Welcome to hell: Inside brutal El Salvador mega jail

Dramatic new images have emerged showing the inside of one of El Salvador’s brutal mega prisons where thousands of gang members are kept in cramped cells and watched 24 hours a day by masked guards. 

Pictures show topless and heavily tattooed inmates lined up under the watchful eye of armed guards at the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), a maximum security facility built in Tecoluca to imprison the most violent and high-ranking members of the country’s main gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18.

It is the latest demonstration of the country’s merciless crackdown on narco gangs by President Nayib Bukele, who over saw the arrests of more than 70,000 people in 20 months in an attempt to wipe crime off the streets.

It is a fortress of high security where artificial light shines for 24-hours, prisoners are forced to eat with their hands as knives and forks could be a deadly weapon, and inmates can only leave their cells for 30-minutes a day. 

In the dead of night yesterday 2000 more prisoners were transferred into this ‘blackhole of human rights’ under the eagle eye of heavily armed guards. 

Pictures released by the Government of El Salvador show the new arrivals being processed.

The inmates were transported in a bus with their hands cuffed behind them, their heads resting on the chair in front and wearing nothing but a pair of cotton shorts. 

Inside images revealed they were force to sit in rows with their hands on their necks, and heads down as they wait to be moved into their new cells. 

Many display bold tattoos of Roman numerals of the numbers 18 or 13, symbolising their gang affiliation etched onto their skin in ink. 

The president has become immensely popular for this heavy-handed policy at home, as seen when he swept the country’s presidential elections in February, with 85 per cent of the votes, which will keep him in power for another five years. 

The number of homicides in El Salvador – considered by many to be the murder capital of the world – tumbled 56.8 percent in 2022 following his crackdown. 

Inside the CECOT there are eight modules with an undetermined number of prisoners in each as the authorities have refused to specify, however the capacity of the whole prison is 40,000. 

Behind bars are the most dangerous prisoners in the country, assassins with dozens of murders to their name are serving sentences of 700 years and so far no one who has entered the facility handcuffed has ever seen daylight again.  

The convicts are forced to sleep in close quarters, each taking a bed, which is just a metal sheet on a four-storey bunk. 

They are fed rice, brans, hard-boiled eggs or pasta, which they must eat with their hands as they can’t even be trusted with plastic or wooden utensils. 

In each 100 square-metre cell the notoriously dangerous inmates are forced to share just two toilets and two sinks. 

They get a brief 30-minute window in which they’re allowed to exercise, using only their own bodyweight due to fears of them bludgeoning each other or the guards with dumbbells or barbells. 

Human rights group have hit out at the facility calling it a ‘blackhole of human rights’  and UN officials have described it as a ‘concrete and steel pit’, which has been built to dispatch of the prisoners without applying the death penalty.

When Human Rights Commissioner of El Salvador, the Colombian Andrés Guzmán, visited the notorious prison he insisted the inmates are ‘in good condition and their human rights are being respected’.

But human rights groups have compared the conditions in the prison as something similar to the concentration camps used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

A report by human rights group Cristosal found that 174 inmates have been tortured and killed in horrifically violent deaths in the year since President Nayib Bukele launched his merciless campaign against the gangs.

El Salvador’s historic crime problem goes back to a civil war in the 1980s.

As Latin American Refugees fled to America, the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs formed on the streets of Los Angeles. When the war ended, those from El Salvador returned. With them, they brought their gang affiliations, rivalries and violence.

Now, Barrio 18 is thought to have around 65,000 global members, while MS-13 has between 50,000 to 70,000. As their numbers grew, their influence spread.

For many years now, thousands of members from both have fought and died for the crown of Central America’s most powerful gang, profiting off crimes such as sex and drug trafficking, racketeering, money laundering, extortion and kidnapping.

In one instance of extortion in 2015, a man who owned a bus refused to pay his $1 fee to the MS-13 gang. Three weeks later, two young gang members cornered him, threw him to the ground and shot him four times – twice in the head.

His son said his father was killed because of $21.