These seem to issues of subordinates blindly following orders or miscarrying out their directives.

No - this is intentional. This is what Bukele wants, because Bukele is an authoritarian dictator who does not care about human rights.

“In the state of exception that was put into place last year, there’s been a series of new norms that have been generated,” Bullock told Vox. “Effectively, the state of exception has transformed the criminal justice system entirely,” essentially negating the possibility of fair trials.

For one thing, there simply aren’t enough public defenders assigned to the thousands of people in pretrial detention, Bullock said. But the bigger problem, according to Bertha María Deleón, an attorney from El Salvador, is the justice system itself.

“Bukele also controls the Attorney General’s Office, the institution in charge of public criminal defense,” she told Vox. “What’s more, the attorney general says that there are no cases of arbitrary detentions. The human rights attorney does not do her job either.”

According to Deleón, prisoners must wait in detention, “in overcrowded and subhuman conditions” as their criminal trial plays out, for as long as three years. “Many have died,” she told Vox, “and they do not allow an autopsy.”

“Oops, we accidentally crowded more people than can safely live in this space, denied them medical care and contact with the outside world! Just a few bad apples!”