Story highlights El Salvador is one of the world's deadliest countries

Killings peaked in 2015, with 103 homicides per 100,000 people

(CNN) The killings stopped for a day in El Salvador.

The small Central American country with one of the worst murder rates in the world went 24 hours without

a single homicide, said Howard Augusto Cotto of the National Civil Police.

Wednesday marked the first day in two years without a homicide, Cotto said at a news conference Thursday. There was one death that day, but police were not counting it as a murder/violent death since the deceased had been injured a few days earlier, he said.

The number of murders declined last month, Howard Augusto Cotto says.

In addition, December recorded the least murders in 2016, Cotto said. He provided no explanation for the decline in violence last month or for Wednesday's 24 hours with any killings.

Read More </s> El Salvador has rare murder-free day, 1st in nearly 2 years

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — El Salvador, one of the world's deadliest countries, has recorded a rare day without a single homicide.

National Civil Police commissioner Howard Cotto said Thursday that no murders were reported the previous day in the gang-plagued little Central American nation.

The last time the country went a full day without any killings was Jan. 22, 2015, according to records kept by The Associated Press. It also happened once in 2013 and on two days the year before that.

Killings peaked at 104 per 100,000 residents in 2015, the highest rate for any nation not in open war that year.

Homicides fell by about 20 percent last year, but it was still one of the most violent countries with 81.2 murders per 100,000 residents. </s> SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — El Salvador, one of the world’s deadliest countries, has recorded a rare day without a single homicide.

National Civil Police commissioner Howard Cotto said at a news conference Thursday that no murders were reported the previous day in the gang-plagued Central American nation.

The last time the country went a full day without any killings was Jan. 22, 2015, according to records kept by The Associated Press. It also happened once in 2013 and on two days the year before that.

The nation of about 6 million people averaged 14.4 murders a day last year.

Killings peaked at 104 per 100,000 residents in 2015, the highest rate for any nation not in open war that year.

Homicides fell by about 20 per cent in 2016, but it was still one of the most violent countries with 81.2 murders per 100,000 residents.

Warring gangs known as “maras” are involved in drug trafficking, organized crime and extortion rackets in the country. </s> SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - El Salvador’s maverick new president takes office on Saturday pledging to battle violence, poverty, corruption and mass migration to the United States - but will have to do all that without a congressional majority.

Nayib Bukele, a 37-year-old former mayor of San Salvador, ended 30 years of bipartisan rule by the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) with his election victory in February.

But the electoral coalition the former FMLN politician forged with right-wing allies for the five-year term won just 11 of 84 seats in Congress, forcing Bukele to promise to work with “all the political forces.”

“His strength is that he has awakened a lot of popular enthusiasm and that’s what he’s counting on,” said Jose Maria Tojeira, a political analyst and director of the Human Rights Institute of the Central American University in San Salvador.

“The traditional parties risk being swept away in the next elections if they fight the president or hinder government.”

Rampant crime is the main headache for most of El Salvador’s 6.6 million population. Bukele will inherit one of the most violent countries in the world, although under the outgoing FMLN government murders fell 15 percent in 2018.

At around 51 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, the murder rate is still about ten times higher than the United States.

Much of the blame is pinned on El Salvador’s “maras” - international criminal gangs involved in drug trafficking and extortion that have some 70,000 members. Previous governments have tried, but failed, to broker lasting truces between them.

Recently the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), the largest gang, floated the possibility of stopping violence through dialogue.

“We trust in God and in the new president Nayib,” a MS-13 spokesman told the Central American magazine Factum.

Gang violence has helped fuel mass migration from Central America and created tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Bukele said he will push ambitious public works to help contain migration, including plans for a Pacific railway, though he has given little indication of how he hopes to fund them.

El Salvador’s dollarized economy has not grown by more than 3% annually in the past decade and the government faces a steep challenge to shoulder external debts of over $9.5 billion without paring back welfare spending, analysts say.

The incoming president has used social media to burnish his profile, scoring a hit on Twitter earlier this year by ironically describing El Salvador as a “Mexican country” after Fox News in the United States had earlier made reference in an on-screen caption to “3 Mexican countries.”

