El Salvador in the Age of the “Mega Prison”
Image courtesy of Mauricio Cuéllar on Unsplash
Imagine an empty gymnasium court filled with at least 2,000 men. In a uniformly seated position, each one is sandwiched between the man in front of and behind him. With raised hands behind their shaven heads, they are assembled into multiple groups, and, when observed from a distance, almost appear to fuse into one singular mass. The only major differences in their physical appearances are the tattoos they fashion. This is because every one of them has been stripped down to a pair of white shorts and is now a member of one of the many regiments of recently incarcerated Salvadoran suspected gang members. Lined upon the cold stone floor, they have been marched into formation for a government-organized photo op.
This latest wave of entries to the system, now awaiting transportation to the recently unveiled “mega-prison,” formally known as the Centro del Confinamiento del Terrorismo (“Center for Confining Terrorism”), or CECOT, is just the most recent within an eclipsing typhoon of incarcerations that has crashed hard upon and rocked El Salvador.
The massive crackdown on the nation’s gangs, predominantly Mara Salvatrucha or as it is commonly known, MS-13, began in March of 2022, when the Salvadoran government declared a state of emergency, following a spike in gang-related murders. From there, the policy was spearheaded by populist President Nayib Bukele, who concurrently declared war on the criminal syndicates.
Interestingly, the announcement of the impending campaign came just months after the rearing of accusations by the U.S. Department of the Treasury that Bukele himself had cut a backroom deal with MS-13’s more prominent imprisoned figures in leadership. Claiming the President’s current government had secretly offered kickbacks to more powerful, incarcerated members in a bid to barter for lowered homicide rates, the U.S. Treasury marked two individuals within the administration for freshly-issued sanctions. Nevertheless, President Bukele persisted with his proudly-touted, tough-on-crime image, which was instrumental in his ability to win the presidency in 2019.
In the 13 months following the beginning of the crackdown, El Salvador ultimately arrested 67,203 people, a population roughly equivalent in size to the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts, as reported by Spanish newspaper El Mundo on April 12, 2023. And as detainment figures continued to stack up to nearly 2 percent of the adult population, Bukele’s personal war against the gangs eventually arrived at the unveiling of the aforementioned mega prison itself in February of this year.
Emerging from a construction process which began in July of 2022, the CECOT, was advertised proudly to the world by the Salvadoran government as capable of containing 40,000 inmates. Built specifically for suspected gang members, its population would more than quintuple the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed “Angola,” the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. Complete with “punishment cells” and devoid of open, recreational space, Salvadoran Minister of Public Works Romeo Rodríguez claimed that the roughly 56-acre institution would be “the largest prison in all of America.” Boasted by Bukele to be “impossible to escape,” the project has been quick to draw scrutiny from onlookers abroad.
In the wake of the mega-prison’s opening, Human Rights Watch’s acting director in the Americas, Tamara Taciuk Broner, stated in an interview that the prison was indicative of the President’s “punitive public security policies.” More broadly, the organization has affirmed its position that the ongoing “State of Exception,” the local political term for the crackdown, has been marred by gross violations of basic human rights. Specifically, they cite arbitrary arrests, the torture of detainees, and the deaths of at least 90 people in state custody since the beginning of open season on anyone suspected of being in assistance of the Maras. Bukele’s tactics drew the even harsher censure of left-wing Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who referred to the institution as a “concentration camp,” a remark which acted as the prelude to a later Twitter clash between the two heads of state. Despite intense controversy, however, Bukele has been met with nothing if not the adoration of his constituents in response to his heavy-handed strategies.
In a manner almost unphased by his internationally polarizing approach to the gangs, polls across the board have consistently portrayed a Salvadoran population which continues to exert a widened approval of the President’s mission to completely eviscerate organized crime. The most recent major survey, conducted by independent Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica with a sample of 1,500 people, reported that 91 percent of respondents approved of Bukele’s performance.
More conservatively, a study by another local paper reported that 68 percent of another 1,500 person sample supported him in his recently announced bid for a second term, despite the fact that El Salvador’s constitution prohibits any president from ever serving more than one term. With many pointing to the near halving of the national homicide rate since the state of emergency began, it would seem that the President’s far-reaching operations of mass incarceration have courted for him an all but unprecedentedly popular position in the nation’s politics. From within and abroad, onlookers now wait in suspense of what actually will come of the obvious conflict between his desire to remain in power and the rule of law.
And so, as thousands more men are cowed into the crowded halls and cells of the gargantuan CECOT with thousands more to come, Bukele’s ‘war’ on the gangs shows no sign of stopping. Defined ever more distinctly by the ever more controversial man at helm of the project, the world watches, polemicized, as El Salvador marches convicted into the age of the mega-prison.
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