Amnesty International on Monday called on Salvadoran authorities to guarantee Ruth López’s due process rights, end her incommunicado detention and comply with precautionary measures ordered in her favour by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The rights group said López remains behind bars a year after her detention and repeated its call for her immediate and unconditional release.
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary general, said López is a prisoner of conscience who has been unjustly detained for a year because of her tireless fight against corruption and her defence of social justice. López was detained on 18 May 2025, and her relatives and legal team said in the first hours afterward that they did not know where she was.
That detail still hangs over the case. One year after her detention, Amnesty said the Salvadoran authorities continue to hold her in conditions that are incompatible with international human rights obligations, including incommunicado detention and restrictions on her right to defend herself. The organization said it recognized López as a prisoner of conscience in June 2025, then welcomed precautionary measures granted by the commission in September 2025, which it said should include effective access to legal counsel, regular communication with her family and protection of her physical and psychological integrity.
In December 2025, Amnesty sent a public letter to Human Rights Ombudsperson Raquel Caballero de Guevara, pressing for action. The group said the case sits inside a broader pattern of growing harassment and criminalization of human rights defenders and critical voices in El Salvador, along with concerns about the lack of independent and effective national mechanisms to monitor people deprived of liberty. It also pointed to the thousands of people it says have been arbitrarily detained in the country.
The question now is not where is El Salvador on the map, but how far its authorities are prepared to go in holding a prominent critic incommunicado despite international warnings. For López, the next step is the one Amnesty has demanded from the start: release, and release without conditions.
