The Legislative Assembly of El Salvador, dominated by the ruling Nuevas Ideas (NI) party, approved this Tuesday a constitutional reform sent by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that allows life sentences in prison for “murderers, rapists and terrorists.”
“We are going to see who supports this reform and who dares to defend that the Constitution continues to prohibit murderers and rapists from remaining in prison,” the president had said. Bukele announced the new measure after the publication of a report prepared by international legal experts with which he has been governing for the last four years.
“Prison for debt, slanderous, proscriptive and all kinds of torture is prohibited. Life sentences will only be imposed on murderers, rapists and terrorists,” establishes the reform to the second paragraph of article 27 of the Constitution approved in a plenary session by 59 pro-government deputies, their allies and including two from the opposition. The approval was given without prior study or debate.
Currently, our security cabinet is presenting to the Legislative Assembly a constitutional reform to endorse life imprisonment (until now prohibited by the Constitution) for murderers, rapists and terrorists.
We will see who supports this reform and…
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele)
The Minister of Justice and Security, Gustavo Villatoro, arrived this Tuesday at the Parliament controlled by Bukele to present the constitutional reforms and gave a speech against the organizations that have denounced human rights violations under his Government: “They started here by coming to talk about victims, the rights of victims and they created laws on the rights of victims to end up with the story that the victim was the accused and the perpetrator an agent of authority. There could not be anything more absurd. But their time has come. “What we are doing is irreversible,” the minister said at a press conference in Congress.
Article 27 of the Salvadoran Constitution prohibited life sentences, considering that the penitentiary system is organized with the “objective of correcting criminals, educating them and forming work habits, seeking their readaptation and the prevention of crimes.” The jurisprudence in that country already establishes a limit of 60 years as the maximum sentence for a convicted person, but in December 2025 the Prosecutor’s Office published that it managed to convict up to a group of gang members.
El Salvador faces a legal crisis that could worsen with the new reform. On the one hand, the justice system is collapsed: a report from the Citizen Action organization indicates that by 2025, each prosecutor had an average of 108 cases to investigate, while each public defender has 200 cases. On the other hand, the justice system is co-opted by the Executive: Bukelism controls the police, the prosecutor’s office, the attorney general’s office, the prisons and the judges, which could open the door to irreversible injustices. In fact, the Constitution could not be reformed until January of last year, after the ruling party to enable express reforms like the one it made this day.
Minister Villatoro dedicated his entire speech in Parliament to attacking human rights organizations. “Now we are going to see these organizations defending, as always, violent criminals, rapists, murderers of men, women, terrorists and representatives of criminal organizations: your vote does not count because you do not have any sovereign legitimacy over this country. And I would like to tell you as a citizen, but I have to respect the position that attacks me. I can simply tell you: Go to hell,” he said.
At the end of the plenary session that lasted just over an hour, the deputies sent four laws to study, among them the Juvenile Penal Law, which in the coming days will be reformed to standardize them and contemplate life imprisonment in them.
After the publication of the report that indicates crimes against humanity, the Government launched a campaign throughout the weekend on social networks. Bukele, who does not usually respond to journalistic publications, wrote angrily on his X account: “These organizations that defend human rights, to which many national and international media [The Guardian, France 24, EL PAÍS, los medios de Open Society, entre otros] “They are giving them extensive coverage, and they are being taken up by thousands of local and foreign journalists, activists and politicians, they are demanding that the State of El Salvador release 100% of the gang members captured since the beginning of the Exception Regime.”
