How an innocent man wound up dead in El Salvador’s justice system
MS-13 gang members languish in one of the three “'gang cages” in the Quezaltepeque police station in 2013 in San Salvador, El Salvador. These overcrowded cages were designed to be 72-hour holding cells for common criminals and rival gangs. (Giles Clarke/Getty Images)
MS-13 gang members languish in one of the three “'gang cages” in the Quezaltepeque police station in 2013 in San Salvador, El Salvador. These overcrowded cages were designed to be 72-hour holding cells for common criminals and rival gangs. (Giles Clarke/Getty Images)
SAN JUAN TALPA, El Salvador — On a dusky evening last spring, Jorge Alberto Martínez Chávez was tossed into the hell that is El Salvador’s prison system: a holding cell barely bigger than the bed of a pickup, where more than 50 prisoners were crammed together, some on the sweat-soaked floor and others spilling out of thin hammocks crisscrossed from ground to ceiling.
