Blanca Osmilda Castro Quijada was a woman suffering from chronic illnesses: she had hypertension, hypothyroidism, and diabetes.
When police officers arrived at her red-brick, corrugated-iron house in the Altos del Tecana subdivision in Santa Ana on June 1, 2022, they found no evidence of unlawful association.
Inside were sweets and soft drinks that she sold to make a living, a hundred pills that she took daily, and an adult daughter who the family believes has suffered from schizophrenia since childhood, according to relatives.
“She had a little shop, and that's how she got by. People loved her because if she had bought a case of soda, and someone came by, she would give them one even if it meant she wouldn’t make a sale,” says a relative of Blanca Osmilda.
The relative continued: “There is a woman who sometimes walks down the street, and if she was eating, she would give her food. Sometimes she even sent me a quarter of a chicken, and she still had food left over because she was generous.”
The relative agreed to share details of the case on condition of anonymity, fearing becoming a victim of arbitrary arrest under the state of exception, as happened to Blanca Osmilda.
On the day of Blanca Osmilda’s arrest, at around 9:30 in the morning, police officers entered the house without showing a search or arrest warrant.
According to a neighbor who was a witness, the officers told her that she had to report to the police station for a “normal” procedure and that she would then “return home,” as they have done with many of those arrested.
Blanca Osmilda returned home two years later, but in a coffin.
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Blanca Osmilda was the mother of a 40-year-old woman who, although the family never took her to a doctor, they suspect has suffered from schizophrenia since the age of two, when she began to scream for no apparent reason.
“She had a sick daughter, a special daughter,” says the relative. “I have to feed her and tell her to take a bath,” says Blanca Osmilda's relative.
Before they took her from her home, Blanca Osmilda begged the police to let her make a phone call to inform her family and prevent her sick daughter from being left alone in the house.
The police ignored her request and “the girl was left alone,” says the neighbor who walked several blocks down a hill to alert other family members about the arrest.
A relative and three neighbors of Blanca Osmilda all asked that their names be withheld for fear of the state of exception.
The Nayib Bukele administration’s famous public security strategy has succeeded in dismantling gangs but has destroyed the right to the presumption of innocence and due process, among others.
The measures have been in effect since March 27, 2022, following the breakdown of a pact between the gangs and the Bukele government.
Socorro Jurídico Humanitario now records 94,844 arrests and 470 deaths in prison under the state of exception in El Salvador.
In June 2025, a survey by the Public Opinion Institute of the Central American University found that six out of ten Salvadorans are “more careful” when expressing their political opinions.
Nearly half of those surveyed are afraid to express their opinions for fear of being detained or imprisoned.
El Faro has also documented that some relatives of those who have died in prison even deny knowing their loved ones for fear of the Bukele government.
Blanca Osmilda was taken from her home at 9:30 in the morning, but the police held her in the cells of the 911 police station in Santa Ana until 4:00 in the afternoon.
Until that moment, a relative and one of her neighbors received a brief explanation of why she was being detained: illicit association.
That crime, the police said, was due to her relationship with the Mara Salvatrucha-13 gang, something that surprised the detainee’s relative because the Altos del Tecana subdivision was not controlled by any gang.
Something similar happened on Espíritu Santo Island in Usulután, a place where authorities captured 22 people, even though there were no gangs on the island.
Some twenty police documents, drawn up between 2014 and 2022, coincide with the testimony of Blanca Osmilda’s family: there were no gangs in the Altos del Tecana subdivision.
Various documents prepared by the Police Intelligence Subdirectorate detail that three cliques of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) operated in the department of Santa Ana: the Stoner Locos Salvatruchos (STLS) clique, the Fulton Locos Salvatruchos (FLS) clique, and the Hollywood Locos Salvatruchos (HLS) clique.
The police are very explicit in mentioning the areas controlled by this gang, which they linked to Blanca Osmilda.
The housing development where she lived and was captured does not appear in any report or in the 10 million internal police emails and 250,000 Armed Forces emails released in the Guacamaya Leaks.
