Meet Dennis Muñoz, defender of lost causes in El Salvador

The first wrongful conviction that outraged Dennis Muñoz was his own. He was in third grade when his teacher hit him with a ruler, a common form of punishment in El Salvador at the time. 

“I wished that one day I could say something about unjust circumstances because I was being punished without having done anything wrong,” Mr. Muñoz says 40 years later at a cafe near El Salvador’s Supreme Court of Justice, located in San Salvador, the country’s capital.  

Mr. Muñoz found a way to channel that deep-seated desire for justice by becoming a lawyer in 2005. But he doesn’t work with just anyone – he goes for the tough cases of human rights abuses. He has defended multiple women who suffered miscarriages but were accused of murder in a nation where abortion is banned without exception. He has fought arbitrary arrests of environmentalists, activists, and average citizens. He could be called a defender of lost causes.

“I’ve been told I run an apostolate. Other lawyers who work for corporations have mockingly told me I’m an attorney for the poor,” he says.

There’s no shortage of demand for Mr. Muñoz’s work in El Salvador, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world. And these days the risks of his work are almost as high as the demand for it.

In March 2022, a monthlong “state of exception” was enacted in response to extreme gang violence. The order suspended basic constitutional rights for those arrested under it. Securing a court warrant before searching private communications was no longer required, for example, and arrestees were barred from their right to a defense attorney and their right to see a judge within 72 hours. 

But what started as an emergency measure has become ordinary practice. The state of exception has been extended every month for more than a year and a half now, with no end in sight. Violence has declined dramatically, but critics say the order’s extreme powers are seeping far beyond the gang-related arrests they were meant to address. Even those detained outside of the state-of-
exception category are having their rights suspended. 

That’s the group Mr. Muñoz focuses on. While he has taken a few state-of-exception cases, he primarily works on human rights violations, with the added burden now of his clients getting caught in the emergency order’s crosshairs. Despite death threats and intimidation, he’s not slowing down. Instead, fellow lawyers doing similarly risky work ask him to be on call if – or, perhaps more likely, when – they themselves are arrested. 

The government’s legal maneuvers are also serving as a model for other governments in the region, making Mr. Muñoz’s work a fight not only for his clients but also for his profession – and a warning to the rest of Latin America.   

“If I was wrongfully convicted, I’d like someone to care about me,” Mr. Muñoz says, explaining his motivation. “If my daughter was convicted to 30 years of prison, I’d like someone nosy to try and get her out.”

El Salvador suffered 12 years of civil war from 1980 to 1992. The violence between the U.S.-backed government and leftist rebels claimed the lives of some 75,000 civilians. Since the conflict ended, the tiny Central American country, roughly the size of Massachusetts, has often had one of the world’s worst homicide rates. 

For years, national headlines regularly blasted news of unmarked graves and rampant violence. Local gangs extorted everyone from fruit vendors to bus drivers to elementary school principals, often charging monthly “rent” that sapped the earnings of businesses or individuals. Movement across a city or community rarely happened in a straight line, as the gangs that exploded in the aftermath of the civil war controlled who could enter or exit. Visiting a loved one who lived in a neighborhood claimed by a rival gang could be deadly, even if none of the visitors were in gangs.  

For decades, presidents tried different approaches to bring the violence under control. Punitive populism known as mano dura (iron fist) involved mass arrests. The state was sometimes complicit in vigilante efforts by police and soldiers against alleged criminals. And covert negotiations with criminal gangs even took place.

When the last negotiations broke down in March 2022, gang members killed 87 people in one weekend.

That same weekend, the young, populist President Nayib Bukele and his majority in the Legislative Assembly passed the state of exception. Despite quashing constitutional rights, the move has been overwhelmingly popular for providing a long-elusive sense of calm. 

“A tired society, fed up with a lack of answers to the chronic problem of violence, is willing to accept short-term answers,” says Verónica Reyna, director of human rights for the Passionist Social Service, a nongovernmental organization focused on local violence prevention and support of human rights. 

Gustavo Villatoro, minister of justice and public security, acknowledges that the state of exception is affecting more than gang members. Over 7,000 innocent people have been arrested, Mr. Villatoro said in August, noting that some degree of error is inevitable. 