Of Palestinian descent, the bearded Bukele capitalized on discontent towards the two established parties with his motto: “There’s enough money when no one steals.”

Promising to end widespread graft, he wants to create an international commission against corruption, similar to schemes once adopted by neighboring Guatemala and Honduras. </s> Like many middle class Salvadorans, Óscar Martínez has a security system in his home. But his goes a step further that most. It has several panic buttons and other features we won’t go into because his life has been very specifically threatened on more than one occasion.

Martínez is willing to change some things about his life to deal with living in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world. He, for example, takes his 3-year-old daughter to shopping malls, instead of public parks. He knows why he is a target, but that's one thing he doesn't plan to change. Martínez is one of the most important and reliable investigative journalists covering crime and migration in Central America, particularly in his native El Salvador where he writes for the the news site El Faro.net. His work covering gangsters, narco traffickers, crooked cops and corrupt government officials can piss people off.

Last year, he and two other El Faro journalists had to flee the country after their exposé about an alleged police massacre in which eight people were killed. He has since returned to El Salvador and now has a new book out in English, "A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America."

The book, a collection of some of his best long form articles, dives deep to the problems driving the region's violence and impunity, and is a fitting follow-up to his widely acclaimed 2013 book, "The Beast," for which Martínez spent three years following Central American migrants in their harrowing ordeals traveling through Mexico to the US.

If "The Beast" was a look at the dangers of the journey, "A History of Violence" focuses on why people take it to begin with.

“I would be satisfied if this book became a tool for those people who want to explain, principally in the United States, why so many people migrate,” he said in a recent Skype conversation from his home office in San Salvador. “I would be satisfied if this book became a tool for those who want to explain and reaffirm that the motivation of many migrants is not to migrate, but to flee.”

In the first 73 days of 2016, 1,688 people were murdered in El Salvador, more than twice the number of people killed in the same period last year according to police data reported by a Salvadoran news site. The country is well on its way to surpassing last year’s total of 6,640 murders, which was itself a 70 percent increase over the previous year.

To put these numbers in perspective, roughly 162 people were killed in terrorist attacks in Paris in November and in Brussels in March.

According to Martínez and his team at El Faro, the murder rate in El Salvador dropped from mid-March through April, from about 23 a day to 10 per day, in large part because gang leaders agreed to reduce murders during their negotiations with the government. This week though, the gangs pulled out of all of their agreements with the ruling party and Martínez expects the murder rate to climb again.

The crisis in El Salvador and Central America has a direct impact on the US. It is one of the drivers of Central American migration across the border, which has been ticking up as again. More than 17,000 unaccompanied minors, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were detained at the border in the last quarter of 2015, more than double the number of children detained in the same time period last year.

But "A History of Violence" isn’t about these migrants, at least not the ones who make it. It tells the story of "Hollywood Kid," a hitman who took a plea bargain to testify against the leaders of a gang and was eventually killed himself, despite being in a witness protection program.

It explains the life of Grecia, a victim of human trafficking who was lured into working for a brothel in southern Mexico and repeatedly raped by her captors. She was tricked into coming to Mexico with the promise of jobs and captured. Her captors, members of the brutal Zetas caretel, branded her with a tattoo, raped her and then turned her into a sex slave.

In the course of the book, Martínez travels to an isolated Guatemalan jungle villages to interview indigenous people displaced from their land, accused of being "narcos" while the real narco estates remained untouched. He meets with a narco trafficker in Nicaragua who explains how the industry has evolved, and with a city official in El Salvador who will only talk about local corruption anonymously and while standing next to an industrial motor, so no one can listen in. One chapter details the story of bodies at the bottom of a well, all homicide victims, and the quixotic quest by a forensic investigator to retrieve them before the statute of limitations expires and the accused murderers are freed.

Martínez spoke with Global Nation about the people he has written about in his book, Donald Trump’s wall and the good — and not so good — policies of the Obama administration.

Jared Goyette: Why do you think Central America receives so little attention compared to other regions of the world?

