El Salvador’s Terrorism Detention Center

The other night I watched Tucker Carlson interviews El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. Bukele first came onto my radar a few years ago when he made Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador. He became president of El Salvador in 2019 and has since overseen the dismantling of organized crime and corruption in his country, taking it from the murder capital of the world—in 2015, the country had an annual murder rate of over 100 homicides per 100,000 residents—to a predicted homicide rate of less than 2 per 100,000 by 2024, making it safer for homicides than any other country in the Western Hemisphere, including Canada.

The decline in crime in El Salvador has come at a price. Gangs such as MS-13 and Barrio 18 have been arrested and jailed. Bukele has justified the mass arrests and imprisonment of criminal gang members as a necessary and urgent response to restore security and peace to the country. He has called for extraordinary measures, including a State of emergencywhich allows for long-term detentions without formal charges. He sees this as crucial to dismantling the power of these violent organizations that have terrorized Salvadoran society for decades.

Aside from fair trial concerns, what is the scale of this repression and where are all these gang members ending up? Since emergency measures were imposed in March 2022, more than 75,000 people have been arrested. El Salvador is a country of about 6.4 million people. The US, by comparison, has a population of about 335 million. A good rule of thumb when comparing the magnitude of what is happening in the two countries is therefore to use a multiplier of 50. So a round-up of 75,000 in El Salvador would correspond to a round-up in the US of 3.75 million, or almost 4 million.

These numbers are staggering and give El Salvador the highest incarceration rate of any country in the worldwith 1,086 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. This puts it ahead of Cuba (794 per 100,000), Rwanda (637 per 100,000) and, fourth on the list, the US (614 per 100,000). By comparison, Mexico has 174 per 100,000 and Canada has 88 per 100,000. At the very bottom is Japan with 36 per 100,000.

The growing number of prisoners in El Salvador has necessitated the construction of new prisons, or perhaps I should say the construction of a single “huge” prison, namely the Terrorism Confinement Center, or in Spanish CECOT—Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. I put the word “huge” in quotes because this prison is indeed huge in terms of the number of prisoners it can hold, although its actual physical size is quite limited. It currently holds over 14,000 prisoners, but its total capacity is 40,000. Secured by a force of 1,000 guards, 600 soldiers, and 250 police officers, the prison at its current capacity would have an inmate-to-security ratio of about 8 to 1. (It is unclear what economies of scale could be achieved if the prison were filled to its total capacity of 40,000.)

For comparison, the largest prison in the US is the Louisiana State Penitentiary (also known as Angola). It has a prison population of about 6,000 and employs about 2,000, with a prisoner-to-worker ratio of 3 to 1. This latter ratio suggests a lower efficiency than that of CECOT, although in fairness the available CECOT figures only cover security forces and exclude administrative, medical and maintenance staff (which do, however, include non-violent prisoners brought in from other prisons to help with food preparation). However, it seems unlikely that including staff numbers would significantly reduce the previous ratio of 8 to 1.

Although CECOT sits on 410 acres (or about two-thirds of a square mile), the actual CECOT prison complex occupies only 57 acres, or 2.5 million square feet, and of that, the 8 modules (blocks) together comprise 540,000 square feet, or 67,500 square feet per module (for comparison, the average Walmart supermarket has 180,000 square feet). And with each module capable of housing 5,000 inmates, that only gives each inmate about 6 square feet.

This of course means that no prisoner has their own cell. Instead, each module consists of 50 community cells, with each cell holding 100 prisoners. To house so many prisoners in such small spaces, the ceilings are high with four-tiered bunk beds without mattresses. These cells have been compared to birdcages. At about 6 square feet per prisoner, CECOT offers far less space than human rights groups would like to see, which is at least 36 square feet per prisoner at the low end.

The Salvadoran government considers CECOT as a monument to justice and offers the outside world a clear image of CECOT. NBC and the BBC have reported on it, with the BBC even referring to it as “El Salvador’s secret mega-prison.” In fact, the Salvadoran government has been transparent in sharing details about CECOT, as the following incredible video reveals (which has been viewed over 40 million times):

In the interview with Tucker Carlson cited at the beginning of this post, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele described prison life in the old El Salvador: There, gang members could do gang business from prison, make occasional trips outside the prison, and even bring in prostitutes. Bukele also joked about the American prison system for giving prisoners access to exercise equipment and Netflix. At the same time, he noted that in the old El Salvador, prison guards were afraid because they had to do without amenities like exercise equipment and were locked in spaces that were less comfortable than those of criminal bosses.

In the new El Salvador, all previous roles and expectations have been reversed.