Hugo Ernesto Osorio Chavez was born in 1970 and had served in the Policia Nacional Civil. On May 7, 2021 officers went to his house in the Estevez alley in the Apaneca district of Chalchuapa, in Santa Ana, after reports that a man in the area had attacked a woman. They found blood at the entrance. Inside were the bodies of two women, and at the back of the property two more in a pit.
The excavation went on for weeks. Reporting at the time put the recovery at fourteen bodies; the Salvadoran press later gave the total at around forty, mostly women, with men and children among them. He named others as having taken part, and said some had paid him.
He was tried for two of the deaths and sentenced to seventy years for two counts of femicide. That is the whole of the case proved against him. The prosecution service said at the time that sentences from other proceedings would be added to it, and by 2023 the same office was reporting publicly that it had been unable to investigate more than half of the deaths recovered from the house.
The accomplice prosecution collapsed. Ten people were accused in June 2022 over twelve of the deaths, nine of them in custody and one at large, and in January 2023 a Santa Ana court sent them for trial. On May 8, 2023 Judge Lidia del Carmen Lopez acquitted all nine of aggravated femicide and aggravated homicide. The Attorney General, Rodolfo Delgado, said publicly that those acquitted were accomplices who had paid Osorio to kill, and that his office would appeal. On May 11, the day they were due to be released, the nine were re-arrested on charges of unlawful association and enforced disappearance. A serving judge, Juan Antonio Duran, publicly criticised the prosecution service for naming the judge who had acquitted them, calling it a media pressure campaign of the kind international standards on judicial independence prohibit.
The English-language record of this case is out of step with the Salvadoran one. It is widely reported in English that he was convicted of fourteen murders. Salvadoran outlets and the prosecution service itself both state, repeatedly and in terms, that the seventy-year sentence covers two femicides. This archive follows the Salvadoran record.
Around forty people were taken out of the ground at one address, and two of those deaths have been proved against anybody. The remainder are not unsolved in the ordinary sense: an investigation identified them, named suspects, took the case to trial and lost, and the prosecution service has said it lacked the capacity to examine the rest.