Inside El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison, which could soon house deportees from the U.S.
San Salvador — It takes about 90 minutes to drive from El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador, to the most notorious prison in the country.
Opened in 2023, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, known as CECOT, was designed to hold the most dangerous gang members in what used to be the country with the highest murder rate in the world.
Prisoners cannot receive visitors, and hearings happen only via zoom. Cell signal is blocked within a mile-and-a-half radius surrounding the prison to keep any information from getting out in an effort to contain the power of gangs which authorities said used to control 85% or the country’s territory. Today, El Salvador has the lowest homicide rate in the Western Hemisphere.
Starting in 2022, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador declared a state of exception, which empowered police and the military to arrest people on suspicion of gang affiliation, without any evidence of committing crimes. The state of exception has led to the imprisonment of more than 80,000 people, making El Salvador the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, at 2%. But the crackdown has earned Bukele an approval rating of more than 90%.
Many inmates are serving sentences that are centuries long, while others still have not been convicted. But the prison’s director affirms no prisoner there will ever step outside.
Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Bukele had agreed to accept deportees from the U.S., including U.S. citizens. Those convicted of crimes would be held in prisons like CECOT.
“We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” Bukele wrote in a Feb. 3 social media post. “We are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted U.S. citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee.”
Bukele added that the fee would be “relatively low,” but would help make the country’s prison system “sustainable.”
CECOT has a stated capacity of 40,000, and while prison authorities would not disclose the exact number of inmates housed in it, citing safety concerns, they said it is at least at half-capacity, with around 80 to 100 inmates in each cell. They sleep on metal slabs and are only allowed outside the cells for 30 minutes per day. If they need medical attention, they are treated within the modules so no prisoner ever leaves the premises alive.
Inmate Marvin Vazquez belongs to the infamous MS-13 gang. He was arrested in El Salvador after the government declared war on the gangs in 2022.
Vazquez explains that he expects to be incarcerated in CECOT “for the rest of my life.”
“We murdered a lot of people, and this is the consequence of what happened to us, is like the Titanic,” Vazquez said. “That we were a big and strong gang. But we got hit with the iceberg.”
He adds, “We try to act strong in the day and cry in the nighttime.”
Most Salvadorans support Bukele’s efforts to lock up gang members. But advocates for migrants in the U.S. worry this is no place for any but the most dangerous people.
“I worry about the idea that people who are undesirable in the United States can just be sent to, basically, a transnational penal colony, without any guarantees of rights or due process,” said Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, a human rights organization that used to serve the victims of criminal gangs, and now serves people fleeing persecution by the state.
CBS News spoke with journalists, activists and even first responders who say they have been unfairly persecuted by the state, some going months into hiding. One woman who has not heard from her husband since he was taken to a prison without evidence of gang affiliation says she is as afraid of the government as she used to be of the gangs.
Bullock said CECOT and the full-body tattooed gang members held in it are the face of the president’s security strategy, but it’s a misrepresentation of the majority of the people who have been detained and the conditions that they’re held in. He says the rest of the maximum security prisons are far worse, and most of people held in them indefinitely are not gang members.
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