In El Salvador, a small state in Central America and one of the most violent in the world, an enormous prison was recently inaugurated which can accommodate up to 40,000 inmates (the largest in Italy, the Milanese Opera prison, contains about 1,400). It includes eight buildings and is one of the largest in the world in proportion to the total population (6 and a half million inhabitants). Above all, it is highly criticized because it provides very limited spaces for prisoners: lower than those foreseen for the transport of livestock according to European law, to understand each other.
The construction of the prison was decided by the government in response to the serious problem that the country is going through due to the activities of Salvadoran criminal gangs, responsible for the very high levels of violence recorded for years now. Last year the government had also declared a state of emergency, which however had been much criticized because it had given the police powers that had allowed them to make arbitrary arrests. El Salvador, a state smaller than Lombardy alone, is currently the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
The prison is called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) and is located in the middle of extensive and uninhabited countryside near Tecoluca, about 70 kilometers south of the capital San Salvador. Its eight buildings are guarded by 19 control towers, each manned by seven officers, and the prison as a whole covers about 230,000 square meters. Osiris Luna, of the General Directorate of Penal Centers of El Salvador (more or less the equivalent of our DAP, the Department of Penitentiary Administration), said that in total 250 policemen and 600 soldiers will be employed in the prison.
(AP Photo/Salvador Melendez)
El Salvador’s Minister of Public Works, Romeo Rodriguez, said each of the eight buildings includes 32 cells of about 100 square meters, with two sinks and two toilets each. He means that if the prison were full, each inmate would have about 60 square centimeters available, a space well below the 4 square meters per inmate provided, for example, by the Council of Europe, a body unrelated to the European Union which promotes democracy and human rights.
The space available to CECOT inmates is also less than that required by European standards for the transport of livestock by road, according to which medium-sized animals (for example cattle) must have between 90 and 130 square centimeters of space. Gymnasiums and common areas have also been built in the prison, exclusively reserved for policemen and soldiers.
THE CECOT was built rather quickly, within six months: the works had begun in July 2022 and the inauguration was on 31 January last. Right from the start, the prison attracted a lot of criticism from various activist groups, according to whom the facility does not offer any type of guarantee with respect to the human rights of the detainees.
The first transfer of detainees to the prison was at the end of February: around 2,000 people accused of being part of criminal gangs were brought to CECOT, as part of a major operation in which the police had arrested around 64,000 people.
The transfer itself had been carried out in a particularly brutal and widely publicized manner by the government, perhaps with the aim of frightening members of criminal gangs. Images had been disseminated and video which portrayed prisoners with shaved hair, bare chested, handcuffed or with their hands on their heads running in paths prepared by riot police, to then be herded into the center of a large room in the prison.
Policemen in riot gear during the transfer of prisoners to the new prison in El Salvador, in late February (EPA/Government of El Salvador)
Referring to the gangs, the Minister of Justice and Security Gustavo Villatoro had said that the transfer of prisoners to the new prison served to “eliminate this cancer from society” and had made it clear that he had no intention of letting those imprisoned there leave.
Inmates arrived at the new prison in El Salvador, at the end of February (EPA/Government of El Salvador)
President Nayib Bukele, a wealthy young populist businessman who swept the last elections in 2021, promised during his election campaign to rid the country of violence, degradation and poverty. Over the past few weeks he has dismissed criticism of the prison from opponents and activists as pointless and superfluous.
Speaking of CECOT Gustavo Fondevila, a scholar at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), a Mexican research center that deals with social sciences, told the Financial Times that “this gigantic prison will become a small city of crime” .
– Read also: Who is Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador
