Photos: Inside El Salvador's new 'mega prison' for gang members
Human rights groups have criticised a crackdown on crime, accusing the government of empowering itself to act with impunity.
Inmates accused of belonging to the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs arrive at a new "mega prison" called the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism in Tecoluca, 75km (45 miles) southeast of San Salvador. [Salvadorean Presidency/AFP]
27 Feb 2023
The first 2,000 inmates of a new prison built in El Salvador to accommodate more than 40,000 suspected gang members targeted in President Nayib Bukele’s “war” on crime have arrived at the facility.
Bukele tweeted on Friday: “At dawn, in a single operation, we transferred the first 2,000 members to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT),” which he said is the largest prison in the Americas. “This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, all mixed, unable to do any further harm to the population,” the president said.
Human rights organizations said the state of emergency Bukele has used to make the arrests has led to serious human rights violations. Among them are “mass arbitrary detention, torture and other forms of ill-treatment against detainees, deaths in custody, and abuse-ridden prosecutions”, Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
Bukele posted a video showing barefoot, tattooed men wearing only white boxers, bent over with their hands behind their shaven heads. Each inmate sat with his legs on either side of the man in front of him as armed guards in balaclavas guarded the prisoners.
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https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/2/27/photos-inside-el-salvadors-new-mega-prison-for-gangster
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By León Krauze
Global Opinions contributing columnist
February 26, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EST
Members of the "Mara 18" and "MS-13" gangs are seen in custody at a maximum security prison in Izalco, Sonsonate, El Salvador, on Sept. 4, 2020. (Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty Images)
Earlier this month, Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, unveiled his latest infrastructure project: a massive, “first-world” jail that could well become the largest penitentiary in the world, with an alleged capacity to hold 40,000 inmates. This weekend, he announced the transfer of the first 2,000 prisoners to the new facility.
“A common-sense project,” Bukele called it.
The reality is that the scale of the project defies common sense — and easy comprehension. And the social implications of the endeavor are no less striking. The citizens of El Salvador have tacitly accepted Bukele’s unprecedented crackdown on crime, and, for the time anyway, are ignoring its broader ramifications.
The unveiling of the prison came in typical Bukelian fashion. He took over the country’s airwaves to share a 35-minute video of himself touring the facilities (it was soon posted on his popular Twitter feed, the presidency’s de facto press office). He can be seen arriving at the jail in a caravan of black SUVs. “Welcome to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, a key part in our battle against the gangs,” Osiris Luna Meza, director of El Salvador’s penitentiary system, said.
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1dRJZMRRyzDGB
Bukele is then shown X-ray machines, surveillance towers and a fully staffed security perimeter. A “riot intervention squad,” armed to the teeth, salutes him. The tour then goes to the cells, meant to hold groups of “terrorists,” and the extreme solitary confinement area, where inmates will be kept completely in the dark — a widely condemned practice.
Penitentiary security officers during a media tour at the Terrorism Containment Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on Feb. 2. (Camilo Freedman/Bloomberg News)
“They won’t see any daylight, Mr. President,” Luna Meza, whom the U.S. government has placed on a list of officials suspected of corruption in El Salvador, proudly told Bukele.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/26/el-salvador-prison-nayib-bukele-gangs-crime/
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https://archive.ph/LYocQ
'Men are pressed up against one another like animals in a battery farm': As he looks around the El Salvador mega jail capable of holding 40,000 inmates in 32 'mass cells', RAPHAEL ROWE asks - Is this the most hellish prison on earth?
By RAPHAEL ROWE
PUBLISHED: 17:26 EST, 27 February 2023 | UPDATED: 17:42 EST, 27 February 2023
Heads bowed and torsos bare, their hands manacled behind their backs and chained to their shackled ankles, 2,000 men suspected of gang violence are herded into a newly built mega-prison in El Salvador.
Cops in riot gear push down the convicts' shaven heads. The men are pressed up against one another like animals in a battery farm: stripped of all individual identity.
They look like carbon copies of each other, naked to the waist, tattooed, locked into the same submissive pose.
I've been to some of the most brutal penal facilities in the world, including maximum-security jails in Costa Rica and Belize in Central America, while filming my Netflix series Inside The World's Toughest Prisons. But the intensity of what these new pictures show, and the sheer depth of dehumanisation, is exceptional even to me.
This is a deliberate policy to control the inmates and manage them. I fear it will backfire badly — and result in violence even worse than the gang-driven chaos the government is desperately trying to stamp out.
More:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11800195/RAPHAEL-ROWE-El-Salvador-mega-jail-hellish-prison-earth.html
