El Salvador anti-corruption lawyer arrested for alleged embezzlement

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By Nelson Renteria

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) -El Salvadoran authorities have arrested a prominent human rights and anti-corruption lawyer over accusations of embezzlement while she served as a state official.

Ruth Lopez is the anti-corruption and justice director of Cristosal, one of the country’s leading non-government human rights organizations. Police arrested her at her residence on Sunday.

Cristosal has sharply criticized President Nayib Bukele’s hardline security policies and warned of possible irregular use of public funds by his administration. The group denounced Lopez’s arrest and said that it was part of a “systematic strategy of criminalization against those who defend human rights.”

The Attorney General’s Office linked Lopez to a case against the former president of El Salvador’s electoral tribunal, Eugenio Chicas, who was detained in February over accusations of illicit enrichment. Chicas, who has denied wrongdoing and is awaiting trial, served as press secretary for former President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, who led the country from 2014 to 2019.

“During these periods, Ruth Lopez collaborated in the theft of funds from state coffers. According to the investigations and the information gathered in the raids carried out in the case of Eugenio Chicas, we have identified her active participation in the acts with which she is charged,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement on X.

Cristosal demanded Lopez’s immediate release. It said her whereabouts were unknown and that she had had no communication with her family or legal team for over 12 hours, marking “a serious violation of her fundamental rights.”

“The authorities have moved her from one place to another in a deliberate operation of total incommunicado detention, preventing her from exercising her right to a defense and alarmingly violating due process,” it said in a statement.

Bukele, the popular leader of the small Central American nation, has become a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump and has welcomed deportees from the U.S., imprisoning them in the country’s immense Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

Human rights organizations accuse Bukele of co-opting the justice system and imprisoning innocent people during a years-long state of emergency. Bukele rejects the allegations and says he has made the country safe.

(Reporting by Nelson Rentería; Editing by Raul Cortes, Emily Green and Rosalba O’Brien)