The STLS clique mainly operated in the El Ranchador canton; the Santa Cecilia neighborhood and the Santa Ana Norte urbanization in Cutumay Camones; the Primavera canton, the San Antonio neighborhood, and the Barcelona neighborhood of Santa Ana, according to a report prepared in March 2016 after the seizure of a notebook from a gang leader known as “El Tato de Fulton.”
The document adds that the FLS clique controls the Santa Anita neighborhood, while the HLS operates from the San Juan neighborhood in San Sebastián Salitrillo.
Other police intelligence reports prepared in 2017, 2019, and 2022 state that the STLS clique controlled coffee farms in cantons such as Las Aradas, El Porvenir, the Sitio Viejo de Nancintepeque hamlet, Las Cruces canton, and Ayutepeque.
“Armed with AK-47 rifles, they asked the farm owners to allow them to cut part of the harvest for the gang,” states one of the reports obtained by El Faro through DDoSecrets, an organization dedicated to releasing information of public interest.
None of the documents obtained by this newspaper report gang activity in the Altos del Tecana subdivision, where Blanca Osmilda was captured.
The closest criminal acts to this subdivision occurred in 2014 and 2020. In October 2014, anti-narcotics police arrested four STLS gang members after finding three medium-sized and one small bag of marijuana in their possession.
These arrests took place in the village of San Antonio, six kilometers away from Altos del Tecana.
Then, in November 2020, two years before the state of exception was declared, the Armed Forces included in their press monitoring an assault committed by two armed men on a truck driver in Altos de Tecana.
The location of the assault is four kilometers away from the subdivision where Blanca Osmilda lived, on the other side of a hill.
Despite the lack of official documents on gang activity in the subdivision or precise information on the alleged relationship between Blanca Osmilda and MS-13, she was arrested for belonging to an illegal group.
Her family does not know who the members of that group were because she was the only one arrested that day, according to her relative.
A neighbor rebuked the police: Why accuse her of illicit associations if they took her from her home? Usually, these charges are filed against individuals caught in a group.
The response she claims to have received from the authorities was surreal. “That's how illicit association is being handled now,” the neighbor recalls one of the police officers answering.
Hundreds of people are in prison because the police applied ambiguous criteria, such as looking nervous or suspicious.
On June 2, 2022, the police informed the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (PDDH) of Blanca Osmilda’s transfer to the Ilopango prison, according to a leaked police document.
When the case reached a Specialized Court of Instruction in Santa Ana, prosecutor Mauricio Valmore Rivas Guevara accused her of belonging to an illegal group.
According to the charges, the woman belonged to an illegal association made up of 200 other people. But those hundreds of people did not live in Altos del Tecana or in neighboring areas.
Given the lack of gang members in the subdivision, Blanca Osmilda was included in an indictment against 200 people captured in late May and early June 2022 in different municipalities of Santa Ana, Sonsonate, and Ahuachapán.
She was prosecuted for allegedly associating with people who lived far away from her.
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At the top of Tecana Hill, there is a leafy amate tree from which you can see a grid of dirt roads, with visible damage from last winter.
Among the mixed-construction houses and trees, there’s a church belonging to the El Shaddai Evangelical Mission, where Blanca Osmilda had worshipped for three years before her arrest.
Her religiosity marked the last words she said to her family member before going to jail in Santa Ana on the afternoon of June 1, 2022.
“She shouted at me and told me to have faith, that God would take care of it, and that God would get her out,” recalls one relative who accompanied her. “Of course, God gave her victory because he saved her life, but not in the way we wanted.”
Blanca Osmilda was imprisoned in Ilopango and later in Apanteos. The family never heard from her again, despite multiple attempts to contact the Attorney General's Office.
“When I went, they told me to come back later. I never, ever spoke to the lawyer. They never said anything, just that I should come back later,” the relative added.
The family hired a private lawyer in the first months of her imprisonment, according to documents obtained through DDoSecrets. Lawyer Darío Alfaro requested a hearing to review her provisional detention due to her delicate health.
On August 29, 2022, the judge in charge of the Specialized Court of Instruction of Santa Ana A2 considered that inquiring about Blanca Osmilda's chronic illnesses was a waste of time.
“The hearing to review the measures is declared inadmissible, as it is considered a delaying tactic,” she ruled in a document.
