This is the mega prison, built by Nayib Bukele, who started taking inmates in February

Last February, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele opened a mega prison in Tecoluca, 74 km southeast of San Salvador. It is the Center for the Reduction of Terrorism that has become a banner of the war against gangs.

Since that month it began to receive prisoners, which today number more than 12,000 and have a capacity for 40,000 people. The AFP agency visited government human rights officials.

“Here we are persistent day after day and we try to change with the help of our God,” says José Hurquilla Bonilla, of the Barrio 18 gang, from a cell.

This is the ‘megaprison’ that El Salvador is building for the most dangerous criminals

Humanitarian organizations have questioned the treatment alleged gang members receive. The UN denounced that there are at least 1,600 minors among the tens of thousands of detainees.

Most of the prisoners are accused of belonging to the violent Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, born in the early 1980s on the streets of the American city of Los Angeles.

“When you’re a kid, everyone lies to you and you joke, you make a mistake, and when you grow up (…) you realize that,” said Nelson Velásquez, a 37-year-old prisoner. who has a tattoo on his head “MS-13″ (Mara Salvatrucha).

Velásquez was speaking during a visit to the mega-prison by El Salvador’s human rights commissioner, Andrés Guzmán, and human rights lawyer Raquel Caballero.

What does the inside of the mega prison look like?

Each cell of about 100 square meters holds between 60 and 75 inmates and has two toilets and two sinks with running water for washing, as well as two containers of drinking water.

The prison’s pavilions have a curved roof that ensures natural ventilation for the inmates, as well as skylights to filter the sun’s rays onto a patio that separates the cells.

The prison was built to hold some of the more than 72,000 gang members incarcerated under an emergency regime declared by Congress in March 2022 at Bukele’s request, in response to an escalation of violence that swept the country in just three days. took the lives of 87 people.

Of the total number of detainees, “just over 7,000 have been released so far,” Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro reported Tuesday.

To build the prison, the state purchased 166 hectares, 23 of which were used for the construction of eight pavilions located within a perimeter surrounded by a concrete wall 11 meters high and 2.1 kilometers long, protected by electrified barbed wire.

Nayib Bukele defends mega prison as decisive blow to drug traffickers and gangs in El Salvador

Caballero said the detainees complained about the lack of food and “that they have free time, that they don’t do anything because they are locked up,” Caballero told AFP.

The prison has dining rooms, relaxation rooms, a gym and table tennis tables, but only for the use of the guards. There are also dark, windowless ‘punishment cells’ for punishing prisoners who misbehave.

There are rooms for virtual court sessions so that prisoners do not have to leave the prison. They are also not allowed to receive family visits. (JO)

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