Inside El Salvador’s prison system

“You’re doing incredibly for your country,” US President Donald Trump said to Salvadorian head of state Nayib Bukele when the former received him in the Oval Office in mid-April 2025. “We appreciate working with you because you want to stop crime, and so do we.”

Since then, the infamous collaboration between the two countries has created headlines worldwide: El Salvador agreed to accept and detain a group of more than 200 Venezuelans without evidence in one of its high-security prisons. In return, it received $ 6 million from the USA.

The Trump administration accuses the Venezuelan migrants of being members of the criminal gang “Tren de Aragua”, though only a few of them have been convicted of a crime. Following their arrival, pictures from CECOT, El Salvador’s so-called “Terrorism Confinement Center”, travelled around the world; US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem even had her picture taken in front of inmates.

“We’re very eager to help. We know that you have a crime problem and a terrorism problem that you need help with,” Bukele answered immediately, visibly flattered by Trump’s words. Bukele knew that he had done more than attract global attention. With his efforts to “fight crime”, he had also won Donald Trump as an ally.

The CECOT high-security prison

Even before Trump took office, CECOT was one of the most important symbols of Nayib Bukele’s security strategy. The modern mega-prison was built in record time and can hold 40,000 people. The government promoted it as a model internationally and attracted the interest of politicians from other Latin American countries who are also struggling with high crime rates. Bukele’s administration even caught the eye of some influencers and generously opened CECOT’s doors to them. They filmed there as if they were taking a tour of the prison. Videos of prisoners with shaved heads, all supposedly criminal gang members, became part of the government’s marketing.

But CECOT by no means provides a realistic impression of what is really going on in El Salvador’s prisons. Because of the country’s high crime rate, the government declared a state of exception in March 2022, after a particularly violent weekend in which at least 87 people were murdered. Since then, about 85,000 people have been imprisoned, most of them without evidence that they committed the crimes they have been accused of. These measures did reduce violence on the streets, but they also curbed citizens’ basic rights.

Nayib Bukele now boasts that El Salvador has become one of the “safest countries in the Western hemisphere”. But the list of the human rights violations committed by his government is long. It not only condoned torture in Salvadorian prisons, it also contributed to the disappearance of hundreds of people. They were presumably arrested – without evidence of the crimes they are accused of, without a trial and without contact with their families.

Deaths in prisons

“I wouldn’t have known how he was if I hadn’t seen him on social media,” a mother told me. Her son was arrested after the state of exception was declared, and she hadn’t heard from him since – until one day she saw photos on Facebook of him receiving medical care in a hospital. Such stories are no longer rare in El Salvador today.

Since the state of exception was declared, Salvadorian prisons have been denounced as torture centres. People waiting for trials here can become victims of all kinds of atrocities, as statements by former inmates indicate. These have been documented by human rights organisations and the press: prisoners being tortured and suffocated, people’s bodies being returned to their families with signs of hangings and beatings that the state does not account for.

In 2024, Cristosal, one of the most important human rights organisations in El Salvador, made a detailed list of the deaths that have occurred in prisons. From 2022 to July 2024, an estimated 244 men and 17 women died in state custody. The organisation states that after collecting hundreds of witness statements, it has also been able to document the deaths of four children. Two had lived in prison with their mothers; two were miscarriages.

Since then, the numbers have risen: according to the human rights organisation Socorro Jurídico, by mid-2025, the total number of deaths had climbed to over 430. In their most recent report, published in January 2026, Socorro Jurídico reported 470 deaths, 94 % of which ­weren’t gang members. Cristosal and Human Rights Watch report that during the first year of the state of exception, most of the deaths occurred in the prisons La Esperanza, known as Mariona, and Izalco.

Statements by former detainees

“I told [my family] very little. It’s difficult to talk about this. There are things that you can’t say. Sometimes people arrived vomiting blood because they had been beaten. Others who were sick screamed ‘there’s someone sick in here’. Sometimes help came. If it didn’t, it was God’s will,” a person told me who had been arrested and brought to Mariona at the beginning of the state of exception.

The coordinator of the Movement for the Victims of the Regime in El Salvador (MOVIR), Samuel Ramírez, reports that most prisons in El Salvador are overcrowded and unhygienic. According to him, the detainees die due to “a lack of food and medical care”. MOVIR was founded in the initial months of the state of exception, when hundreds of people were being arrested without a warrant and subjected to torture in prison. Since then, the organisation has advocated for innocent people who have been arrested and received the 2025 Human Rights Award from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) in recog­nition of its efforts.

“A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in the prisons,” Ramírez says. The reason is obvious: El Salvador has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. According to data from the Institute for Human Rights at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (IDHUCA), the state of exception has exacerbated overcrowding in El Salvador’s prisons. The prisons were already operating at around 119 % of capacity prior to the declaration, and overcrowding is now at over 350 %. According to IDHUCA, 2.6 % of El Salvador’s adult population is incarcerated.

Even now, almost four years after the declaration of the state of exception, “they have done nothing to remedy the situation,” Ramírez comments, “even though we have repeatedly pointed out the violations and deaths that are occurring in the prisons.” In a report from 2024, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights described Bukele’s policies as repressive, arbitrary and in violation of international conventions. Without his absolute control over the government, such policies would not be possible.

A security model based on fear

At his meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Bukele had a request too: as the Washington Post reported, he wanted the return of nine leaders of the MS-13 gang who were in US custody. They included Elmer Canales Rivera, alias “El Crook”, who was arrested in Mexico and facing trial in the US.

But why did Bukele want to have the gang leader under his control? There is evidence that he was trying to prevent the details of his government’s secret negotiations with the most important gangs from becoming public. In these secret negotiations, Bukele was supposedly attempting to lower the country’s homicide rate. In return for their cooperation, the government offered to release some of the leaders or help them leave El Salvador.

At the time of the Oval Office talks, however, the alleged pact between the government and the gangs had long since broken down – certainly since that violent weekend in March 2022 and the declaration of the state of emergency.

According to Ramírez, the security model that Bukele introduced is a “deceptive and hypocritical” model that is based on the suffering and fear of families who know nothing about their incarcerated loved ones. “We insist that this security model must be exposed,” Ramírez says. He wants the world to know that implementing such a strategy poses a threat to society in any country.

Julia Gavarrete is an investigative journalist from El Salvador. 
Bluesky: @PetizaGavarrete