El Salvador announced a new mega-prison where the first hardcore gangbangers and highly violent street gangs will be moved.
This came after President Nayib Bukele boasted that a new prison will be “impossible to escape” amid their war against violent street gangs.
According to the reports, photos from inside the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism showed tattooed, barefoot and stripped-down inmates, kneeling shoulder to shoulder while being chained as heavily armed guards tower over them.
“The prisoners are forced to crouch down with their hands behind their heads while chained inside the massive facility, which authorities claim is the largest in America,” New York Post reported.
On Friday, President Bukele announced on Twitter and revealed that “today at dawn, in a single operation, we transferred the first 2,000 gang members to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, mixed up, unable to do any more harm to the population.”
The prison can reportedly house as many as 40,000 inmates in eight buildings. Each building has 32 cells that will hold about 100 prisoners each and each cell has only two sinks and two toilets.
Last year, Bukele launched his controversial war against violent street gangs and the new prison was part of the President’s efforts.
“The initiative has raised concerns among human rights observers who have complained that the campaign violates basic constitutional rights, including by allowing security forces to arrest suspects without a warrant To date, more than 64,000 suspected gang members have been rounded up, including those allegedly belonging to the notoriously violent MS-13 and Barrio-18 gangs,” New York Post reported.
In 2016, eight electrical company employees and three farmers were found hacked-up and bullet-riddled near a desolate field in El Salvador’s San Juan Opico municipality.
The investigation revealed that killers used machine guns and machetes and machine guns, bearing the hallmarks of MS-13, or Mara Salavtrucha, the uber-violent street gang.
At that time, authorities and citizens blamed President Salvador Sánchez Cerén for his lenient measures to stop the violent crime.
“The only problem was that it wasn’t MS-13 that carried out the massacre. It was a gang known as Barrio 18. MS-13 and Barrio 18 are bitter rivals whose ongoing feud is responsible for the deaths of thousands across the US, Mexico and Central America,” New York Post reported.
According to the report on gang violence released by the Justice Department in 2013, “these two gangs have turned the Central American northern triangle into the area with the highest homicide rate in the world.”
“Like its better known rival, [MS-13], the Barrio 18 has cells operating from Central America to Canada, including the United States. With thousands of members across hundreds of miles, and interests in a number of different illicit activities, Barrio 18 is one of the more significant emerging criminal threats in the region,” the organized-crime investigative nonprofit Insight Crime noted.
