Chilling new pictures present inside El Salvador mega jail the place ‘nobody sleeps’

Chilling new pictures give a glipse of the hellish conditions inside a high-tech super-prison housing thousands of feared gangsters.

Images show heavily-inked lags lined up by masked guards at the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT). The maximum security prison was built in response to El Salvador’s out-of-control drug gang problem and holds over 12,000 gang members sleeping in four-tier bunks in 80-man cells.

Among them are the most high-ranking members of the country’s main gangs – MS-13 and Barrio 18.

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It is the latest example of the country’s merciless crackdown on narco gangs by President Nayib Bukele who oversaw the arrests of more than 70,000 people n 20 months in a bid to wipe crime off the streets, MailOnline reports.

Prisoners are forced to eat with their hands as cutlery is banned and inmates can only leave their cells for 30 minutes a day. With only artificial light, so far those who have entered haven’t seen daylight since and noone sleeps.

Pictures released by the Government of El Salvador show new arrivals being processed after being transported by bus wearing nothing but a pair of cotton shorts.

Many bear tattoos of Roman numerals of the numbers 18 or 13 symbolising their gang affiliation. The number of homicides in El Salvador has plunged by 56.8% since the drastic move.

Earlier this year, the Daily Star reported how Salvadoran journalist Rubén Díez toured the futuristic, all-white super-jail.

Director Belarmino Garcia told him that there’s no hope of rehabilitation, and the prisoners will be kept in the jail for the rest of their natural lives. “This is a maximum security regime,” he said. “There is no visiting time for them.”

President Bukele scrapped human rights legislation in order to bring the gangs under control.

After declaring what he called a “state of exception,” Bukele ordered a crackdown that resulted in the the arrest of some 55,000 suspected gang members. Children as young as 12 years old can also now be tried for their potential gang membership, and it has been claimed that at least 1,600 children have been arrested since this law was amended as of November 2022.

Human Rights Watch has slammed the brutal crackdown, accusing the Salvadoran government of “arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, torture and other ill-treatment of detainees, and significant due process violations”.

Each cell contains two toilets, two wash-basins, and 80 bunks that have no mattresses.

Bukele himself has said that the spartan conditions are a big improvement on previous prisons that he’s visited. “Before, the gang members had prostitutes and PlayStations, televisions, drugs, cellphones, and computers and the guards and soldiers were sleeping on the floor,” he explained. “It was all backwards.”

As well as a comfortable barracks, the guards have a fearsome array of equipment to maintain control in the “escape-proof” jail, including batons, shotguns, and high-calibre assault rifles.

The Taiwanese-made T-65 assault weapons are issued to guards patrolling the prison’s outer walls, while the shotguns – and suits of stab-proof body-armour – are on hand to put down any riots within the jail.

High-tech airport-style body scanners make it almost impossible for prisoners to smuggle weapons or drugs into the jail when they are admitted, and with no visitors allowed there is little chance of anything being brought in from the outside.

Bukele claims that the brutal CECOT régime has turned around his country’s gang problem.

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