Mothers in El Salvador grapple with absence and pain under Bukele’s regime 

It was not on the street; it was inside his home. “They took him away… and he has now completed three years in detention,” says Silvia Carolina Martínez de Ruiz about her husband. Since then, she has known nothing about him, except that he is being held at Mariona prison. Between marches, absence, and the pain of her children, her request is direct and without hesitation: she asks El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to free her husband and others she considers innocent detainees. “That he put himself in my shoes, even for a moment,” she says. It is not a political slogan; it is a plea: to understand the pain of a family that is still waiting.