Security in exchange for the highest percentage of prisoners in the world?

washington —

When the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, announced last week as an important achievement in his plan to combat gangs the opening of “the largest prison in all of the Americas,” accompanied by choreographed images of thousands of gang members transferred to the center -provided by the official press- the international community did not go unnoticed.

The Terrorism Confinement Center, as the Salvadoran government has baptized the mega-prison located in the center of the country, is itself one of the largest facilities on the planet and the one with the largest proportion, according to records of the World Prison Brief, which compiles official information on prisons around the world.

In an opinion piece published by The Washington Post Last weekend, analyst León Krauze believes that given the country’s socioeconomic and political conditions, “the scale of El Salvador’s new prison is difficult to comprehend.”

For Krauze, putting into operation “a huge ‘first world’ prison” with the capacity to house some 40,000 inmates leaves many questions and calls for comparing the largest prison projects on the planet and their implications.

El Salvador, according to the data handled by the World Prison Brief organization, has an average of 605 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, followed by Rwanda, in Africa with 580 inmates per 100,000 inhabitants, and the creation of the mega-prison, at the rate of space, would not solve the problem of prison overcrowding in the Central American country.

“The reality is that the scale of the project defies common sense and easy understanding. And the social implications of the effort are no less surprising. The citizens of El Salvador have tacitly accepted Bukele’s unprecedented crackdown on crime and, at least for the moment, are ignoring its broader ramifications,” the analyst noted.

This, and other experts in criminal matters in the Central American country have seen with reservations this prison project that; even lawyers and human rights defenders in El Salvador have compared with “a concentration camp” and see the mega-prison as part of “a narrative to justify absolute power.”

The size, figures and criticism

When the already finished infrastructure was visited by Buekele, under an enormous deployment of security -before the transfer of some 2,000 gang members– To show the interior of the compound to Salvadorans and the world, the Vice Minister of Justice and Public Security, Osiris Luna Meza, proudly showed the X-ray machines, watchtowers and the “extreme isolation area”, where the inmates will be in complete darkness, a practice rejected by the international community for the treatment of prisoners.

It should be noted that Luna Meza and other Salvadoran government officials are on the long list of Central Americans sanctioned by the United States as “corrupt and undemocratic actors”.

“You will not see the light of day, Mr. President,” Luna Meza said during the visit, and Bukele later told the two rival gangs that for decades disputed strips of the country’s territory with a trail of murders that “this will be your new house, where they will live for decades, mixed, without doing more harm to the population”.

The mass incarceration of Salvadorans has also generated friction with other governments such as Colombia, President Gustavo Petro and his Salvadoran counterpart. they raised the tone between dimes and bickering in the diplomatic relationship this week in light of the prison and security situation.

Petro told Colombians that “you can see on the networks the terrible photos – I can’t get into other countries – of the concentration camp in El Salvador, full of young people, thousands and thousands, imprisoned that gives one the chills.”

The Colombian president considered that the path to reduce crime and homicide rates must include education and the creation of opportunities.

Bukele has responded that “the results weigh more than rhetoric” and challenged Colombia to lower homicide rates “as we Salvadorans have achieved.”

During the emergency regime in El Salvador and the massive arrests of Salvadorans, human rights organizations have documented more than a hundred deceased inside prisonsas well as hundreds of cases of youth detained without gang ties, the government he came to recognize it as a margin of error in their operations.

Analysts have also specified that the official statistics of El Salvador showed after a peak in homicides in 2015, four years before Bukele came to power, a gradual drop in murders in that country, which reached record lows in 2020, between the emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and an alleged negotiation plan between the government and the gangs to reduce crime, according to journalistic investigations.

However, the plan would have failed due to disagreements that led to the indiscriminate killing of close to a hundred Salvadorans in a single weekend by the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), which led to the to the declaration of the State of exception that since March 2022 has prevailed in that country and that facilitates the imprisonment of thousands of Salvadorans.

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