Óscar​ Martínez: I don’t understand why the outlets in the US, that have lots of resources, have such little interest in the region. It’s a region very related to the US because of the subject of migration, because of the subject of violence — there are cliques, or sub groups of the Central American gangs that have a presence in California, Houston, Washington D.C., New York. I don’t understand why they have such little interest in what happens in Central America.

It's part of a tendency to look for all the answers in just one place... We like to talk about refugee camps, but we don’t like to accompany migrants in their journey when it is a long journey like the one in Mexico. It seems like in many cases, many publications — and this is true in the entire world, not just in the US — like to get packaged tragedies so they can quickly see them and analyze them in just one product. When the tragedy is more complex to explain, as are these tragedies or modern wars in the north of Central America, the interest dissipates.

Photos: El Salvador's skyrocketing violence is being met by youth who risk their lives to treat victims

JG: What’s your take on US presidential candidate Donald Trump?

I’m in agreement with a few of the things Jon Lee Anderson has said in the media. I read that he said that they should charge Donald Trump with hate speech or for inciting violence, which is a crime that exists in the US. I think that he is a an erratic man who represents the feeling of many people in the US who believe that change — and I’m referring to racial change, customs — is the apocalypse. He, like all politicians, is a real reflection of a certain part of society in the US.

This is not a problem that is just about one man, it is a problem that comes from a large part of the society that continues to think these things about undocumented immigrants, that continues to think that the construction of a wall is the solution. They built the first wall in Tijuana with leftover material from the Vietnam war was in 1994. And the migrants keep crossing through Tijuana, despite the fact that they built another wall with leftover material from the Gulf War, and that George Bush added 18,000 new border guards — now it's at 20,000 — with Operation Jump Start. The people keep entering. The lesson is that this is not the solution. And they keep believing this is the solution while 74,000 children arrive in one year in 2014, but they keep believing that it's the solution. I believe that is not a product of reason, but of hate.

Related: A filmmaker’s journey along the US-Mexico border shows it's 'a very powerful idea to have a line'

JG: Two chapters of "A History of Violence" deal with the state's inability to protect a witness who takes a plea bargains to testify against gangs. The US sends hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to El Salvador, with much (though not all) of it going to the police and military or to combat narco trafficking. Should the US be doing more to support the basic rule of law and things like witness protection programs?

OM: Right now I am finishing an investigation about the work of the public prosecutor's office and in two months I have learned about four protected witnesses who have been killed. Four more! If I kept working on this topic for a year, for certain I would discover 20 more. The system of witnesses protection in El Salvador doesn’t work but the entire justice system depends on testimony. It’s a system in which scientific proof is very poor; there are few people well qualified to do the job well. The investigation is principally based on finding a person who can tell you what happened. But we don’t offer protection to these people. Yes, the system of protected witnesses is garbage in El Salvador to the point where it’s very common that people are killed and no one is scandalized when an official says that a protected witness has been killed.

I believe El Salvador’s principal problem in relation to solving its violence problem is that the political class, which should resolve the problem, doesn’t understand it. The members of the security commission, the security cabinet, don’t understand exactly how a gang operates. They haven’t even dedicated themselves to understanding the history of where these gangs come from. They have a base of knowledge that has very little support in statistics, in data, in studies. They do what occurs to them in the moment. They are leaders who very rarely have a plan. They just have isolated ideas. And I think that this is part of what does us so much damage. The US should do a much better job of supervising how the El Salvadorian government spends this money. I’m not saying that they should stop giving money, because the US has a historic moral responsibility with these countries in the current violent situation. I say they should better manage how they give it and how it’s used.

JG: One of the stories in the book is about Grecia, a victim of human trafficking and sexual explotation. Why did you pick her story? What stood out about it?

It seems to me that in the way we generally view crimes, as a list of importance, there are some things which are misplaced. Since the ‘80s, the US has sold us the idea that drugs were the principal problem of organized crime. That’s what they have most wanted us to pay attention to — the drugs, who is a narco trafficker and how much drugs do they move?

