Attorney for Venezuelan Gang Members Deported to El Salvador ARRESTED | JP
A top attorney who represented illegal Venezuelan gang members that were deported from the U.S. to El Salvador has just been arrested.
Ruth López was detained by President Bukele’s government in El Salvador on Sunday. She is facing charges of embezzlement.
Take a look:
The lawyer for Venezuelans deported to El Salvador prison by Trump has been arrested pic.twitter.com/qTmqA7bWBk
— EssenViews (@essenviews) May 19, 2025
Ruth Lopez, a human rights and anti-corruption attorney, who spoke to Rolling Stone earlier this year about the brutal conditions in El Salvador’s prisons, has reportedly been arrested by the Bukele government.
(via @Cristosal)
🔗 https://t.co/BFRRXCURNL pic.twitter.com/uviBClm8N3
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) May 19, 2025
López was the leader in a ‘human rights group’ called Cristosal, who have since condemned her arrest.
The Guardian reported:
Ruth López, an outspoken critic of President Nayib Bukele, was detained late on Sunday under an order from the prosecutor’s office which accused her of “embezzlement” when she worked for an electoral court a decade ago, the human rights group Cristosal said in a statement.
The prosecutor’s office confirmed the arrest in a post on X.
López runs Cristosal’s anti-corruption and justice division and has been a vocal critic of Bukele’s sweeping arrests of 85,000 mostly young men without due process under the state of exception that began in 2022.
Neither López’s family nor her legal team knew where she was taken after police removed her from her home shortly before midnight on Sunday.
“The authorities’ refusal to disclose her location or to allow access to her legal representatives is a blatant violation of due process, the right to legal defence and international standards of judicial protection,” Cristosal said in a statement.
The arrest is part of an accelerating government crackdown on civil society and the free press as Bukele is apparently emboldened by his close relationship to the Trump administration, which is paying El Salvador to hold deported immigrants in its prison system.
A short clip and audio (in Spanish) from her arrest have been released:
#Video | “Tengan decencia, esto un día se va a acabar”, dijo Ruth López, al ser capturada por la PNC este domingo por la noche, según una grabación del momento de la detención a la que El Diario de Hoy tuvo acceso. La abogada, reconocida defensora de derechos humanos y crítica… pic.twitter.com/nH5SvRJcLk
— elsalvador.com (@elsalvadorcom) May 19, 2025
For those of us who don’t speak Spanish, The Rolling Stone provided a summary of what went on in that video:
According to a video of the arrest obtained by El Diario de Hoy, López told officers to “have decency,” because one day the sort of impunity they enjoyed “will end.”
Within minutes of the arrest, the Salvadoran attorney general’s Office posted a tweet with a photo of López being arrested by two officers, writing that she had been charged with embezzlement stemming from her time working in the office of Eugenio Chicas, a former magistrate and ex-president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal of El Salvador, who has been incarcerated since February on similar charges. The attorney general wrote that López had “collaborated in the theft of funds from the state coffers.” Chicas — with López’s legal assistance — successfully sued Bukele in a 2017 defamation case.
López denied the charges during her arrest after an officer said he would “explain” her situation to her. “Here, the only reason for my arrest is that I’m a human rights defender and I work for an NGO that’s inconvenient for the government; that’s the only problem,” she says in the video. “There’s nothing to explain — about embezzlement, corruption — when I’m the one investigating corruption here.”