The current deportation of MS-13 gang member and Salvadoran citizen Kilmar Ábrego García, whose gang affiliation invalidated his U.S. residency, has drawn attention to the Salvadoran jail the place he’s now being held. El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) is the brainchild of President Nayib Bukele, who operated on the premise that anybody bearing gang tattoos was possible a member, since non-gang-members with gang tattoos have been usually killed by gang members. Bukele tasked his police and army forces with rounding up identified gang members and home terrorists, a lot of whom at the moment are locked away on this ultra-secure facility.
For the reason that crackdown started in March 2022, El Salvador’s homicide price has dropped from 52 per 100,000 folks in 2018 to simply 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023. The nation, as soon as thought of one of the harmful in Latin America, is now ranked among the many most secure within the area.
There have been some foreign nationals despatched there as effectively, together with deportees from the USA and extra are anticipated. Nevertheless, these are people believed to be gang members or affiliated with transnational prison networks, not atypical visa overstayers or migrants. Claims that each one deportees are being locked up in CECOT are factually incorrect.
In early 2023, President Nayib Bukele unveiled the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a large maximum-security facility in Tecoluca designed to dismantle the operations of El Salvador’s most harmful gangs. With a capability of as much as 40,000 inmates, it’s the largest jail within the Western Hemisphere and a centerpiece of Bukele’s broader anti-gang marketing campaign launched beneath a state of exception declared in March 2022 after a pointy spike in homicides.
CECOT was constructed with one goal: to isolate people with confirmed or suspected ties to violent prison networks comparable to MS-13, Barrio 18, and the Venezuelan-born El Tren de Aragua. These organizations—designated as terrorist teams by the USA—aren’t atypical gangs however transnational threats. Accordingly, detainees are handled not merely as criminals, however as home terrorists.
For the reason that crackdown started, Salvadoran authorities have arrested over 75,000 suspected associates. By concentrating on management and chopping communication traces, the federal government has successfully dismantled the construction that after allowed gangs to extort, visitors, and kill with impunity. CECOT performs a central position on this technique, making certain that high-risk offenders are locked down and unable to direct prison exercise from behind bars—a key flaw of the nation’s earlier jail system.
In Latin America, many prisons are successfully managed by organized crime. CECOT, in contrast, stays absolutely beneath authorities authority. Situated in a distant area close to the San Vicente volcano, 75 kilometers from San Salvador, it’s bodily and technologically reduce off from the skin world. There is no such thing as a web or cell service in or across the facility, and signal-blocking extends for 1.5 miles in each path. There are not any telephone calls, no visits, and no messages—prisoners are fully remoted. This eliminates any risk of coordinating gang exercise past the partitions.
Surveillance is whole. The jail spans 57 acres and is surrounded by two 9-meter-high concrete partitions topped with barbed wire, electrified fences, and gravel flooring designed to amplify footfalls. Nineteen guard towers present full perimeter visibility. Inside, every of the 256 cells—every housing a median of 156 inmates—is monitored across the clock with CCTV and armed oversight from lattice ceilings. Guards reside on-site, are rotated usually, and their identities are hid to forestall intimidation or retaliation towards their households. Everybody getting into the jail, together with employees, is topic to bodily searches and X-ray scans, decreasing alternatives for contraband smuggling and corruption.
Motion inside the power is minimal. Inmates are shackled and bent on the waist throughout transfers, allowed solely half-hour a day for train, Bible research, or digital hearings. Excessive-risk people could also be held in solitary confinement for as much as 15 days in pitch-black cells with a concrete mattress and a single ceiling gap for gentle. The vast majority of inmates spend 23.5 hours a day in overcrowded cells, with as much as 80 folks in lower than one sq. meter of house every. There are not any mattresses, no utensils, and no instructional or leisure applications. Meals are served straight on the ground. The purpose is just not rehabilitation, however containment.
To forestall any likelihood of inmate management or rebel, guards keep overwhelming dominance. The ability is staffed by 600 troopers, 250 law enforcement officials, and a riot intervention squad—over 1,000 personnel in whole. Hooded guards armed with rifles implement self-discipline. Inmates are forbidden from making eye contact with anybody, should put on white uniforms, and have their heads shaved to strip away individuality. Psychological management is additional maintained by fixed synthetic lighting and verbal degradation. Many detainees are going through sentences that stretch for hundreds of years or are held with out trial beneath the continued state of exception. The federal government has made it clear: most of them won’t ever go away.
Since its opening in January 2023, no escape makes an attempt or jail riots have been reported. The extent of management inside CECOT makes it one of the safe prisons within the Western Hemisphere.
Regardless of what the mainstream media would have you ever consider, CECOT is just not a detention heart for migrants or people deported for minor offenses. It’s a facility designed to isolate these thought of severe threats as a result of prison affiliations. Bukele’s technique is brutally easy: if you happen to lock up the gang members and make jail a spot nobody desires to finish up, crime goes down. First, as a result of the criminals are behind bars. Second, as a result of nobody desires to affix a gang if it means ending up in a facility like CECOT.
The strict self-discipline and surveillance measures at CECOT aren’t excesses—they’re needed to forestall it from changing into yet one more gang-run jail, as is widespread throughout a lot of Latin America. Whereas worldwide NGOs, liberal commentators, international media, and educational circles have voiced criticism, the outcomes are arduous to dispute: violence in El Salvador has plummeted. The critics had a long time to supply a greater answer. They didn’t, and nonetheless haven’t. Bukele acted and crime dropped.
