
The Roots of Bukele’s Gulag
The Terrorism Confinement Center was designed to be a black hole. When Nayib Bukele’s flagship “megaprison”—known as CECOT, after its Spanish acronym—opened in January 2023 in a desolate stretch of Tecoluca, about forty-five miles from San Salvador, his administration boasted that people held there “would not have contact with the outside world again”.
Bukele has made global headlines for cultivating an air of millennial cheekiness, making Bitcoin a national currency, and storming the halls of Congress with soldiers, but it’s his gulag that most defines his rule. Having reportedly spent years secretly negotiating with Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, the two gangs at the heart of the country’s surging violence, in 2022 he responded to an especially homicidal weekend of killings by declaring a state of emergency, detaining anyone even allegedly affiliated with either group, and jailing them in ostentatiously brutal conditions.… Seguir leyendo »