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-relatedexception category are having their rights suspended.
