The government of El Salvador has released photos from its mega-prison, where thousands of suspected gang members are being held.
The government of El Salvador recently published photographs from its mega-prison in Tecoluca, as the New York Post reports. The images mainly show the shaved-headed and half-naked prisoners who are being held there under sometimes inhumane conditions.
The huge prison facility is located in Tecoluca, about 75 kilometers southeast of the capital San Salvador, and has space for up to 40,000 inmates. It was built about a year ago to hold gang members from the country’s most violent criminal organizations, the MS-13 and Barrio 1.
The convicted prisoners are locked up in a very small space in the so-called “Terrorist Detention Center” and have little room to move. A government-released image shows half-naked prisoners squatting in a long row, their heads tilted forward until they touch the back of the prisoner in front of them, reports the New York Post.
In one photo, the men with shaved heads and hands tied behind their backs are crammed into a transport bus.
Because prison guards fear that the inmates could use the cutlery as deadly weapons, the men are forced to eat their meals, such as rice, noodles or hard-boiled eggs, with their hands instead of with cutlery, the New York Post reports.
In addition, the inmates are only allowed to leave their dark, neon-lit cells for 30 minutes a day. In addition, according to the Daily Mail, they are only allowed to exercise with their own body weight because the authorities do not want them to injure each other with weights and dumbbells.
Due to numerous allegations of torture and inhumane conditions, the mega-prison facility is now being called “the black hole of human rights” by many human rights activists, reports the Daily Mail. The left-wing Colombian President Gustavo Petro compared the facility to a concentration camp.
According to a report by the human rights group Cristosal, 174 inmates have been tortured and killed this year alone, the paper added. However, the country’s human rights commissioner stressed that the inmates are in “good condition” and that their rights are being respected.
Almost two years ago, due to the high crime rate and the emergence of parallel societies, the government of El Salvador declared a state of emergency and declared war on criminal gangs, especially the violent so-called Maras. As a result, more than 70,000 suspected gang members have been arrested in the last 20 months and transferred to newly built mass prisons, the Daily Mail reports.
Although the murder rate in El Salvador fell by 56.8 percent following the political measures in 2022, human rights organizations criticize the fact that arbitrary arrests and inhumane prison conditions have continued to occur since then.
The prisoners were usually sentenced to life imprisonment in mammoth trials set up for this purpose. Through the collective legal proceedings, the government of conservative President Nayib Bukele was able to convict around 71,000 suspected gang members, sorted by their affiliation, in a very short space of time.
Some of the inmates are serving prison sentences of up to 700 years, reports the Daily Mail. So far, none of the thousands of prisoners have been released from prison.
The violent and rampant crime in El Salvador dates back to the civil war in the 1980s. As a result of the war, Latin American refugees fled to the USA and formed the street gangs MS-13 and Barrio 18 there, especially in Los Angeles, reports the Daily Mail.
After the war ended, most of the refugees returned to their homeland and established the gang affiliations, rivalries and criminal violence that had previously developed in El Salvador. Today, the number of members of Barrio 18 is estimated at around 65,000. According to the Daily Mail, the number of members of MS-13 is estimated at 50,000 to 70,000.
For many years, thousands of gang members have died in street fights and conflicts. The gangs profit from their illegal economic structures primarily through crimes such as sex and drug trafficking, extortion, money laundering and kidnapping.
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