The largest prison in Latin America is in El Salvador, it will house 40,000 "terrorists" 2:12
(CNN Spanish) --
The Government of El Salvador presented at the beginning of 2023 the Confinement Center for Terrorism, a mega prison in which thousands of gang members will be and, according to the government, whoever enters there will not come out again .
These are some facts about the largest prison in Latin America that is located in El Salvador.
It has a capacity for 40,000 inmates.
The prison is made exclusively for the confinement of Salvadoran gang members, according to the authorities, and has a capacity for 40,000 inmates, which the Nayib Bukele government qualifies as "terrorists."
The authorities have said that the leaders and dangerous members of the gangs will soon be transferred to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, CECOT.
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It has high security measures
Inmates will remain in concrete cells, enclosed with thick, reinforced steel bars and will not have access to sleeping mats.
To prevent escapes, the prison has several security rings, an electrified fence with 15,000 volts and prison guards, soldiers and police who will control the perimeter through 19 watchtowers.
In addition, 50 members of the National Civil Police will permanently support the searches.
"He is not going to go out to the hearings, threaten the judges, threaten witnesses, to occupy the exit to organize himself with the structures," Bukele said while making the visit.
It is also completely isolated from any urban area with an extension of more than 236 blocks, about 5,200 kilometers of land.
It is expected that both inside and outside the CECOT facilities, more than 600 soldiers from the Armed Forces and 250 members of the Police will support security work in the event of possible disturbances, according to the Presidency of El Salvador.
The facilities have eight confinement pavilions for inmates, a house for guard dogs, a building for guards, as well as "access control with a full body scanner, parcel scanner and metal arch," said the Government of El Salvador.
It is hoped that whoever enters there will never come out again.
According to the Presidency, the CECOT "is designed so that criminals serve their sentence without ever having contact with the outside world."
El Salvador is home to some of the world's most notorious gangs, including Barrio 18 and MS-13.
The latter emerged in Los Angeles in the 1980s among Salvadoran immigrants who had fled their homeland amid a violent civil war partly financed by the United States.
It grew to include other Central American migrants, and in the 1990s many were deported to their home countries, sparking an explosion of violence there, experts say.
Before Bukele's crackdown, an estimated 70,000 active gang members across the country made it "virtually impossible for politicians and state officials not to have to negotiate with them if they wanted, among other things, to run an electoral campaign or provide services in slums,” according to a Crisis Group report.
Here will end the days of all the terrorists who for years terrified El Salvador.
They will be the example of the punishment that those who intend to attack the population will receive.#CECOT #PlanControlTerritorial #GuerraContraPandillas pic.twitter.com/Z08TYebbl5
– Presidential House 🇸🇻 (@PresidenciaSV) February 1, 2023
It was built after the war that President Nayib Bukele declared against the gangs
In April 2022, President Bukele declared a war against gangs in this country, as a wave of bloody killings by gangs left dozens dead in March of last year and put El Salvador in a prolonged state of emergency.
The heavy-handed anti-gang policy resulted in homicide rates in the country falling, Tiziano Breda, a Central America expert at Crisis Group, told CNN.
The country closed January 2023 with an annual rate below 2 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, according to a report by Bukele published on February 2.
According to official figures, January 2023 was the safest month in the history of El Salvador with 11 homicides in the entire month.
In 2016, that first month of the year, 740 homicides were reported.
The objective of the war against the gangs is to "eliminate the terrorist structures that in the past caused mourning in Salvadoran families," the government said.
Since the end of March 2022, when the emergency regime was implemented in response to a surge in violence that left 62 murders in a single day, the Government of El Salvador has captured more than 62,000 people, according to security authorities. public.
El Salvador ends the year under an emergency regime 3:23
It has received criticism from human rights organizations.
Both the emergency regime and the mega-prison promoted by the Bukele government have received criticism from local organizations and international organizations because they consider that human rights are violated.
However, the government of El Salvador has responded to criticism and has said that what it pursues with this policy is to control crime through "justice."
"And that the puppeteers do not come to tell us that we are violating the human rights of terrorists, because El Salvador has taken the same path that first world countries took to be what they are, the path of justice," he said on Tuesday. Gustavo Villatoro, Minister of Justice and Security, in a message on his Twitter account.
-- With information from CNN en Español's Merlin Delcid, and CNN's Tara John.
Nayib Bukele