But the consequences of those errors can be grave. Even if a case has nothing to do with gang activity, lawyers can be blocked from visiting their clients in detention, and court hearings can be suspended. Over 71,000 Salvadorans have been arrested under state-of-exception rules. With 6 million people in El Salvador, close to 2% of the adult population is currently behind bars. And many of them, even those not under the emergency order, lack access to a lawyer and may be tried en masse.

Margaret Satterthwaite, the United Nations special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, tweeted in May that in El Salvador, “public defenders reportedly have 3-4 minutes to present the cases of 400 to 500 detainees.” She warned that “fair trial rights must not be trampled in the name of public safety.” 

In the last week of July, Salvadoran lawmakers eliminated a previous two-year limit on pretrial detentions and passed reforms to allow mass trials that could bring together 1,000 individuals in a single appearance before a judge. 

“Maybe they won’t let us be lawyers anymore,” says Mr. Muñoz, “at least not private attorneys with independent criteria.”

“The reforms have disrupted the whole system and have turned innocence into an exception,” says Ursula Indacochea, program director at the Due Process of Law Foundation, based in Washington. “Presumption of innocence is disappearing because the roles have shifted. The state no longer has to prove I’m guilty, but now I’m guilty and have to prove I’m innocent,” Ms. Indacochea said in a Sept. 7 radio interview in El Salvador. 

Yet in some ways, the measure has achieved the government’s goals of sharply decreasing homicide rates and loosening gangs’ near-total domination over towns and hamlets. In 2015, the homicide rate in El Salvador was roughly 103 per 100,000 inhabitants. By contrast, the government projects that 2023 will end with a rate close to 3 per 100,000 inhabitants.

And despite outcry from human rights defenders and international watchdogs about the state of exception being unconstitutional – leading to widespread arbitrary arrests, and hundreds of deaths and instances of torture in prisons – the order has not been successfully contested in court. 

After a century of dictatorships and military rule, El Salvador began its democratic era in 1992. But it was short-lived. Think tanks such as the Human Rights Foundation no longer consider El Salvador a democracy, describing its form of government, instead, as “competitive authoritarianism.”  

In 2021, President Bukele’s party was victorious in the midterms, gaining legislative control by a landslide. With the executive and legislative branches secured, his Nuevas Ideas, or New Ideas, party used its power to take over the Supreme Court of Justice by unconstitutionally dismissing judges unsympathetic to Mr. Bukele and replacing them with his supporters. The court then ruled that Mr. Bukele could run for reelection, despite explicit constitutional bans against a sitting president doing so. The court’s decision was another step in the four-year, systematic process of eliminating checks and balances here. 

Legislators went on to remove an attorney general investigating corruption inside the government, purge one-third of the country’s judges, select a new ombudsperson who supports the state of exception, and prevent independent human rights organizations
from visiting prisons to observe their conditions.

Two years ago, the day after the court released its decision allowing Mr. Bukele to run for reelection, interim chargé d’affaires and former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Jean Manes spoke harshly at a press conference, comparing Mr. Bukele to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and labeling the nation “a democracy in decline.” 

Of the 35,000 authorized lawyers registered in El Salvador, Mr. Muñoz stands out for almost exclusively taking cases of human rights violations.

“Things aren’t easy right now,” he says, describing the justice system as “made to convict.” The government is “criminalizing the job of lawyers,” he adds.

Yet Mr. Muñoz looked anything but cautious at a press conference in early July, where he was the only person wearing a suit at the San Salvador offices of the Christian Committee for Displaced People in El Salvador, a wartime human rights organization. He headed to the podium in the ample room, sparsely decorated with pictures of St. Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador murdered by right-wing death squads in 1980. 

Mr. Muñoz discussed openly a forbidden topic. Five environmentalists were arrested in January over the alleged 1989 murder of a Salvadoran woman during the war. The case was under a court-issued gag order.  

“It’s very serious that environmentalists are being unjustly accused, bending [what are considered] the rules of due process anywhere in the world,” Mr. Muñoz said, staring into the cameras. 

