El Salvador moves first 2,000 gang members to mega jail

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele announced on Friday the transfer of the first 2,000 gang members to the new mega jailin which it intends to detain 40,000 people captured under the emergency regime in El Salvador.

“Today at dawn, in a single operation, we transferred the first 2,000 gang members to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (Cecot). This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, mixed, without being able to do any more harm to the population.” Indian Bukele on Twitter along with a video showing gang members entering the prison.

The prison, located 74 kilometers from the capital in the Tecoluca municipality, San Vicente department, has 33 blocks of construction within 236 isolated blocks of the city. It is made up of confinement pavilions with metal cabins and punishment cells, virtual courtrooms and two modules for factories against prison leisure.

Two days before the transfer, an indictment from the Department of Justice of the United States against 13 alleged leaders of the MS-13 gang, for multiple crimes in New York, accused the gangs of having negotiated with members of the government of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) to reduce homicides in exchange for benefits, as well as with its rival the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) and with the current government.

The notice mentions meetings “organized by the Salvadoran government” and officials such as the director of penal centers and the director of Tejido Social to obtain benefits in exchange for the reduction of homicides and electoral support in the 2021 legislative elections. The government did not react to the regard.

From the beginning of the exception regimeon March 27, 2022 until this Friday, the authorities have captured 64,512 people accused of being gang members, of whom 3,745 were later released and another 3,344 have denounced human rights violations, the majority for alleged arbitrary detentions, before the association Cristosal.

The emergency regime was approved on March 27, 2022, after 62 Salvadorans were killed on March 26, and its eleventh extension is in force until March 17. Homicides dropped from 1,211 in 2021 to 615 in 2022, according to official figures that registered a gradual drop year after year since 2016.

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