive differentiated treatment geared toward rehabilitation — not simply punitive confinement. UNICEF has called El Salvador’s actions a “major setback” and expressed its concerns in a joint statement alongside other U.N. bodies.

Escobar, from Humanitarian Legal Aid, insists that even if one of the Chalatenango minors is linked to a gang, the response should be different. “The punitive power of an entire state cannot be directed against a child. We cannot forget that they are children. What is the purpose of putting them in adult prisons? Or sending them to a facility for criminals?” he asks.

Attorney Flores also finds this to be a dangerous path forward, as well as a form of exploitation for the president to be able to gain popularity: “There are no technical or moral criteria for exposing these children to violence and rape alongside adults in prisons.”

The possibility of their children ending up in Bukele’s mega-prison — the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) — is a fear that mothers had long before the reform was approved. And, for the mothers interviewed by EL PAÍS, it’s no secret that, in the juvenile detention centers where their children now live, there are young people who have reached adult age and are still inside.

Ana Daisy Chávez Guevara, 35, began having nightmares about this situation when one of the judges in charge of her son’s case told her that Guillermo had been the target of a rape attempt at the juvenile detention center. “This is torture. Who’s looking after him?” she exclaims.

Chávez Guevara has had a pit in her stomach ever since they took her son away. The entire family’s dynamic has changed: Guillermo’s room remains untouched, with his notebooks and markers stored in a drawer. And she isn’t the only one whose sleep has been disrupted: her youngest son, at six-years-old, doesn’t sleep well, either.

“He’s become very hyperactive; he looks for him [Guillermo] everywhere. And, when we come back from somewhere, he expects us to come back with him. He asks us why we don’t bring him back… I don’t even know what to say anymore. How long am I going to lie to him?” she laments from her living room.

For Pamela Rodríguez — a psychologist at Humanitarian Legal Aid — this collateral damage is the norm in arbitrary or violent arrests, especially when minors experience it.

“It’s a form of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she emphasizes. “Being detained — without family members being able to see them or know if they’re alive or when they’ll be released — manifests itself in the body, as if a person has a missing relative. Many children develop a feeling of persecution, nightmares, insomnia and drastic personality changes. But the constant is a permanent state of alert, for fear of being next.”

While psychological support is recommended during these processes, most families affected by the state of emergency cannot afford it.

Ana, Irma and María Adela aren’t angry. Rather, they remain frightened by what the state is capable of doing to their children, whether this means locking them up without evidence or falsely accusing them.

Still, the mothers have found the strength to continue bringing their children clothes and food to the juvenile detention center. They’re fighting to deal with the constant absence: a feeling of emptiness in their houses. When they count the members of their family, someone is always missing. They’ve already accepted that this trauma — which has so devastated Irma — will be long-lasting.

If the mothers don’t achieve justice in El Salvador, they’ll wait for the U.N.’s precautionary measures. But they will keep returning to the prison. And, when Gerson comes home, Irma will take his shoes out of plastic and unfold his clothes, so that, once again, they’ll have the scent of her child, even though he’s now had the experiences of a man.

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

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