Inside El Salvador’s prison holding Venezuelans deported from US

(CNN) — El Salvador’s Cecot mega-prison was notorious long before the Trump administration’s recent decision to deport hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members there.

The Center for Terrorism Confinement, to give it its full name, is considered the largest prison in the Americas – with a capacity of 40,000 inmates – and has been the biggest symbol in the Latin American country’s controversial crackdown on domestic crime.

It is now home to some of the country’s most hardened criminals, including mass murderers and gang members billed as the “worst of the worst” and is notorious for the spartan conditions in which they are kept.

In a recent visit, CNN’s David Culver and his team described cells “built to hold 80 or so inmates” where men are held for 23.5 hours a day and “the only furniture is tiered metal bunks, with no sheets, pillows or mattresses … an open toilet, a cement basin and plastic bucket for washing and a large jug for drinking water.”

Some 10,000 to 20,000 prisoners are currently thought to be housed there, with the most recent arrivals being the 261 people the Trump administration deported from the US over the weekend – 238 of whom it accused of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 alleged members of the MS-13 gang.

El Salvador’s leader Nayib Bukele – a strongman president and self-styled “world’s coolest dictator” – offered to house the US deportees in Cecot as part of an unprecedented deal in which the US will pay $6 million dollars in return. The money will help sustain El Salvador’s penitentiary system, which currently costs $200 million a year.

Harsh conditions

Those deported by the US got a taste of the prison’s uncompromising policies as soon as they arrived Sunday morning.

Officers held their heads down to waist-level as they escorted them to the facility in shackles. The new inmates were then forced to kneel while prison guards shaved their hair and shouted commands.

“We are executing to the letter a regiment to which you will submit from this moment on, where prison security personnel will be treated with absolute respect! Is that clear?” one officer shouts at the visibly disturbed inmates in a video shared by the Salvadoran government.

Such brutal introductions have been a hallmark of the prison since it started housing inmates a few years ago.

Images published by the government in 2023 showed some of the first prisoners being transferred to the facility, stripped down to white boxer shorts, with their heads shaved, as they were forced to run into their cells.

The CNN team that visited in late 2024 described the deprivation as “deliberate,” noting the men were allowed out of their crowded cells for just 30 minutes a day, that “there is no privacy here, no trace of comfort” and the lights are on 24/7.

“They do not work. They are not allowed books or a deck of cards or letters from home. Plates of food are stacked outside the cells at mealtimes and pulled through the bars. No meat is ever served. The 30-minute daily respite is merely to leave the cell for the central hallway for group exercise or Bible readings,” wrote CNN’s David Culver and his team.

Inmates are not allowed visits from family or friends and some of them must face the possibility that they will never be released.

“We believe in rehab, but just for common criminals,” Public Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro said at the time of CNN’s visit.

Civil liberties suspended

Cecot houses both convicted criminals and those still going through El Salvador’s court system. Some people have even been locked up without any due process, critics say.

The incarcerations have been part of Bukele’s controversial efforts to stem the high crime rates and gang violence that have plagued the country for years.

In 2022, Bukele, with the support of lawmakers, declared a state of emergency which allowed the government to temporarily suspend constitutional rights, including the right to legal defense provided by the state. The measure was intended to last 30 days but has been extended dozens of times and continues to this day.

In the three years since it was declared, security forces have arrested nearly 87,000 people nationwide, or more than 1% of the Salvadoran population, according to authorities.

The government insists the crackdown has made the country safer, but critics say it has violated people’s rights and resulted in countless cases of wrongful detentions.

Bukele has admitted that some innocent people have been detained by mistake but says several thousand of them have already been released. He argues that the tough measures have been necessary to transform the country from being dubbed the “murder capital of the world” to what he now considers one of the safest on Earth.

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