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Swept up in the operation, Cruz-Zavala spent his first years of adulthood in solitary confinement as the prosecution unfolded. His charges were dropped, and though he left MS-13 behind, a series of DUIs years later landed him in ICE custody. In May 2021, he was deported to a country he hadn\u2019t seen since he was a child.<\/p>\n
For a time, it seemed that Cruz-Zavala might be able to make a life in El Salvador. He sent his U.S.-based attorney Raha Jorjani updates, telling her about the calf he had helped deliver on the family farm and sending her a photo with his newborn nephew. Then, this\u00a0spring, the precarious foundations of his existence in El Salvador buckled.<\/p>\n
Facing an eruption of gang violence, the Salvadoran government empowered itself to undertake an unprecedented crackdown. With more than 51,000 arrests and counting, the campaign has been broadly popular in a nation where gang extortion and impunity have pummeled communities across the country for years. For men like Cruz-Zavala, seeking to escape his past, the \u201cstate of exception\u201d instilled terror \u2014 fears of government abuse and internment with dangerous gang members who might seek to do him harm. Cruz-Zavala hunkered down at his father\u2019s but was eventually taken and disappeared into a rapidly metastasizing Salvadoran prison system.<\/p>\n
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While each arrest is a story of its own, Cruz-Zavala\u2019s stands out. The reason,\u00a0Jorjani argues, is the moral responsibility the U.S. government has for the danger her client now faces. U.S. immigration judges ruled that Cruz-Zavala would likely face torture or murder if he were deported to El Salvador, thanks to the tattoo he was given by a paid U.S. government informant advertising allegiance to a gang he\u00a0<\/strong>had left a decade and a half ago. ICE, the agency that recruited and paid the informant, kept Cruz-Zavala locked up and pursued his deportation all the same.<\/p>\n \u201cNot only did you help put the tattoo on his body, but then you were given notice of the dangers it created for Walter,\u201d Jorjani, a\u00a0public defender in Oakland,\u00a0said of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency. \u201cYou heard directly from expert after expert who warned that Walter would be harmed. Your own courts decided, \u2018No, this person should be protected\u2019 \u2014 but even then, you rejected those findings, and now we\u2019re here.\u201d<\/p>\n Accounts from human rights groups and investigative media outlets reveal that the conditions currently suffered by tens of thousands of people swept up in El Salvador\u2019s crackdown sometimes amount to torture and, for at least 76 known cases<\/a> as of late July, end\u00a0in death.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cYour own courts decided, \u2018No, this person should be protected\u2019 \u2014 but even then, you rejected those findings, and now we\u2019re here.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Those outcomes \u2014 torture or death \u2014 are exactly what Cruz-Zavala and Jorjani feared as they appealed to immigration judges for protection. Twice, he won such protection under a provision of immigration law called the Convention Against Torture. The convention is based on a United Nations treaty, later adopted as U.S. law, whose full title is the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The precise day-to-day conditions Cruz-Zavala faces in prison are unclear, but the one piece of evidence available \u2014 a TikTok video \u2014\u00a0shows that he is undergoing cruel and degrading treatment.<\/p>\n The U.S. bears much of the responsibility for the rise and dominance of the two primary Central American gangs, 18th Street and Mara Salvatrucha\u00a0\u2014 known as Barrio 18 and MS-13, respectively \u2014\u00a0both of which were formed in southern California. The U.S. also played a key role in destabilizing El Salvador, and much of the rest of Central America, in the mid-to-late 20th century, as American forces participated in genocidal campaigns and funded right-wing dictatorships that brutally targeted their own populations. As Central Americans began to flee the bloodshed, U.S. deportation policies began sending tens of thousands of young men back to the region, some of whom had since been initiated into the California gangs. Those men found a power vacuum in their devastated and destabilized home countries, quickly extending their ranks and beginning to prey on their communities. These were the conditions Cruz-Zavala fled as a child.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a desperate attempt to secure Cruz-Zavala\u2019s release, Jorjani has written repeatedly to Rep. Barbara Lee and Sen. Alex Padilla, both California Democrats, pleading for some form of U.S. intervention in his case. \u201cWe are calling for the U.S. government to intervene on behalf of Walter Cruz,\u201d Jorjani said. \u201cI understand this may seem like an exceptional ask, but this is an extraordinary situation.\u201d<\/p>\n Cruz-Zavala set off for the U.S. alone when he was 14 years old, fleeing the gangs in his hometown and an abusive adult neighbor. The trauma of his childhood and his years in solitary confinement in California took a severe psychological toll. He drank heavily, and in 2017 he was arrested on a felony gun charge and turned over to ICE custody, where he would remain for the next four years.<\/p>\n Counselors, human rights experts, and even his probation officer argued that Cruz-Zavala had reckoned with the mistakes of his youth. He was working to understand the relationship between those mistakes and his own trauma, they said, and exiling him to El Salvador would expose him to extraordinary danger, including torture or murder at the hands of gangs or the Salvadoran state. In the end, none of it was enough: Cruz-Zavala was deported in May 2021.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In his first year in El Salvador, he kept a low profile, staying with his father, tending to livestock, and trying not to get killed by members of the gang he had renounced or the Salvadoran security forces that pursued them. He stayed in regular contact with Jorjani through WhatsApp. He told her that Salvadoran police had visited his family\u2019s property shortly after his arrival, inquiring about his whereabouts. He wasn\u2019t home, but he visited the local police station soon after, telling the officers there that he was no longer a gang member and allowing them to photograph his tattoos.