I honestly prefer that a ton of cocaine passes through my country than having a victim of trafficking, of sexual exploitation like Grecia. I think that the model of combating drugs is absolutely absurd. It’s already been shown that prohibition is ridiculous. It’s already shown that criminalization is a loss for the state. However, the other crimes that organize crime comits, like those against Grecia, like the trafficking of a woman who spent months in confinement, raped by salvages — this seems normal to us, this we only punish it with eight years in prison at the most. This is something that we make invisible. To me it seems like journalism principally has to illuminate the darkest corners of our societies. This is one of the darkest corners of societies of Central America, what happens to women in Central American societies.

PRI: In one chapter, you tell the story of a group of bodies that were discovered at the bottom of a well and how, over the course of two years, the state was unable to retrieve the bodies. What’s the lesson of the well?

OM: For me the moral lesson of the story of the well is that the impunity of El Salvador is a selective impunity. If in this well there had been the children of businessmen, if they even suspected that there were children of businessmen, I assure you that they would have opened this well in a week. That’s to say that the first lesson, and the strongest, the most terrible, is that here in Central America there are distinct classes of citizens. There are some who are a little important. And there are others who are very important. And I believe that the people at the bottom of that well belonged to the class of Salvadorans who are of little or no importance. Only one in 10 homicides from the last year went to a trial — I’m not saying there was a conviction. I believe that the message that the Salvadoran state sends with acts like this is very clear: This is a good place to kill. If you kill, you will get away with it.

PRI: What do you think will be US President Barack Obama’s legacy in Central America?

Obama had a role in opening the discourse when it came to immigration reform. He, at least, tried. I think now some time is going to have to pass before someone else tries it again. He understood that the only way to combat violence in Central America is through a regional effort and he tried to unite the Central American governments — Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — though the distribution of funds.

However, he continued believing that the principal solution to the problem is repression, because what [his administration] invested in the most is police, the army and the persecution of crime. He’s a president who continued believing that prevention, reinsertion and rehabilitation are secondary questions. He is one of the presidents who most believed in deportation. The fact is that he deported many more Central Americans than his predecessor. In this sense, I think that when it comes to thinking what is the solution with respect to Central America, Obama is a president who has done much harm in the issues I cover. At the same time, he has a lot of virtues with what he has done in the US. I don’t know a lot about that. I know I can tell you what he has done with the migrants, and I know what he tried to do with migrants. The numbers of deportations speak for themselves.

Obama was also complicit in allowing Mexico to become the natural barrier for migrants on their way to the US. This was not only disappointing, but also very irresponsible. The US government knows perfectly well what happens to migrants who cross Mexico trying to enter the US. I dedicated my first book to this and it doesn’t seem at all responsible to me to put the Mexican government in charge of that task. If you look at the stats, as the number of deportations declines in the US, they begin to expand exponentially in Mexico. I don’t think that’s a product of coincidence. I think it’s a product of conversations.

More: Is Mexico doing the US’s dirty work on Central American migrants?

JG: You have a family and a young daughter. Your life was threatened last year. Why do you continue to do the type of work that you do?

There are two responses: The first is egotistical. The only thing I know how to do and gives me any sense of satisfaction is doing journalism. I don’t know how to do anything else. I have done this since I was 17 and now I'm 33. I have never done anything else. I played soccer as a teenager but I'm not very good.

And second, I continue to believe that journalism changes things. Some days, I believe it less. But if it doesn’t change things, if I am convinced of anything, it’s what Seymour Hersh said, that journalism makes it more difficult for the corrupt and a little less difficult for the victims of this corruption or this violence. I continue to believe that the journalism that I do, the journalism that we do at El Faro, makes life a little more difficult for a few bastards. And I think that’s important. If at least I made it so this person gets nervous, or has a really bad day, or has to do this much better to continue corruption or violence, I consider myself satisfied. I hope that when I die, my epitaph doesn’t say, “He lived and died in the most violent country in the world and he didn’t do anything about it.”

Also: In one of the deadliest countries in the world, there's one business thriving — the coffin industry </s> A Brazilian city's murder rate has soared by 650 per cent with 52 homicides in just three days after police officers went on strike.

Military troops had to be deployed in the state of Espírito Santo after looting, rape and murders broke out on Saturday amid the industrial action.

The chaos has been compared to the 2014 thriller film The Purge, where people take advantage of the absence of law and order to carry out horrific crimes.