In the following months, the only thing the family could do was bring her a care package every month, although the family is not sure whether she received the food or medicine.
After claiming the defense was playing for time, the same court, created by the ruling party Nuevas Ideas, granted one extension after another to prolong her stay in prison.
In November 2022, prosecutor Rivas Guevara was granted six months to investigate. But one month later, thanks to a reform of the Organized Crime Law, the court extended the deadline to one year.
“The state of exception has allowed for the mass capture of terrorists, which requires providing justice sector institutions with the necessary laws to order the proceedings that have been initiated,” the resolution states.
That extension expired in December 2023, but Blanca Osmilda remained in detention without trial, because the court considered every request for a review hearing due to her multiple chronic illnesses to be a play for time.
With no rights, her family continued to bring her the care packages.
The package included levothyroxine, to treat hypothyroidism; amiodarone, a highly toxic drug to treat cardiac arrhythmias; and metformin, used to treat diabetes by improving insulin sensitivity and reducing intestinal absorption of sugar.
Blanca Osmilda took three other medications, but the family member didn’t specify the names.
“I don’t remember the names of each one, but she had to take about 300 pills a month because she had blood pressure and sugar problems, fluid retention, and heart problems.”
In January 2024, Blanca Osmilda had an appointment at the Santa Ana hospital. Guards said that the family could not do anything and had to leave the hospital documents so that the prison authorities would take responsibility for taking her.
The family member left the hospital card at the prison. Since then, she has not been able to pick up Blanca Osmilda’s medication.
“Since I left the card at the prison, I had to buy the medicine, which cost me about a hundred dollars,” she says. “It was a mistake to leave the card because I don’t know if they took her to the appointment. Without the card or the prescriptions, I couldn’t pick up the medicine.”
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The funeral home employees arrived at 6:00 a.m. It was June 23, 2024, 24 months after Blanca Osmilda's arrest, and a man told the family, bluntly, that she had died.
The family went to the hospital in Santa Ana, where they were told that she had died of cardiac arrhythmia.
The obituary from the Institute of Legal Medicine lists the cause of death as “dilated cardiomyopathy,” a serious disease that stretches and thins the heart muscle, reducing the heart’s pumping capacity.
The document does not specify whether Blanca Osmilda received treatment for this disease at the Apanteos prison or at the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Santa Ana.
“Medical assistance: not specified,” states the document prepared by forensic scientist Bladimir Antonio Clara Hernández.
Blanca Osmilda became one of 35 women who died during the state of exception that Socorro Jurídico Humanitario has been able to document.
Their latest report, presented on January 29, states that “of the 35 women who died, in five cases the apparent cause of death was violent; the other 30 were due to situations related to illness and lack of medical treatment.”
The relative who attended the funeral says that Blanca Osmilda, at least on her face, had no bruises or scars, as has been the case with several other bodies that have been returned to families from prisons.
The family is unsure whether she was deprived of the medicine she needed. “There was nothing on her face. I was in bad shape. I didn’t even have the courage to look at her, so I didn't check the rest of her body,” says her relative.
Blanca Osmilda had no criminal record, much less one related to gangs. When asked if she had gang tattoos, her relative looked surprised:
“No, she was a 60-year-old woman! How could she be involved in that? She never had any problems with anyone.”
SJH’s report states that 470 people detained under the state of exception died in Salvadoran prisons. Of those, the organization estimates that the cause of death was violent in 32 percent of cases: 150. The figure is current as of January 29, 2026.
Despite the evidence, the Attorney General’s Office has not investigated or prosecuted any authorities for these deaths.
In the case of Blanca Osmilda, her family is resigned to expecting nothing from the state. “With God’s will, there is nothing one can do. As human beings it hurts, but God knows how to handle things. And that was by God’s design.”
Blanca Osmilda’s relative says she supports the state of exception, with some reservations.
“In a way, it’s good, because my daughter was going to high school and I was afraid to send her because of all the kids,” she says. “Thank God. With this I can now send her to study freely.”
She explains that, while there were no gangs in her community, there were in nearby neighborhoods.
The regime’s arrests, she concludes, should be supported by evidence, something that did not happen in the case of her relative: “It would be good if they conducted a thorough investigation.”