Thousands of Suspected Gang Members Moved to El Salvador’s ‘Mega Prison’

El Salvador’s press office recently released a video showing the transfer of over 2,000 suspected gang members to a maximum-security prison.

The inmates, who were accused of alleged involvement in gangs in El Salvador, were moved to the CECOT mega-prison (the Spanish acronym for the Counter-Terrorism Confinement Center) in Tecoluca.

The country has been under an anti-gang emergency decree for over two years. The original state of emergency began in March of 2022 after a major spike in gang violence, which left 62 individuals dead in just one day. 

As of April 2024, nearly 80,000 people have been arrested for presumed gang affiliations. According to many rights groups, these sweeps have been arbitrary, with suspects arrested due to location and appearance alone. In fact, many have been released due to a lack of evidence. Their conditions in prison have been heavily criticized, with one group claiming that dozens of inmates have died in prison as a result of torture.

Since President Nayib Bukele began his crackdown on gang activity, El Salvador reportedly has a homicide rate of only 2.4 per 100,000 people—an extreme decline from 8 years ago, when it was 103 per 100,000. Today, El Salvador has the lowest homicide rate in Latin America, with a rate notably lower than the United States.

As the transports of the inmates began over a year ago, Gustavo Villatoro, the government’s minister for justice and peace, stated that the arrested suspects “are never going to return to the communities, the neighborhoods, the barrios, the cities of our beloved El Salvador.”

In the new video, the inmates were cuffed at their hands and feet, wearing nothing but white cotton shorts as authorities loaded them onto buses to transfer them to the new mega-prison. Many are concerned about the risk of human rights violations there. According to a recent report by Amnesty International, “Among the gravest consequences [of the anti-gang policy] are deaths in state custody. Many others are the result of inhumane conditions of imprisonment or denial of medical care and medicine.”