With officers staging a walk-out over conditions and wages, thugs are running riot, with people running rampant with guns and machetes, shops being robbed, buses set on fire and dead bodies are left lying in the street.

Protests by friends and family of military police officers in the coastal state ignited the crime wave and forced the shutdown of state services such as health centres and schools.

According to latest figures, there were 802 recorded murders in the state capital of Victoria in 2015.

This equates to just more than two a day.

In the last three days, since the strikes began, there have been 52 reported homicides, according to Plus 55.

The unprecedented surge in violence dwarfs the figures of the entire state, which has a population of 3.9million.

In 2012, the latest available figures, there were just over five reported homicides a day state-wide.

Since the strikes, the figure in Victoria alone is more than 17.

At the request of the state government, federal troops began arriving Monday night to help patrol the streets.

The protests calling for higher pay began this weekend outside military police barracks across the small, coastal state and have prevented vehicles from leaving.

That has left the military police virtually unable to patrol, though a few foot patrols began Monday, the Department of Public Security said.

Harrowing scenes were reported from all around the state, and one resident told Political Outsource: 'The thugs are randomly shooting at anyone who passes the street in Espírito Santo. My God what is happening.'

Schools have been closed and even football matches cancelled in the affected areas due to the lack of security, which has meant many people are refusing to even venture outdoors.

'I won't even leave my house today,' one Brazilian resident in Espirato Santo told Political Outsource.

'Things are absolutely crazy, there are people running around with guns in pretty populated areas, dozens of people stealing from malls, even dead bodies on streets.'

In the state capital of Vitoria, store windows were smashed and metal shutters used to protect shops peeled away as looters took advantage of the vacuum in law enforcement.

Civil police used force to stop some thieves, shooting at least one man in the leg.

Defense Minister Raul Jungmann traveled to the state Monday evening and 150 soldiers were already on duty.

In all, 1,000 members of the armed forces and 200 members of the national guard were being sent to reinforce police.

The commander of the military police in the state has also been replaced.

The protests come as Brazil grapples with a deep, protracted recession and many states struggle financially.

In Rio de Janeiro state, where the government is desperately trying to plug a huge deficit, public servants have repeatedly protested over late pay, sometimes clashing violently with police.

The protests in Espirito Santo have 'paralyzed the military police service, not just in the capital but also in the entire state,' the state's head of public security, Andre Garcia, told reporters.

He said there had been a marked increase in crime since the protests began.

Later, he told the defense minister that there had been 37 homicides from Sunday to Monday, though that figure has since climbed to 52, according to local media.

'Movements of this nature, they hold society hostage,' Garcia said.

Because of security concerns, officials in Vitoria suspended most services Monday, though emergency services were being maintained with help from the municipal security force.

The closure of health services meant there could be no vaccinations for yellow fever in the city, even as Brazil experiences its worst outbreak of the disease since 2000.

Espirito Santo has seen 14 confirmed cases in the current outbreak, and dozens more are under investigation.

A court ordered the protesters to end their blockade, but the demonstrations outside barracks continued.

Because of their crucial role, members of the military police are not allowed to engage in strikes.

But Garcia, the head of public security, implied that officers were behind the movement, which he called 'supposedly spontaneous.'

Major Rogerio Fernandes Lima, a union representative, denied to reporters that military police had organized the protests but said the officers supported the goals, namely higher pay.

He said officers in the state are among the worst paid in Brazil.

The defence ministry said soldiers were being sent in 'due to the serious public safety situation'.

Police officers have been blockading police stations in protest against unpaid salaries since Saturday.

The acting governor of Espirito Santo state, Cesar Colnago, had earlier begged President Michel Temer 'to send the National Force and the army to safeguard the security of citizens'.

State security chief Andre Garcia said the police chief had been replaced and the new commander had been tasked with 'restoring order and discipline'.

Talks are to take place with the disgruntled officers but they have been told they have to go back to work first.

Vitoria and its suburbs have a population of 1.8 million people, while a total of 3.9 million live in Espirito Santo state.