His clients in this case are former guerrilla members, and two of the accused are part of the Association of Economic and Social Development Santa Marta, known as ADES. One of the country’s oldest environmental organizations, ADES was key in achieving the total ban on mining here in 2017. In a country where almost the entirety of war crimes remain unresolved and defendants in active cases are rarely imprisoned, the arrest of these men was an outlier, apparently due to their vocal criticism of the government. The U.N. called for the activists’ immediate release. 

“Dare I say there are crimes being committed against these environmentalists,” Mr. Muñoz said before the media. “It’s nefarious that things like this happen in a country that calls itself democratic but really has a criminal injustice system in place.” 

By late August, Mr. Muñoz had successfully convinced a judge to grant an order for his clients’ release. “It’s a crumb of justice, but we shouldn’t celebrate until there’s a dismissal of proceedings,” he said at a later press conference.

It’s hard to reconcile this image of seeming fearlessness with Mr. Muñoz’s request when the Monitor approached him for an interview: Could the piece leave out his last name? The question reflects a sense of fear that has built up over many years of doing this work. 

Mr. Muñoz downplays receiving death threats, normalizing the culture of violence he’s lived under for most of his professional life. “They say they wish that I was extorted or killed because of the people I’ve defended,” he says about the social media threats. He thinks he’s been able to stay off the political radar by censoring his opinions. “I issue legal and technical opinions,” he explains. “Other colleagues have entered the political arena and expose themselves more to attacks.” 

El Salvador’s cracking down on civil liberties and silencing of opponents are familiar governing strategies in Latin America. The region is facing some of its most serious human rights challenges in decades as judicial independence, a free press, and strong civil societies have been intentionally weakened by those in power from Guatemala to Peru, and are virtually nonexistent in Nicaragua and Venezuela. At the same time, the presence of organized crime is gaining strength, giving politicians an opportunity to curtail citizens’ rights in the name of security.

Even so, Mr. Bukele stands out. He’s a hugely popular president, with one of the highest approval ratings in the region. 

“The deterioration of security conditions in many countries of the region increases demand for security measures and is met with the mano dura offer, which is associated with Bukele due to his results and his government’s communication skills,” says Tiziano Breda, a research fellow for the Istituto Affari Internazionali, an Italian think tank focused on crime and politics in Latin America.

But, he points out, this model has proved tough or impossible to replicate due to El Salvador’s specific conditions: “a small, mainly urban topography, a defined criminal landscape, high institutional capabilities, effective state control over jails, and no separation of powers, since a perpetual state of exception would be more contested in a country where the court could intervene and civil society had more power.”

Mr. Bukele himself has noticed his critics, largely made up of human rights organizations, independent media, and other governments. “They’ve never been interested in El Salvador,” he said on Twitter (now known as X) in August 2022. “They fear that if we succeed, then other governments will want to imitate it. They fear the power of example.” 

Honduras enacted its own version of a state of exception in December 2022. Three Guatemalan presidential candidates praised Mr. Bukele’s policies on the campaign trail last summer (though they lost), while other politicians and presidential hopefuls from Colombia to Argentina and from Ecuador to Paraguay have tried to emulate Mr. Bukele and his approach to security. 

But it’s not just fellow leaders looking at him admiringly: Citizens reaching from Central America to the tip of South America have also expressed support for him on social media and in opinion polls.  

Lawyers like Mr. Muñoz – and the people they have represented over the past several decades – serve as the counternarrative, painting a picture of some of the collateral damage that policies that chip away at civil liberties can have on a society. 

On July 27, lawyer Osvaldo Feusier went to court to defend Victor Barahona, a radio reporter who had spent 11 months in prison, accused of collaborating with gangs. Mr. Feusier says he fears retaliation for defending him, especially because Mr. Barahona went on to denounce jail conditions upon his release. Mr. Feusier uses two adjectives to describe the work of lawyers here today: limited and fearful. 

“There are rumors in the courthouses of a blacklist with the lawyers who have represented people arrested under the state of exception,” Mr. Feusier says. “That would have been impossible before, but now it’s not so hard to believe. 

“I think they’re testing how far they can go,” he says of the government.

