They were here. They were always here.

There is a question that the Salvadoran government regularly throws around as if it were an argument. It appears in press conferences, on official accounts, in the mouths of officials whenever a human rights organization publishes an uncomfortable report:

"Where were the NGOs when gangs were killing our families?"

The question sounds devastating. It is designed to be. It is built to generate shame, to put those who document State abuses on the defensive, to suggest that criticizing the regime is the hypocrisy of those who looked the other way while crime ravaged entire communities.

The problem is that the question is built on a lie.

Not an omission, not an inaccuracy, not a different perspective. A documented lie, verifiable and refutable with names, dates, reports, and judicial rulings. What follows is that documentation.

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2003-2004: NGOs were in the courts, challenging repression

The first major modern security policy against gangs was called Mano Dura (Iron Fist). It was promoted by President Francisco Flores in 2003. Its promise: to arrest anyone with tattoos or signs of gang affiliation. Its result: over 20,000 people arrested, with 91% released without charges due to lack of evidence.

While the State celebrated the arrest figures, FESPAD (Foundation for the Study of the Application of Law) filed constitutional challenges against the Anti-Gang Law. They did not do it quietly: they argued before the Supreme Court of Justice that the law violated the Convention on the Rights of the Child and criminalized youth for their appearance, not their actions.

The Court agreed with them. The law was declared unconstitutional.

NGOs were not looking the other way while gangs grew. They were in the courts documenting that policies of massive repression without judicial process were not only illegal — but were feeding the problem.

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2004: The IACHR already knew what was happening in prisons

In August 2004, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a statement on gang-related prison violence at the La Esperanza Penal Center. It was not the last. It was the first of a series that would extend over fifteen years.

That same year, the organization Las Dignas began a systematic monitoring of femicides through the media. There was no official registry system at the time. The State did not count the bodies of murdered women with the same diligence it counted other statistics. Women's organizations did it for them.

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2006-2009: The reports no one wanted to read

In November 2006, WOLA (Washington Office on Latin America) published Youth Gangs in Central America, an analysis that dismantled the logic of Mano Dura with data: mass arrests did not reduce violence. Gangs grew stronger inside prisons. Deportations from the United States fueled recruitment. Public policy was producing the exact opposite of what it promised.

In 2007, WOLA and Harvard Law School published No Place to Hide: Gang, State, and Clandestine Violence in El Salvador, simultaneously exposing gang violence and extrajudicial State violence — two sides of the same institutional failure that communities experienced daily.

In 2009, the POLJUVE program — promoted by FESPAD and Interpeace with support from the Spanish AECID — published Youth Violence, Maras and Gangs in El Salvador. Its diagnosis was clear: El Salvador invested more in punishment than in prevention. More in imprisoning than in educating. More in reacting than in building dignified living conditions for the youth.

No one in power wanted to hear that analysis. NGOs published it anyway.

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2009-2010: Las Dignas achieves what the State hadn't done in decades

In July 2009, the feminist network REDFEM — comprised of Las Dignas, Las Mélidas, ORMUSA, and CEMUJER — presented before the Legislative Assembly the draft of the Special Comprehensive Law for a Life Free of Violence for Women (LEIV). It was approved in November 2010.

It was the first law in the country's history to recognize femicide as a specific criminal category, obligating the State to systematically register and prosecute gender violence. Women's organizations had documented for years what the State didn't even want to name: that gangs forced marriages with girls as young as 12, that they used sexual violence as an instrument of territorial control, that they killed women just because.

The law exists because NGOs pushed for it. The State had been ignoring it for decades.

In June 2010, the Barrio 18 gang burned two minibuses in Mejicanos, killing 19 people. Human rights organizations contextualized what the media presented as an isolated event: 217 drivers and transport workers had been murdered in the previous 18 months, victims of systemic extortion that the State tolerated or ignored.

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2012-2014: The truce, civilian mediators, and UNHCR arriving at the doors

In March 2012, mediated by former guerrilla Raúl Mijango and Bishop Fabio Colindres, a truce was announced between MS-13 and Barrio 18. Homicides dropped drastically. The IUDOP of the UCA conducted public opinion polls. The OAS joined as an international observer. Civil society was an active part of the process.

When the truce collapsed in 2014 and homicides began to rise again, human rights organizations were already documenting the deterioration — and the structural causes that no truce, on its own, could solve.

In March 2014, UNHCR published Children on the Run, the result of interviews with 404 Central American children detained at the US border. The finding was devastating: 58% of Salvadoran children had specific needs for international protection, mainly due to gang violence. They were not economic migrants. They were refugees fleeing a terror that the State could not or would not control.

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2014: The Civil Society Roundtable is born — a coalition of 13 organizations

Faced with the total absence of policies to address internal displacement, over a dozen organizations took the initiative the State refused to take. The Civil Society Roundtable against Forced Displacement by Violence was formed in 2014 with the participation of Cristosal, IDHUCA, FESPAD, SSPAS, MSF, Save the Children, World Vision, the Red Cross, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and others.

In January 2015, the Roundtable sent a formal letter to the UN Secretary-General denouncing the displacement crisis. The Salvadoran State didn't even officially acknowledge the problem existed.

In October 2015 — the year El Salvador became the most violent country in the world outside active war zones — the Roundtable formally presented the issue before the IACHR in Washington.

NGOs were not watching from the outside. They were building the response architecture the State lacked.

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2015: The most violent year. 6,656 dead. NGOs on the ground.

103 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. That was the rate in 2015. On August 23 of that year, 52 people were murdered in a single day. Between 2009 and 2019, more than 41,000 Salvadorans lost their lives in a country not technically at war.