State Secretary of Public Security André Garcia told Globo: 'The first step taken by the government to overthrow this movement was the filing of a lawsuit requiring the illegality of the movement to be enacted.

'Our intention is to negotiate, always, but this negotiation must be based on mutual respect, and the condition for the police come to patrol the streets and answer the calls of the Capixabas citizens.'

The government has threatened to file a lawsuit against the force, claiming the strike is illegal. </s> Salvadoran immigrants living in Delaware under Temporary Protected Status face deportation in 18 months after the Trump Administration announced Monday that it will remove El Salvador from a federal list of countries to which citizens cannot safely return.

The Department of Homeland Security similarly ended TPS for people from Haiti and Nicaragua in 2017. For hundreds of current Delaware residents, the decisions likely mean a forthcoming deportation order during the next two years.

Yet, many who have lived for decades in Delaware, establishing businesses and buying homes, may choose instead to stay here undocumented rather than return to the extreme violence in their homeland, said Bryant Garcia, the immigration program coordinator at La Esperanza in Georgetown.

"You have the potential for people who had a legal status, who were paying taxes, to now move into the shadows," Garcia said. "I understand that this was supposed to be temporary but the fact is, the U.S. government has sat on this for years, and years, to the point that people have started anew here."

While the Department of Homeland Security does not release "state-by-state breakdowns" for TPS recipients, Garcia estimated that the number is close to 1,000 in Delaware.

El Salvador, a diminutive country on a global scale, has had by far the most TPS recipients living in the United States. Salvadorans were given the status in 2001 following two devastating earthquakes, which killed nearly 1,000 people, and destroyed more than 100,000 homes.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen on Monday said disaster-related conditions from the earthquake no longer exist and therefore her agency is legally bound to end the program.

"Following the 2001 earthquake, El Salvador received a significant amount of international aid to assist in its recovery efforts, including millions of dollars dedicated to emergency and long-term assistance. Many reconstruction projects have now been completed," Nielsen said in a statement.

Yet previous administrations under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had noted that violence from drug traffickers was a factor in their decisions to extend the program.

In February, the State Department issued a warning to U.S. travelers in El Salvador, noting the country "has one of the highest homicide levels in the world and crimes such as extortion, assault and robbery are common."

Garcia said Salvadorans who had lived in the United States often are a "bigger target" for those crimes when returning to their home country.

"We do know of situations where people who have only been in the states for a year or two ... who have then been killed" after returning home, Garcia said.

When people from Haiti lost the Temporary Protected Status in November some decided to move to Canada rather than their home country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. The migration left chicken farms in Delaware and Maryland's Eastern Shore without needed employees, said Bill Satterfield, executive director of Delmarva Poultry Industry.

"One of the biggest challenges facing the Delmarva chicken industry is the recruitment and retention of qualified employees," Satterfield said in a statement. "The looming July 2019 expiration of Temporary Protected Status for some Haitian chicken company workers likely will result in more departures in the coming months."

Contact Karl Baker at kbaker@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2329. Follow him on Twitter @kbaker6.

More: Trump may order 200,000 Salvadorans to leave U.S.

More: Trump administration to send Haiti earthquake victims home in 2019 </s> CIUDAD HIDALGO, El Salvador (AP) - A young rape victim who was suspected of having an abortion and charged with homicide was acquitted by a judge at a retrial Monday in a case that attracted international attention to El Salvador's strict abortion laws.

Evelyn Beatriz Hernández, now 21, had served 33 months of a 30-year prison sentence when her conviction was overturned in February for lack of evidence and a new trial was ordered. Prosecutors had asked for a 40-year sentence.

The retrial was a first for such a case in the Central American nation, where prosecutors aggressively pursue legal cases against women who have miscarriages or other obstetric emergencies, accusing them of murder.

"Thank God, justice was done," Hernández said following the announcement of the verdict, visibly emotional as dozens of women waited at the courthouse. "I also thank you who have been present here."

"Yes we did!" the women chanted.

Hernández also thanked foreign diplomats who have followed the case closely. The Associated Press usually does not name victims of alleged sexual assault, but Hernández has spoken publicly about her case.

