Gang members wait to walk in their cells upon their arrival at the Terrorism Confinement Center, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, June 2024. Source: Reuters, via Secretaria de Prensa de la Presidencia
By Arianna Mancini
In less than three years, El Salvador went from being one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest in Latin America. The key to this transformation? A state of emergency, mass arrests, and a prison the guards themselves call hell: CECOT.
In 2015, El Salvador recorded a homicide rate of 103 per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest in the world for a country not at war. Gang violence, driven primarily by the criminal organisations MS-13 and Barrio 18, had turned entire neighbourhoods into ungovernable territories, where gangs imposed extortion, recruited children, and decided who could walk the streets and who could not. A decade later, that number had dropped to 1.3 per 100,000. Streets that were once ungovernable are now walkable by families with children, who feel safe across the country.
The architect of this shift is Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president since 2019. After secretly negotiating with Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) leadership, the homicide rate dropped. The arrangement appeared to be working, until March 2022, when MS-13 ordered 62 murders in a single day. Bukele declared a state of exception, giving police and military the authority to detain anyone on suspicion alone, without evidence or warrant, stripping detainees of the right to legal defence, family visits, and private communications, and allowing judges to extend imprisonment indefinitely. That same state of emergency has since been renewed more than 47 consecutive times. In the months that followed, security forces detained over 90,000 people, making El Salvador the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world: over 1,600 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. At the centre of this model sits a structure unlike any other on earth.
Inside CECOT
The Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, CECOT, opened in February 2023 in Tecoluca, in the department of San Vicente. Designed to hold up to 40,000 inmates, it is one of the largest prisons in the world. Eight modules radiate from a central tower, each subdivided into cells holding up to 80 detainees. There are no windows facing the outside and no natural light reaches the interior, a space described by Miguel Sarre, former member of the UN Subcommittee for the Prevention of Torture, as a “concrete and steel pit.” The facility cost approximately $70 million to build and was completed in less than a year.
Bukele has made CECOT a centrepiece of his global image. Choreographed visits for journalists and social media influencers have produced widely circulated footage: rows of shaved-headed, tattooed inmates in white shorts, forced to move synchronised in silence through concrete corridors. CECOT is not merely a prison, it’s a political message.
According to the Salvadoran government, those held inside are high-ranking members of MS-13 and Barrio 18, the gangs whose dismantling Bukele presents as his main achievement. Officially, they are labelled terrorists. Bukele himself, during a 2025 visit to the White House, summarised his philosophy in a phrase that drew admiration from Donald Trump: “Sometimes they say we imprisoned thousands. I like to say we liberated millions.” In 2025, CECOT also began receiving international detainees, primarily Venezuelan nationals deported directly from the United States under the Trump administration, as part of a bilateral deal in which Washington paid El Salvador $6 million to hold them.
But what does life inside actually look like?
Detainees leave their cells for just 30 minutes per day to exercise in the central corridor. There are no recreational activities, no educational programmes, no religious services, and family visits are not permitted. Communication with lawyers is effectively non-existent, and even court hearings are conducted entirely by video link from a dedicated room inside the prison. Each cell holds up to 80 prisoners, who sleep on metal bunks with no mattresses or sheets, and who are not permitted to keep any personal belongings, except for their own clothes. Three meals are served daily, rice, beans, hard-boiled eggs, or pasta, eaten with their hands, as no cutlery is permitted. Whoever behaves in a disruptive or aggressive way is punished by being held for few days in solitary confinement cells that are completely dark. The dining halls, the gym, and the recreation rooms visible in official footage exist inside CECOT, but they are reserved for the guards.
There is no rehabilitation and no work. According to the November 2025 report by Human Rights Watch and the Salvadoran organisation Cristosal, prison authorities greet new arrivals with four words: “You have arrived in hell.”
Credits: Gladys Serran
“You Have Arrived in Hell”
The HRW and Cristosal report is based on detailed accounts from 40 Venezuelan prisoners deported to CECOT by the United States Department of Homeland Security in March 2025. The document reaches a conclusion that is difficult to ignore: the abuses documented inside CECOT were not isolated incidents attributable to some guards. They were systematic violations that took place on a near-daily basis throughout the entire period of detention.
From the moment of arrival, detainees reported being beaten in the hallways of their assigned modules. Beatings continued during daily cell searches, triggered by infractions as minor as speaking too loudly, showering at the wrong time, or requesting medical treatment. A section of the prison known as “the Island” functioned as a dedicated punishment zone, where detainees were subjected to particularly severe abuse, even sexual violence, reported by three former detainees.
These findings are corroborated by a declaration filed under oath by Juanita Goebertus, Director of the Americas Division of HRW, that describes conditions at CECOT that include torture, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process, and inadequate access to food and medical care. So far, more than 450 deaths have been recorded in Salvadoran prisons since the state of emergency began. The Salvadoran government has denied human rights organizations access to its prisons, while simultaneously granting it, under tightly controlled conditions, to journalists and influencers.
Who Shouldn’t Be There
The official narrative is clear: CECOT holds terrorists. And for some of those inside, that description may be accurate.
But the picture is more complicated. Human Rights Watch has documented that arrests under the state of exception were frequently made by quota, without individual warrants, based on little more than a tattoo, a neighborhood, or an anonymous tip. Of the 252 Venezuelan nationals deported to CECOT by the US, ICE data revealed that 48.8% had no criminal record in the United States. Only 8 individuals had been convicted of a violent offense, and HRW found no evidence that any of the 40 individuals interviewed for its report were members of Tren de Aragua, the gang cited as justification for the deportations.
Safer for Whom?
The homicide rate in El Salvador has collapsed by over 90% between 2015 and 2022, according to UNODC data. For millions of Salvadorans who lived for decades under gang extortion and violence, this transformation is tangible and deeply meaningful. The results are real, and for the first time in decades people feel that the state is on their side. Families sit in parks after dark; children take the bus to school without fear. It is no surprise that Bukele’s model has attracted global attention, with several governments across Latin America and beyond asking whether the same approach could work at home.
But the state of exception that made all this possible operates without the most basic legal safeguards. No warrant. No evidence. No right to a lawyer. Under this system, a person can end up inside CECOT based on a tattoo or an anonymous tip. When hearings do take place, they happen by video link, with limited access to individual legal defence. Nearly half of the Venezuelan nationals deported to CECOT by the United States had no criminal record whatsoever.
The citizens of El Salvador have the right to live in peace, that is not in question. What is in question is whether a system that imprisons people without due process, in conditions that international law defines as torture, with no mechanism to distinguish the guilty from the innocent, can be called justice. Because when the need for proof disappears, that right to peace and safety is not guaranteed to everyone: it is only guaranteed to those the state has not yet labelled as an enemy.
So, what rights remain when the state decides you are a terrorist?