WASHINGTON – In a video circulated last weekend by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the new inmates of his infamous Terrorism Confinement Center were shackled by the hands and feet and yanked by the hair off of planes by faceless guards in riot gear.
Fresh from the United States, they were shoved onto buses and hauled into the prison under blinding klieg lights. They were forced to their knees and guards shaved their heads and faces with blunt swoops of an electric razor. And then they were herded into crowded mass jail cells with prisoners with tattooed faces and musclebound bodies.
The three-minute video, complete with action movie shots and sinister music, is terrifying. And that’s the point.
Welcome to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT as it is commonly known. It’s where President Donald Trump is now saying that vandals in the U.S. defacing Tesla dealerships could be sent along with 261 alleged gangsters, most from Venezuela, that he flew there last weekend.
What, exactly, is CECOT? And is it as harsh and dangerous as its many critics say?
In short, the answer seems to be an unequivocal yes – and that scare tactic is the reason both Trump and Bukele say they’re incarcerating them there.
Here’s what we know about the maximum-security prison:
Bukele, El Salvador’s maverick and very pro-Trump president, proposed the unique agreement with the United States in which he offered to house American deportees at the sprawling multi-building prison complex.
Bukele, a self-described strongman and Trump supporter, boasts that CECOT – and its solitary confinement deprivation of prisoners – is the crown jewel of his aggressive anti-crime strategy. Visitation, recreation and education are not allowed at the mega-prison, says Bukele, who has shared numerous other videos of how roughly prisoners are treated.
Trump has embraced the arrangement and sent alleged Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gang members to the prison last Friday evening. In a White House press briefing Monday afternoon, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the $6 million the Trump administration has agreed to pay Bukele amounts to “pennies on the dollar” compared with what it would cost to house them in maximum-security prisons in the U.S.
“The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us,” Bukele said in an X post accompanying the video of the men’s arrival and processing. “Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, will help make our prison system self-sustainable.”
Lawyers have challenged the men’s deportation and a federal judge in Washington has ordered the Justice Department to explain its legal justification for sending them there.
A response to a surge in gang violence in El Salvador
The prison is located in Tecoluca, El Salvador and was built in 2022 in response to a surge in gang-related killings in the country. El Salvador, which endured years of civil war and repression, had among the highest homicide rates in the world in the aftermath. Bukele announced the country was entering a state of emergency, initiating a full-fledged government crackdown on gang violence during which, he said, constitutional rights and due process would be suspended.
Each of its 256 cells houses an average of 156 inmates in metal bunks with no mattresses or sheets and only two toilets and two sinks for the entire group. Artificial lights stay bright 24 hours a day, and CCTV cameras and armed guards monitor each cell. Solitary confinement cells are kept pitch black except for a small ceiling hole for light to trickle in.
The crime rate and homicide rate dropped after the state of emergency, but behind closed doors, experts allege there have been significant human rights abuses.
‘A punitive approach to incarceration’
The prison’s conditions raise significant legal, ethical and humanitarian concerns, critics and constitutional experts say.
“I strongly, strongly fear that they’re already being tortured, being mistreated, being screamed at, being forced to perform forced labor, being poorly fed or underfed,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights organization.
Doug Specht of the University of Westminster, writing in the SAIS Review of International Affairs, said when compared to international standards, CECOT’s conditions “fall significantly short of accepted norms for the humane treatment of prisoners.”
Specht, a human rights scholar, said CECOT’s sheer scale is unprecedented in Latin America, with windowless cells in each of eight large pavilions. Its architecture, and operational protocols, prioritize security and isolation over rehabilitation, “reflecting a punitive approach to incarceration,” Specht said.
He said prisoners are restricted to their cells for 23.5 hours daily, with 30 minutes per day for exercise in a windowless corridor. “Surveillance is omnipresent,” Specht said, “with CCTV cameras and armed guards monitoring from elevated positions, creating an atmosphere of constant observation and control.”
‘Very good jails’
Trump has boasted about the Salvadoran mega-prison in the context of supporting Bukele and his tough-on-crime policies toward suspected offenders.
“They’re dangerous people, but they didn’t look so dangerous when the guards took care of the situation from El Salvador,” Trump said on Friday referencing the men he sent there. Many of them are not the gang members Trump portrays them to be, according to their lawyers and human rights advocates.
On March 17, the White House posted a statement saying the Trump Administration had deported “ruthless terrorist gang members – illegal immigrants who invaded our country and brought unspeakable devastation to our communities” to the prison as part of Trump’s “utilization of every possible tool to protect the safety and security of the American people…”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Bukele would hold the detainees “in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”
And Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, posted on X that the deportees were going to “the beautiful prisons of El Salvador.”
Building on his successful partnership with Trump, Bukele is now hoping to go global and take in “criminals from any country.”
“As always, we continue advancing in the fight against organized crime. But this time, we are also helping our allies, making our prison system self-sustainable, and obtaining vital intelligence to make our country an even safer place,” Bukele said in his post along with the U.S. deportees last weekend. “All in a single action.”