What we know of Cecot, the mega-prison of El Salvador taking Trump’s deportees

Under a volcano in El Salvador is a secret mega-prison where the only way out, according to the Minister of Justice, is in a coffin.

Known as Cecot – The Spanish Acronym of Terrorism Confinement Center – It is built to contain 40,000 people.

At Cecot, there are no family visits, no access to the outside, no rehabilitation programs. Opened in 2023 by Nayib Bukele – the president of El Salvador and self -proclaimed “the coolest dictator in the world” – Cecot has been under the spotlight from the American president Donald Trump expelled presumed members of Venezuelan gangs There last month.

The US government agreement with the small central Nation of Central of 6 million people to send deportees to CECOT has alarmed human rights and legal experts. Not the least because one of the men sent it, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoral citizen living in the United States, was wrongly expelled. Despite an American courtyard Trump Administration Order Bring ABREGO GARCIA at home In the United States, Trump and Bukele have The two insisted that there is no way to return it. When the two leaders met in the oval office last week, Trump Prized to send us citizens Who commit violent crimes in prisons in Salvador. “I’m absolutely for that,” he said.

Few observers have been authorized inside Cecot, but this is what we know about prison and the criminal system to which it belongs – a system that human rights organizations have accused of torture, murders and disappearing people.

“Collateral damage”

Cecot was built after President Bukele declared the “war” on the gangs which terrorized El Salvador for decades and led to his reputation as the capital of the murder of the world. In smooth choreographed promotional videos, prisoners are unleashed in Cecot, chained and leaned between two rows of guards. Prison administrators promoted high security prison as a “key to winning the war against gangs”.

Extended on 23 hectares, CECOT consists of eight concrete buildings, each containing 32 cells. Each cell, designed for Hold more than 100 prisoners eachAt 80 four -story metal berths without bedding and two toilets and sinks without privacy. The mesh ceilings allow guards to patrol the cells from above.

According to a analysis by financial time using satellite imagery, If the prison was to reach its capacity of 40,000 people, prisoners would only have 0.6 square meters of cell space each. It is less space than the head by square rule per square meter, Australian poultry producers must join “free” accreditation.

But the number of people detained exactly in the prison is not publicly known.

Bukele, who has ruled under the emergency powers in the past three years, is a very popular leader. And its repression against brutal violence, extentions and murders of gangs that have tormented Salvador since the 1990s is an important part of its popularity.

“A majority of Salvadoran feels more security than they have done for years,” said MNEESHA Gellman Political Science Bours written in the conversation. “According to the authoritarian Bukele regime, the homicide rate has officially decreased, many street sellers no longer pay a gang tax, and taxi drivers are not as worried about diversion or de facto routes. And this has led to the generalized popularity of Bukele across the country.”

But human rights organizations have warned that the Salvadoral prisons are “beyond the rule of law” and say that “the violence of the state gradually replaces the violence of the gangs” in the country.

“The American people must be clear on the penitentiary system to which their government sends expelled migrants – which, in the worst case, could one day hold American citizens,” Noah Bullock written in foreign policy recently.

Bullock, the Executive Director of the Local Human Rights Organization Cristals, has written that since an emergency declaration to combat the violence of the gangs has been declared in 2022, at least 85,000 people (according to government figures) were held without a judicial mandate. Since Bukele came to power, the country’s prison population tripled, he wrote.

El Salvador now would have the highest incarceration rate in the world. (Recent data from the Australian Statistics Bureau have shown that the northern territory is second.)

Bullock argued that the prisoners detained in Cecot, many ink with formidable tattoos of gangs, have “probably been in prison since well before the start of the exception” because the Salvadoral gangs abandoned the practice of tattooing of the face years ago. Bullock warned against the fixing of Cecot, as people imprisoned under the state of exception without mandate are probably held in other Salvadoral prisons. (The vice-president of El Salvador admitted that arrests of innocent people had occurred: “In any war, there were innocent victims and collateral damage.” And Bukele said that 8,000 people wrong were imprisoned in Salvado -ian prisons.)

Several human rights organizations say they have documented deaths in Salvado prisons in recent years.

Inside a mega-prison

Juanita Goebertus, director of the Human Rights Watch Americas Division, said recently in A legal declaration on prison conditions In El Salvador, those detained in Cecot were denied regular procedure. “(They) are denied communication with their loved ones and lawyers, and appear only before the courts in online hearings, often in groups of several hundred detainees at the same time.” She said Human Rights Watch was not aware of anyone freed from Cecot.

Goebertus said Human Rights Watch had documented cases of torture, ill -treatment, inhuman conditions in other Salvadoral prisons – including lack of access to adequate health care and food – and she believed that the abuse of CECOT prisoners are similar.

The Salvadoran government has denied human rights groups to access its prisons, said Goebertus, and “only allowed journalists and social media influencers to visit CECOT in highly controlled circumstances”.

Videos of these visits inside Cecot Show Rows of thin men in white uniforms fixing the camera. Many have tattoos and all have shaved their heads. French filmmaker Lucas Menget, who visited Cecot in March, described the prison as “tropical gulag”. He said to the New York Times There was a strange silence inside the prison.

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A journalist from Reuters who visited the prison in April wrote: “Some detainees could be seen during medical control, doing physical exercise or listening to religious talks on forgiveness and repentance, all under close surveillance by masked guards and police officers dressed in equipment.

During a visit to Cecot in 2024, A BBC world journalist said artificial lights have never been extinguished, the temperature could reach 35 ° C inside and the prisoners were allowed to leave their cells for 30 minutes a day to exercise “using only their own body weight” in the central corridor of the prison block.

Bukele said that housing sent from the United States in exchange for costs “makes our full prison system sustainable”. His government has denied that abuses occur in Salvadoral prisons. “Our prisons are clean, ordered, there is no abuse or unsanitary conditions, no blows or murders,” he said on X.

But a 2023 Amnesty International Report warned that “the violence of the state gradually replaced the violence of the gangs” in Salvador. The report indicates that the Salvadoral authorities had used torture and mistreated people in police custody. Ana Piqueer, Amnesty International America Director, said last week that Salvador “implemented a systematic state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of freedom”. She called the expulsion of more than 200 Venezuelan nationals in Cecot a “forced disappearance”.

For Abigo Garcia, the several hundred alleged gangs in Venezuela, and other prisoners in Cecot and other Salvado -rannes prisons without regular procedure, the future is unknown.