6 days ago · Even before the campaign against gangs, El Salvador’s prisons were notoriously violent and overcrowded but the crown jewel of Bukele’s fight is the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, he opened in 2023. In slickly produced videos, prisoners in boxer shorts are marched into prison yards and made to sit nearly atop each other. They are ...

The Terrorism Confinement Center (Spanish: Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, abbreviated and commonly referred to as CECOT) is a maximum security prison located in Tecoluca, El Salvador. The prison was built in late 2022 amidst a large-scale gang crackdown in El Salvador and was opened by the Salvadoran government in January 2023.

5 days ago · El Salvador’s gangs once used jails as operational hubs to issue orders, extort businesses on the outside and recruit new members — something also seen inside prisons across Latin America.

6 days ago · Data from the World Prison Brief (WPB), opens new tab says El Salvador has per capita the highest prison population rate of anywhere in the world, with 1,659 inmates per 100,000 residents.

Feb 25, 2023 · The first group of 2,000 suspected gang members in El Salvador have been moved to a huge new prison, the centrepiece of President Nayib Bukele's self-declared war on crime.

Nov 6, 2024 · CNN goes inside the El Salvador prison that houses gang members who once terrorized the country and are blamed as the “worst of the worst.”

Feb 15, 2024 · El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. More than 70,000 people have been detained under the "state of exception", an emergency measure granting draconian powers to the...

Oct 12, 2023 · TECOLUCA, El Salvador (AP) — With tattoo-covered faces, and wearing white shirts and shorts, gang members captured during El Salvador’s state of exception are gradually filling the country’s new mega prison.

Feb 25, 2023 · The first group of 2,000 suspected gang members in El Salvador have been moved to a huge new prison, the centrepiece of President Nayib Bukele's self-declared war on crime.

Feb 3, 2023 · Dubbed the Terrorism Confinement Center, the prison will hold many of the more than 62,000 people authorities have arrested since the government suspended some constitutional rights and pushed an all-out offensive against the gangs last March.