Evelyn Hernandez, 21, smiles in court after being acquitted on charges of aggravated homicide in her retrial related to the loss of a pregnancy in 2016, in Ciudad Delgado on the outskirts of San Salvador, El Salvador, Monday, Aug. 19, 2019. Hernandez, who has said she did not realize she was pregnant as the result of a rape when she gave birth into a latrine at 32 weeks, was originally sentenced to 30 years under El Salvador's strict abortion laws. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)

Hernández's fetus was at 32 weeks in 2016 when she felt intense abdominal pains and delivered it into an outdoor toilet, and it was later found lifeless in a septic tank. Her mother said she found her passed out next to the latrine, and Hernández said she didn't know she was pregnant.

Both women said they didn't know there was a fetus in the tank, but prosecutors didn't believe them and pressed charges. Forensic experts were unable to determine whether it died in the uterus or in the septic tank.

"We believe the judge has been very fair in his ruling," defense lawyer Bertha María Deleón said. "He has said that there was no way to prove a crime and for that reason he absolved her."

El Salvador is one of three Central American nations with total bans on abortion.

"This is a resounding victory for the rights of women in El Salvador. It reaffirms that no woman should be wrongly accused of homicide for the simple fact of suffering an obstetric emergency," said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International.

Guevara-Rosas called on El Salvador to cease "criminalizing women once and for all by immediately revoking the nation's draconian anti-abortion laws."

Evelyn Hernandez, left, 21, is hugged by her defense attorney Bertha Deleon after being acquitted on charges of aggravated homicide in her retrial related to the loss of a pregnancy in 2016, outside the court in Ciudad Delgado on the outskirts of San Salvador, El Salvador, Monday, Aug. 19, 2019. Hernandez, who has said she did not realize she was pregnant as the result of a rape when she gave birth into a latrine at 32 weeks, was originally sentenced to 30 years under El Salvador's strict abortion laws. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez) </s> El Salvador Woman Who Lost Her Pregnancy Is Acquitted Of Homicide In Retrial

A young woman from El Salvador who was convicted of aggravated homicide after she lost her pregnancy has been acquitted during a retrial.

El Salvador has one of the strictest abortion laws in the world – it's not allowed under any circumstances.

Evelyn Beatriz Hernández, 21, has said she was raped by a gang member and didn't know she was pregnant. In 2016, she gave birth into a toilet, and her mother found her passed out next to it.

At the hospital, doctors told her that she'd given birth, according to the BBC. "She was arrested after the body of her baby was found in the toilet's septic tank," the broadcaster reported. It's not clear whether it was stillborn died in the septic tank. Forensic experts could not make a determination, according to The Associated Press.

Hernández was convicted of aggregated murder and a judge sentenced her to 30 years in prison in 2017. Earlier this year, the country's Supreme Court ordered a retrial, saying the first verdict "was based on prejudice and insufficient evidence," according to Reuters.

She was acquitted on Monday. "Thank God, justice was done," Hernández tearfully told a crowd outside the court, the news service reported. "There are many women who are still locked up and I call for them to be freed soon, too."

Amnesty International said that in El Salvador, "at least 19 women remain in jail or continue to face charges in these circumstances."

"This is a resounding victory for the rights of women in El Salvador," said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty's Americas director. "It reaffirms that no woman should be wrongly accused of homicide for the simple fact of suffering an obstetric emergency."

Hernández has said that "if I'd known I was pregnant I would have awaited [the birth] with pride and joy," the BBC notes.

Many women obtain abortions in El Salvador despite the restrictive laws. A report from the Center for Reproductive Rights estimates that nearly 250,000 happened between 1995 and 2000 – "with 11.1% of them resulting in the death of the pregnant woman."

CPR said a Salvadoran organization, Agrupación Ciudadana para la Despenalización del Aborto Terapéutico, Ético y Eugenésico, analyzed data about women prosecuted for abortion-related crimes. "The women most affected by El Salvador's criminalization of abortion are young women from a lower socioeconomic class," the organization concluded.

Like in Hernández's case, many of the women who have been prosecuted were accused by health workers providing them medical care.
As the homicide rate in El Salvador declines, the country records its first day in the last two years without a homicide.