A Look Inside the Mass Torture Chamber in El Salvador Being Celebrated by Trump
The CECOT prison is actually an Orwellian tool of state terrorism, not a place where real criminals are detained. Few have been charged and fewer get out.
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The photos that accompany this essay capture some of the horror of the mega-prison in El Salvador called CECOT where Trump is forcibly and illegally sending legal immigrants with no criminal record — without even a court hearing or due process of law — after abducting them from the streets and immigration detention facilities of this country. This prison is actually a tool of state terrorism, not a place to incarcerate real criminals.
Prisons are supposed to detain people convicted of crimes after they are given the right to a trial with due process of law. CECOT — which in a nod to Orwell is called the “Terrorism Confinement Center” — houses thousands of people never charged with a crime, tried of a crime, or sentenced for a crime. It opened in early 2023.
Nobody on the inside is allowed to communicate to anyone on the outside. Nobody inside is allowed to receive a visitor, even a family member or lawyer. Nobody there knows if they ever will get out, although some do emerge. It is indefinite detention that flagrantly violates numerous national and international human rights laws. Bukele justifies it all in the name of fighting “terrorism” — the new all-ecompassing term applied to anyone these right-wing authoritarians disagree with and wish to attack. (See the illegal arrests in the U.S. of the distinguished graduate students Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturn for examples of how this process of “terrorist” demonization works to target peaceful protestors.)
Evidence from international human rights groups demonstrates that CECOT is being run as a mass torture chamber by the country’s young dictator, Nayib Bukele. Trump this week met with Bukele in the White House (see photo below) and said the next move on his own dictatorial journey might be to send US citizens — or at least those convicted of violent crimes — to this hellhole. Such a move would be illegal, but if it were to happen it could effectively force any US inmate to face an indefinite lifetime sentence in El Salvador with no legal recourse in that country.
The vast majority of men currently in the CECOT are from El Salvador and were targeted with mass arrests in a supposed anti-gang crackdown that began three years ago when the government declared a state of emergency in response to rising violence. In fact, since 2022, police and military forces in the country have rounded up a staggering 85,000 people out of a total population of 6 million and imprisoned them without charges or trial. That’s 1.4% of the country’s entire population (including men, women, and children) held in violation of the law. This is a flagrant attack on human rights that Bukele and Trump are celebrating. It is also in my view a terrifying model for what Trump would like to do in the United States to legal immigrants and dissidents who are citizens, the courts be damned.
I’ve read reports and statements by respected international monitoring groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (see here, here, and here) about the worsening human rights problems under Bukele and what goes on inside CECOT, which can hold 40,000 people and is likely the largest prison in the world. The reports are chilling. Prisoners are caged in large cells with no personal space; deprived of adequate food; beatings are common; many have died from strangulation and are buried in unmarked graves; all are deprived of communication with the outside world; nobody is allowed outside or can be exposed to sunlight; and no visits from family members or lawyers are allowed. Roughly 350 people reportedy have been killed in the country’s prisons in the last three years.
It’s a sadistic high-tech death camp designed to instill fear in the entire society, but most inside did not commit a crime. The entire “evidence” of wrongdoing cited by the government seems to be a tatoo on the body.
Bukele, an advertising excutive by profession, is the latest human rights violator to be welcomed by Trump in the people’s house. (Netanyahu, facing an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for committing atrocities against civilians in Gaza, was embraced by Trump at the White House a few days before.) As bad as the situation is, and understanding that the Democratic Party leadership seems incapable of effectively fighting this descent into authoritarianism, I am convinced we have yet to come close to hitting the bottom.
-Steven
With you having been sensitized by being another sort of victim, you are a valuable reporter on what others aren’t dealing with. The media is full of outrage about one person treated illegally, but I notice so little about what you are delivering regarding the illegality of all the arrests and the brutality of the treatment the prisoners get. When I post a video of the mass arrests, people are shocked that this is how the arrestees had their heads shaved and were shoved along, shackled and bent over, on the way to that concentration camp called a prison: https://youtu.be/3o-PI8S9BbA.
When you think Trump can’t get any worse, he keeps on delivering. What a lovelessly cruel person he is, and a pox on all the Republicans. Any bloodless coup to be had? Can’t we do that on the internet?
There will come a time when every single person 'incarcerated' in US prisons/El Salvador will be released. Then you USA will understand what you have done.
China and Russia are watching this.
Your time has come USA!