That same year, President Sánchez Cerén's government launched the Plan El Salvador Seguro (Secure El Salvador Plan), with civil society participation and the UNDP as technical secretariat. The plan allocated 74% of its resources to prevention — exactly what NGOs had been demanding for years.

The IDMC estimated 288,900 internally displaced persons at the end of 2014. The International Rescue Committee raised that figure to 324,000 by 2015 — 5.2% of the country's total population.

FUSADES published a study that year surveying 3,977 businesses: 22% of micro and small businesses regularly paid extortion. 85% of cases were not reported for fear of retaliation. The total cost of violence equaled 16% of the GDP — over $4 billion annually.

No one had those numbers if civil society didn't produce them. The State didn't want to count them.

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2016-2017: Cristosal proves displacement exists. The State denies it.

Cristosal — the very organization where Ruth Eleonora López Alfaro worked as Legal Director until her arrest — had spent years documenting what the State resisted acknowledging: that hundreds of thousands of families had been expelled from their homes, neighborhoods, and municipalities by gang threats.

Its Report on the situation of forced displacement by generalized violence (2016) not only documented the role of gangs: it also revealed that 19 cases of displacement were caused by the Armed Forces and 8 by the National Civil Police. The State was not just a victim of the problem. In some cases, it was part of it.

By 2017, Cristosal had assisted hundreds of displaced families and confirmed that gangs were responsible for 83% of the documented displacement.

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2017-2018: The UN arrives in El Salvador with data NGOs put in their hands

In August 2017, the UN Special Rapporteur on Internal Displacement, Cecilia Jiménez-Damary, visited El Salvador. She arrived prepared with data from Cristosal and the PDDH. She called the situation a "hidden tragedy" and urged the State to act urgently.

Six months later, in January 2018, the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, Agnes Callamard, began an official visit. What she found was precisely documented: deaths of alleged gang members at the hands of the police had gone from 103 in 2014 to 591 in 2016. A 474% increase in two years. Callamard called it "a pattern of behavior amounting to extrajudicial executions."

That pattern had first been documented by IDHUCA, SSPAS, and Cristosal. The UN arrived with questions. Salvadoran NGOs had the answers.

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July 2018: A historic ruling the State cannot erase

On July 10, 2018, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice issued an unprecedented ruling in Salvadoran history: it ordered the State to officially recognize internal forced displacement and legislate protections for victims.

The ruling was the direct result of the amparos (injunctions) filed by Cristosal on behalf of six displaced families who had documented with that organization the threats that forced them to flee. It was not a gift from the State. It was a victory torn away by civil society after years of silent and methodical work in the country's most dangerous neighborhoods.

The law protecting internally displaced persons was approved in February 2020. It exists because NGOs made it possible.

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2017-2019: MSF returns to El Salvador for a humanitarian emergency

When Doctors Without Borders (MSF) decides to open operations in a country, it is a signal that cannot be ignored. MSF returned to El Salvador in 2017 specifically because of gang violence. It operated in neighborhoods of San Salvador and Soyapango that the public health teams themselves could not safely access.

• 2018: Care for over 9,300 people. Mental health support for 1,434 patients, 57% direct victims of violence.
• 2019: Assistance to 71 victims of sexual violence. Thousands of consultations in restricted access areas controlled by gangs.

MSF also published the position paper El Salvador is not a safe country for refugees or asylum seekers in 2019, specifically aimed at the US and Mexican governments that were returning Salvadorans to a country that, according to the organization itself, represented a documented risk to their lives.

NGOs were not in meetings in air-conditioned rooms. They were in Soyapango. In the neighborhoods where the State did not enter.

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The complete record: over 30 organizations, more than two decades

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The answer the government does not want to hear

Where were the NGOs when gangs killed?

They were in the courts, challenging laws that criminalized youth for their tattoos.

They were in the neighborhoods of Soyapango, where Doctors Without Borders treated victims the health system couldn't reach.

They were in Geneva and Washington, presenting before the UN and the IACHR the data the Salvadoran State didn't want anyone to have.

They were in the Constitutional Chamber, achieving in 2018 the first judicial recognition of internal forced displacement — a problem the State had denied for years.

They were documenting 450,000 displaced people, when the government didn't even acknowledge the phenomenon existed.

The question "where were the NGOs?" is not an honest question. It is a rhetorical maneuver aimed at delegitimizing those who today document the violations of the current regime — the very regime that arrested Ruth Eleonora López Alfaro on May 18, 2025, precisely because her organization, Cristosal, had spent years doing exactly that work.

It is no coincidence that Ruth worked at Cristosal. It is no coincidence that Cristosal is now an organization in exile. It is no coincidence that the government persecuting NGOs is the same one asking where they were.

NGOs were where the State refused to be. That is why the State persecutes them.

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Sources and documentary references

• Cristosal. Report on the situation of forced displacement by generalized violence in El Salvador (2016)
• FESPAD / Interpeace / POLJUVE. Youth Violence, Maras and Gangs in El Salvador (2009)
• PDDH. Preliminary Report on Forced Displacement by Violence (2017)
• Human Rights Watch. Deported to Danger (February 2020)
• UNHCR. Children on the Run (March 2014)
• OHCHR. Statement by Cecilia Jiménez-Damary on El Salvador (August 2017)
• OHCHR. Agnes Callamard, End of Mission Statement El Salvador (February 2018)
• WOLA. Youth Gangs in Central America (November 2006)
• MSF. El Salvador 2018 Activity Report
• IACHR. Situation of human rights in El Salvador (October 2021)
• El Faro. PDDH: Police executed 116 people between 2014 and 2018 (August 2019)

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This article was prepared by the LibertadParaRuth.org team based on verifiable public documentation. Do you have additional information or corrections? Write to us at: contacto@libertadpararuth.org