Inside El Salvador’s notorious prison that could house US prisoners and deportees – Firstpost

El Salvador has agreed to jail convicted American criminals and deportees of any nationality, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday (February 3). In a development that has alarmed critics and rights groups, Rubio said he had briefed US President Donald Trump about El Salvador’s offer.

The announcement came after Rubio met with Salvadoran President
Nayib Bukele, during his first foreign trip to several Central American countries as secretary of state.

“In an act of extraordinary friendship to our country … (El Salvador) has agreed to the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” Rubio told reporters Monday.

The Salvadoran President confirmed the news on X. “We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” Bukele wrote, saying his government was willing to take in convicted criminals, including US citizens, into “our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee”. “The fee would be relatively low for the US but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”

El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, commonly known as CECOT, is its largest prison housing “high-ranking” members of the Central American country’s main gangs.

We take a look inside El Salvador’s notorious prison.

Inside El Salvador’s mega-prison

El Salvador’s mega-prison that can reportedly hold up to 40,000 inmates was built after President Bukele’s order as he cracked down on gang violence in 2022.

CECOT opened a year later in the town of Tecoluca, southeast of the capital San Salvador.

As per The Washington Post report, the gargantuan prison complex has eight sprawling pavilions. It is surrounded by a 2.1-kilometre concrete wall and two electrified wire fences.

The jail currently has some 15,000 members of notorious gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs, responsible for deadly violence in the country.

They were rounded up in 2022 after the government declared a “state of exception”, an emergency measure that gave drastic powers to the police and military.

The 100-square-metre cells hold 65 to 70 prisoners each, who sleep on stainless steel cots without any mattresses or sheets.

They have to share two toilets and two sinks to wash themselves, as well as two containers with drinking water, reported AFP.

The inmates are fed rice, beans, hard-boiled eggs or pasta, with the government banning meat.

Dressed in white T-shirts and shorts, the prisoners have shaven heads and are heavily tattooed which is common for gang members.

In the CECOT, the MS-13 and Barrio 18 members, who are mortal enemies, have to share cells. Some of these prisoners are serving sentences of more than 200 years.

The prisoners are not allowed visits from their families. They are watched 24 hours a day by CCTV cameras and guards.

The prison cells, where the temperature can reach 35 degrees Celsius during the day, have a curved roof for natural ventilation.

The CECOT has dining rooms, rest areas, a gym and ping pong tables but only for guards.

The mega prison is guarded by 1,000 prison officers, 600 soldiers and 250 riot police, as per the AFP report.

Inmates are allowed to leave their cells for 30 minutes a day to exercise. They cannot go outside for fresh air. They leave their cells to attend their court hearings by video link from a room in the prison.

The jail has dark, windowless “punishment cells” for prisoners who engage in misconduct.

Speaking to AFP, prison director Belarmino Garcia called the inmates “psychopaths who will be difficult to rehabilitate,” adding: “That’s why they are here, in a maximum security prison that they will never leave.”

An inmate in his 40s nicknamed “Sayco” (pronounced “psycho”) told AFP he regretted his violent past. “We are in a maximum security prison where we know there is no way out,” he said.

Rights groups slam El Salvador’s prisons

While Bukele has been credited with significantly bringing down gang violence in El Salvador, rights groups have condemned the country’s prisons as inhumane.

As many as 70,000 people have been detained under the “state of exception”.

In CECOT, rights groups allege inmates are forced to confess and are regularly beaten and tortured by the guards.

Critics of President Bukele have referred to the mega prison as a “black hole of human rights”, where international rules on prisoner rights are violated, reported BBC.

El Salvador’s Human Rights Ombudsman, Raquel Caballero, told AFP in 2023 that inmates complained of a lack of food.

Amnesty International has warned El Salvador is witnessing a “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence”. The international non-governmental organisation published a report in December 2023, accusing the Salvadoran authorities of adopting “a systematic policy of torture towards all those detained under the state of emergency on suspicion of being gang members”.

“Among the gravest consequences are deaths in state custody,” it said, adding that “many others are the result of inhumane conditions of imprisonment or denial of medical care and medicine”.

According to the human rights organisation Cristosal’s report last summer, at least 261 people have died in El Salvador’s prisons since the government declared a state emergency in 2022.

Can the US send prisoners to CECOT?

According to
US Secretary of State Rubio, El Salvador will continue to take in its nationals who entered America illegally. The Central American nation will also “accept for deportation any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal from any nationality, be they MS-13 or Tren de Aragua and house them in his jails,” he said, referring to two transnational gangs with members from El Salvador and Venezuela, reported CNN.

Also, Bukele “has offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those of US citizenship and legal residents,” Rubio said.

So far, it remains unclear whether the US will accept Bukele’s offer. There are also questions about the legality of such a decision.

“The US is absolutely prohibited from deporting US citizens, whether they are incarcerated or not,” Leti Volpp, a law professor at UC Berkeley who specialises in immigration law and citizenship theory, told CNN over email.

The US’ potential move to deport criminals to El Salvador’s notorious prison has been severely condemned.

Speaking to CNN before the announcement, Emerson College professor Mneesha Gellman said the US was “essentially proposing to send people to a country that is not the country of origin nor is it necessarily the country that they passed through.”

“It is a bizarre and unprecedented proposal being made potentially between two authoritarian, populist, right wing leaders seeking a transactional relationship,” Gellman, an international politics scholar, said. “It’s not rooted in any sort of legal provision and likely violates a number of international laws relating to the rights of migrants.”

With inputs from agencies