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#elsalvadorprisons El Salvador’s New Business Model Fills Jails
El Salvador

Last month, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele made an unusual offer to the United States: He said he was willing to take violent prisoners in US jails – citizens, legal residents, and migrants of any nationality – and house them in a mega-prison that now holds tens of thousands of suspected gang members.

The offer was warmly welcomed.

Bukele “has agreed to the most unprecedented, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said after meeting with Bukele in early February. “We can send them, and he will put them in his jails.”

“There are obviously legalities involved – we have a constitution,” he added. “But it’s a very generous offer. No one’s ever made an offer like that.”

Bukele has made El Salvador’s harsh prisons a trademark of his aggressive fight against crime. Now he’s offering to “outsource” them for a fee, he said on X, explaining that the payments would make the enterprise sustainable, essentially a viable business model.

The crown jewel of the prison system is the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), which was opened in 2023 just outside of the capital of San Salvador. It can house about 40,000 inmates.

Bukele says the prison is a symbol of El Salvador’s successful transformation: “El Salvador has managed to go from being the world’s most dangerous country to the safest country in the Americas. How did we do it? By putting criminals in jail. Is there space? There is now.”

For years, powerful street gangs had a stranglehold on the country, terrorizing residents, strangling business, and threatening governance.

Then, in 2019, Bukele was elected on a promise to bring crime under control. Three years later, he declared a state of emergency, suspended civil liberties, and sent the army out into the streets after rival gangs went to war and killed 62 people in a few hours.

Since then, about 84,000 people have been arrested, in three years tripling the prison population to about 110,000 in the country of about 6 million.

Homicide rates have plummeted, life has changed. “The environment where we live is very different now,” one woman told the Associated Press. “It’s very quiet now for the family, for the kids.”

El Salvador last year had a record low 114 homicides, a decrease of almost 50 percent over 2023. In 2015, there were 6,656 homicides.

As a result, Bukele’s approval ratings among voters hover in the 90 percent range. He won the election last year with 83 percent of the vote.

Meanwhile, the number of Salvadorans trying to cross the border into the United States has fallen by a third.

Now, he’s looking ahead, trying to revamp the country in other ways, too. Recently, he lured Tether, the world’s leading stablecoin firm, to El Salvador to create its first physical headquarters. That’s part of his attempt to turn El Salvador into crypto central: In 2021, El Salvador became the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender. Last week, however, the International Monetary Fund told the country to stop accumulating and mining the currency.

He’s been reshaping the government, too. Recently, he’s changed the constitution to make it easier to change it. Now he’s trying to eliminate public financing of political campaigns. Both moves, critics say, are designed to eliminate political competition.

As a result, the “World’s Coolest Dictator,” as he calls himself, has opposition groups, human rights organizations, and others worried.

A year ago, he won his second term even though the constitution forbids consecutive terms for presidents by packing the judiciary and resigning just before the election. Now he’s already talking about an illegal third term. Meanwhile, he has cracked down on journalists, unions, and civil society groups, intimidated opposition lawmakers, and ousted judges who cross him, wrote World Politics Review.

He has also jailed thousands without any access to lawyers or due process: Amnesty International said that El Salvador is essentially undertaking the “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence.”

El Salvador has become the most incarcerated country in the world, with 1.6 percent of the Salvadoran population now behind bars – more than four times that of the United States.

Now, there is a different type of climate of fear in the country: Salvadorans say that it is common to end up in jail because someone has anonymously reported them to the police, who don’t investigate the claims.

Meanwhile, the US State Department describes El Salvador’s overcrowded prisons as “harsh and dangerous,” lacking water and other basics. El Salvadoran officials say they want to keep these individuals in jail for life, regardless of what crime they have – or haven’t committed.

Now, Bukele is turning his success at reducing crime into a nationwide business by importing criminals. As Foreign Policy noted, “Where El Salvador has become a true leader – not only in the Western Hemisphere but globally – is incarceration.”

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