El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center

Where MS-13 and other gangs get sent in the new El Salvador

CECOT: Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo

The other night I watched Tucker Carlson interview El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Bukele first came on my radar some years ago for making Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador. He became president of El Salvador in 2019, and since then has overseen the dismantling of organized crime and corruption in his country, taking it from the murder capital of the world—in 2015 it had over 100 murders annually per 100,000 inhabitants—to a projected murder rate in 2024 of under 2 per 100,000, making it safer from murders than all other countries in the western hemisphere, including Canada.

El Salvador’s reduction in crime has come at a cost. Gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18 have been rounded up and imprisoned. Bukele has justified the mass arrests and imprisonment of criminal gang members as a necessary and urgent response to restore security and peace in the country. He has called for extraordinary measures, including a State of Exception, which allows for extended detentions without formal charges, which he sees as critical to dismantling the power of these violent organizations that have terrorized Salvadoran society for decades.

Leaving aside concerns about due process, what is the scale of this crackdown and where are all these gang members ending up? Since emergency measures were instituted in March 2022, over 75,000 people have been arrested. El Salvador is a country of about 6.4 million. The US, by comparison, has a population of about 335 million. A good rule of thumb in comparing the scale of what’s happening in both countries is therefore to use a multiplier of 50. Thus a round-up of 75,000 in El Salvador would correspond to a round-up in the US of 3.75 million, or close to 4 million.

Those numbers are staggering, giving El Salvador the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with 1,086 incarcerated for every 100,000 in the population. It thus outranks 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 low end is Japan’s 36 per 100,000.

El Salvador’s ramping up of incarceration numbers has necessitated the building of new prisons, or perhaps I should say the building 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 scare quotes because this prison is indeed huge in terms of the sheer number of inmates it can accommodate, though its actual physical size is quite limited. It currently houses over 14,000 inmates, but its total capacity is 40,000. Secured by a force of 1,000 guards, 600 soldiers, and 250 police officers, the prison would thus at its current capacity have a prisoner to security force ratio of about 8 to 1. (It’s unclear what economy of scale might be achieved if the prison is filled to its total capacity of 40,000.)

By comparison, the largest prison in the US is the Louisiana State Penitentiary (aka Angola). It has a prison population of around 6,000 and employs around 2,000, with a prisoner to employee ratio of 3 to 1. This last ratio suggests a lower efficiency than that of CECOT, though in fairness the CECOT numbers available pertain only to security forces and not to administrative, medical, and maintenance staff (which, however, includes non-violent prisoners brought in from other prisons to handle food preparation). Even so, factoring in staff numbers seems unlikely to significantly diminish the previous 8 to 1 ratio.

CECOT Prison Complex

Although CECOT sits on 410 acres (or around two-thirds of a square mile), the actual CECOT prison complex occupies a mere 57 acres, or 2.5 million square feet, and of that, its 8 modules (blocks) together occupy 540,000 square feet, or 67,500 square feet per module (for comparison, an average Walmart superstore has 180,000 square feet). And with each module able to accommodate 5,000 prisoners, that gives only about 6 square feet to each prisoner.

Obviously, this means that no prisoner has a cell of his own. Instead, each module consists of 50 community cells, with each cell able to handle 100 inmates. To accommodate so many prisoners in such small spaces, the ceilings are high with four-tiered bunks that have no mattresses. These cells have been likened to birdcages. At 6 or so square feet per prisoner, CECOT is thus offering far less space than human rights organizations want to see, which at the very low end is at least 36 square feet per prisoner.

Seeing CECOT as a monument to justice, the El Salvadoran government has given the outside world a clear view into CECOT. NBC and the BBC have done reports of it, with the BBC even referring to it as “El Salvador’s secretive mega-jail.” In fact, the El Salvadoran government has been transparent in sharing details of CECOT, as the following incredible video reveals (it has had over 40 million views):

In the Tucker Carlson interview cited at the start of this post, El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele described prison life in the old El Salvador: There gang members could conduct gang business from within the prison, make occasional excursions outside the prison, and even bring in prostitutes. Bukele also made fun of the American prison system for giving prisoners access to gym equipment and Netflix. At the same time, he noted that in the old El Salvador, prison guards ran scared, doing without amenities like gym equipment and being confined to quarters less comfortable than those of crime-boss prisoners.

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