Conditions inside a huge new mega-prison designed to house 40,000 alleged gang members in El Salvador are to be particularly severe, a visiting team of Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said.
Miguel Montenegro, director of the non-governmental Human Rights Commission of El Salvador, has warned of the “risks of violence” in a prison he said would likely end up being badly overcrowded.
“There will most likely be more than the [announced capacity of] 40,000,” considering that 63,000 presumed gang members have been arrested since Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele last year declared a state of emergency allowing arrests without warrants, in the violence-plagued country. Montenegro said that the vast prison — a 166 hectare facility known as the Terrorism Containment Center (CECOT) — is “an embarrassment for the country.”
Photo: AP
An AFP team visited the sprawling complex late on Friday into early Saturday, along with other journalists. What they saw suggested a very different reality from the images broadcast by national television on Tuesday when Bukele inaugurated the facility.
Built on Bukele’s orders after he declared a “war” on gangs in March last year, the prison in Tecoluca, 74km southeast of the capital, San Salvador, consists of eight buildings made of reinforced concrete.
Each one has 32 cells of about 100m2, designed to hold “more than 100” inmates, said Salvadoran Minister of Public Works Romeo Rodriguez, but each cell is to have only two sinks and two toilets.
Photo: AFP / El Salvador’s Presidency Press Office
Prisoners are to leave the cell only for legal hearings (by videoconference), or to be punished in a windowless and unlit isolation cell. There are only 80 metal bunks for every 100 prisoners.
“There will be no mattresses in the cells,” the prison warden, who wore a ski mask to protect his identity, told journalists.
A network of dozens of cameras are to help guards keep constant watch over detainees.
While the prison is equipped with dining halls, exercise rooms and table tennis tables, they are to be exclusively for use by guards.
Ensuring the security of the facility is a 2km-long, 11-meter-high wall with seven guard towers and an electrified fence.
It took 3,000 workers seven months to complete construction of the facility, officials said.
They have yet to reveal its cost or opening date.
Bukele praised the “gigantic job,” saying that the prison would prove to be an “essential element for total victory in the war against the gangs.”
He declared that “war” after a wave of killings left 87 people dead in just three days.
Bukele blamed what he said was the laxity of previous governments, which he said had allowed inmates access to “prostitutes, PlayStations, cellphones and computers.”
Anyone entering the new prison’s perimeter is to be scanned visually and electronically for weapons and contraband.
Six hundred soldiers and 250 police officers are to provide around-the-clock security, and electronic jamming equipment would prevent any communication by prisoners with the outside world. Inside the cell blocks, guards are to carry pistols and assault rifles.
“All the terrorists responsible for the losses and suffering of the Salvadoran people will serve their sentences ... under the strictest regime,” Salvadoran Deputy Minister of Justice and Public Security Osiris Luna said.
Detainees would be forced to work “to repair part of the damage they have caused to society,” he added.
However, Andreu Oliva, rector of the Central American University in San Salvador, has said that prisoners need a chance to be “rehabilitated,” adding: “They deserve a second chance.”
New York-based Human Rights Watch recently denounced what it said was “severe prison overcrowding” in El Salvador’s 20 existing detention facilities, meant to accommodate a total of 30,000 people.
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