Mr. Muñoz has heard the rumors, too – and it’s made him wary. So far, he has taken on four state-of-exception cases. In one, the police said they arrested a woman in a rural town square at midnight, accusing her of carrying cellphones and SIM cards for gang members. But Mr. Muñoz says she was actually arrested in her home at 4 a.m., and no phones or SIM cards were seized. “I took it because the procedural fraud is pretty clear. It’s all made up,” he says. 

Mr. Muñoz was able to get her out of detention on bond. His hypothesis is that the woman was accused by a neighbor with a grudge. These days in El Salvador, that’s enough to get someone thrown in jail, he says.

Yet despite not focusing on state-of-exception cases, Mr. Muñoz is still seen as the first lawyer many who do take those cases would want to represent them. A colleague of his who has worked on nearly 50 such cases recently called him to ask if Mr. Muñoz would defend him if he himself ends up behind bars for his work.   

Mr. Muñoz seems to always be on. Even in his downtime, he says he tunes into legal dramas, from true-crime series to documentaries on smuggling and black markets. In newspaper photos, he’s frequently in sunglasses due to chronic eye infections – not vanity, he assures. He “admits” to having some clients who pay him for his legal work, as if charging for what he does is something to be embarrassed about. 

“Muñoz is not a normal person,” says Dagoberto Quintanilla, a doctor who was a high school classmate and remains a friend. “When we had to do presentations, we jokingly said, ‘Give him the pill,’ because he just wouldn’t stop talking,” Dr. Quintanilla says, adding that Mr. Muñoz can be obsessive, which helps him when he’s investigating a case. 

The lawyer handles medical terms with ease and displays a prodigious memory, recounting details from cases long ago, like a client with a T2 vertebra injury, another client’s precise weight, and a passage that was on page 14 of the case decision for Cristina Quintanilla, a young woman accused of having an abortion, whom he was able to get pardoned. 

Mr. Muñoz doesn’t open up easily, but he gets teary talking about his grandmother. She believed in him long before anyone else did, he says. Before his first case defending a man with paraplegia who was arrested for being in a house where people were consuming drugs, she told Mr. Muñoz, “‘I know you’ll get him out,’” he recalls, “even though I had no experience. Even friends and colleagues were like, ‘Don’t kid yourself.’” But his grandmother was right. The man was pardoned and released.

Yet aside from the woman Mr. Muñoz believes was framed by her neighbor, he has not succeeded in getting his state-of-exception detainees released. They remain behind bars. 

Mr. Muñoz does not come across as a pessimist, but the difficulty of defending people under the current circumstances may explain his decision to stop teaching law. “What for?” he asks, with a hint of defeat in his voice. “What they want is that you ask for your client to be convicted,” which, of course, runs contrary to his mission. 

Instead, he has always aimed to overcome the odds, even though early on in his career, “not even my clients believed in me sometimes,” he says. 

Ms. Quintanilla didn’t believe in him, she admits over the phone from Corrigan, Texas, where she now lives, seeking asylum in the United States. “Most lawyers come to prison and lie to you or try to get money. He arrived, freshly graduated, and told me he would not charge me a penny. I said, ‘You’re playing me.’”

In October 2004, Ms. Quintanilla was pregnant and one day felt strong pains and nausea. Then she passed out. When she woke up, she was in the hospital and her baby had died. She was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated murder in August 2005. 

Mr. Muñoz worked with her for four years. “I thought he was too young and I was his experiment to start his law practice,” Ms. Quintanilla recalls. 

El Salvador’s total ban on abortion has been in effect since 1998 and was later adopted into the constitution. The law disproportionately affects impoverished women and those living in rural areas with limited access to prenatal care. From 1998 through 2019, a total of 181 women who suffered obstetric emergencies were prosecuted for abortion or aggravated homicide, according to a 2020 report by the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion. Without access to legal professionals who can advocate on their behalf, these women face decadeslong sentences.  

In 2009, when Mr. Muñoz showed Ms. Quintanilla the pardon document, she says she had a sinking sensation. “He asked me if I wanted water or a soda. I thought he brought bad news and wanted me to process it,” she recalls. Mr. Muñoz had argued for her pardon on the grounds that the cause of her baby’s death had never been established.

“He gave me the document and asked me to read it. It said my sentence was considered excessive, severe, and disproportional. I just started to cry,” she says. “It’s because of his work that I’m now free.” ρ