<\/p>\n \u201cHe wasn\u2019t hiding from anyone,\u201d Jorjani said.<\/p>\n Then,\u00a0this spring,\u00a0came a wave of gang violence that rocked El Salvador, with dozens of people killed in a single weekend. Cloaked in the language of counterterrorism, the state of exception<\/a> that President Nayib Bukele initiated in response was exactly what it sounded like: Salvadoran security forces fanning out across the country to round up suspected gang members, due process be damned.<\/p>\n When Jorjani reached out to wish him a\u00a0happy birthday in early April, Cruz-Zavala responded with disbelief. Was she not watching the news?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re going to start taking everybody to prison. This is crazy, man.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n On April 5, Cruz-Zavala left Jorjani a voice message. He couldn\u2019t sleep. Young men and boys with tattoos were the target of the government\u2019s crackdown. They already had the markings on his chest on file. It was only a matter of time before they came for him. \u201cI think there is a moment when things are going to get worse. And when that happens, they\u2019re going to start taking anybody with tattoos or they think belongs to the gang or whatever,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re going to start taking everybody to prison. This is crazy, man.\u201d<\/p>\n Four days later, Cruz-Zavala tapped out his final message,\u00a0and then: silence. He had been\u00a0captured, his brother told Jorjani in an email. There was no news, no visits, no word of Cruz-Zavala\u2019s condition until mid-summer. Jorjani was forwarded a TikTok video produced by the Salvadoran government, triumphantly depicting the mass intake of suspected gang members at one of the nation\u2019s most notorious prisons. There, amid the shirtless men, their heads shorn by prison guards, was her longtime client, Walter Cruz-Zavala, kneeling on the concrete of a crowded prison yard. The sound of a clock ticking played in the background.<\/p>\n \u201cEl Tiempo De Las Pandillas Esta Llegando A Su Fin,\u201d a message displayed at the end of the video read. \u201cThe time of the gangs is coming to an end.\u201d Illustration: Gracia Pe\u00f1a for The Intercept<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/p>\n Early in the morning on April 20, less than a year after his deportation, Cruz-Zavala and a friend rode a motorcycle to a nearby city in the department of Usulut\u00e1n to pick up a used car the family had just purchased.<\/p>\n The trip should only have taken a couple hours, and Cruz-Zavala\u2019s father, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation or arrest, was expecting them back by mid-morning. After a slight delay, he was already worried \u2014 along with most Salvadorans, he\u2019d been following the national crackdown \u2014 and called his son to check in. A mechanical issue had slowed them down, but they promised to be back by 1 p.m. As the afternoon progressed, and Cruz-Zavala hadn\u2019t returned, his dad began to suspect that his son had been arrested.<\/p>\n A few hours later, a neighbor said they had seen Cruz-Zavala\u2019s motorcycle at a police checkpoint. The next morning, the\u00a0father called the local police station and confirmed that he\u00a0had been arrested. That same day, he brought food to the local jail where his son was being held, but he was unable to see or speak with him.<\/p>\n In El Salvador, food rations for prisons are meager, unvaried, and inconsistent, Cruz-Zavala\u2019s father explained. In early April, Bukele menacingly threatened to stop feeding prisoners<\/a> at all if gangs continued making attacks. \u201cI swear to God, they won\u2019t eat a grain of rice, and let\u2019s see how long they last,\u201d Bukele said. That was after a previous reduction had changed the eating schedule from three to just two meals a day. \u201cIt\u2019s always the same,\u201d Cruz-Zavala\u2019s father said in Spanish. \u201cRice and beans, a little bit of bread, and a hard-boiled egg. Every day, every meal, the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Three days after his son\u2019s arrest, when Cruz-Zavala\u2019s father returned with additional provisions, he found a sign posted on the jail saying that the prisoners being held there had been transferred. It took a series of calls for him to find out that his son was now in the notorious Mariona prison on the outskirts of the capital, San Salvador.<\/p>\n Mariona has become known in El Salvador as one of the few maximum-security prisons that has been effectively turned into an impenetrable fortress, rife with allegations of abuse, torture, and death. Overcrowding has hit nearly 250 percent<\/a>. Outside, hundreds of family members<\/a> wait in line daily to purchase price-spiked basic goods \u2014 shorts, sandals, soap, and shampoo as well as food \u2014 for their loved ones inside. Neither family nor the media can visit prisoners. Even attorneys rarely see their clients inside. Communication across prison walls has been shut down.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cNot even lawyers have access to the prisons now. The only people who can get in are government-approved TikTokers or media outlets aligned with the administration.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Since the Bukele administration instituted the state of exception in March, nearly 1\u00a0percent of El Salvador\u2019s entire population \u2014 overwhelmingly men between the ages of 18 and 30 \u2014 have been rounded up and crammed in these prisons. A series of hastily passed laws have suspended basic constitutional rights and protections, including the right of association, the right to be informed of the reason for an arrest, and the right to an attorney. The government monitors phone calls and intercepts mail, and someone placed under arrest can be held for up to 15 days without charges.\u00a0When charges are brought, usually for belonging to or associating with a gang, defendants appear before a judge en masse, as many as 500 people at once, and little or no evidence is presented.<\/p>\n\u201cState of Exception\u201d<\/h2>\n
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\n![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/prod01-cdn06.cdn.firstlook.org\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2022\/09\/Walter_Cruz-SPOT_illustration-1000x664.jpg\")
<\/p>\nSuffering Unknown<\/h2>\n