El Salvador New Prison Received 2,000 More Suspected Criminals

El Salvador's justice minister made the promise that "they will never return" to the streets after 2,000 more gang members were transferred to a massive new jail on Wednesday.

President Nayib Bukele's administration made the stern declaration as they requested a 13th month of emergency measures against gangs, AP reports.

Almost 65,000 persons have been apprehended throughout the antigang campaign over the past 354 days.

Human rights organizations reported widespread abuse of prisoners and the arrest of innocent citizens during police raids.

The massive prisoner transfer at El Salvador new prison was announced through a professionally made video released on social media by the administration.

Inmates were seen running down the stairs and crossing naked while handcuffed and wearing only the required white prison shorts. Following that, they were seated in cells in tightly packed groups with their legs chained.

Even though around 57,000 detained have yet to face formal charges or a trial, the government's minister for justice and peace, Gustavo Villatoro, has declared that the accused gang members will never return to the streets.

The El Salvador New Prison

A state of emergency was declared by President Nayib Bukele a year ago, allowing arrests to be made in the violence-plagued country without warrants, according to France 24.

Meanwhile, the El Salvador new prison was constructed to accommodate some of the 65,000 alleged gangsters detained in the war on crime.

Villatoro, the minister of justice and security, requested a one-month extension of the state of emergency on the same day as the transfer operation.

More than a hundred inmates can be housed in 32 cells, each measuring around 100 square meters (1,075 square feet), in a prison in Tecoluca, located 74 kilometers (46 miles) southeast of the capital San Salvador.

There are only two toilets and two sinks in each cell, and there are only 80 metal bunks without mattresses for every 100 inmates.

The First Batch of 2,000 Inmates Was Transferred to El Salvador New Prison in Late February

The El Salvador new prison that will house more than 40,000 suspected gang members who are the target of President Nayib Bukele's "war on crime" has welcomed its first 2,000 inmates in late February, Al Jazeera noted.

"At dawn, in a single operation, we transferred the first 2,000 members to the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT)," Bukele tweeted, calling it the largest prison in the Americas.

Bukela has also declared that the prison will be the inmates' new home for the next few decades, where they will live together, unable to harm the population.

Human rights groups have said that the arrests made possible by President Nayib Bukele's declaration of a state of emergency amount to gross human rights abuses.

El Salvador's Human Rights Watch listed "mass arbitrary detention, torture and other forms of ill-treatment against detainees, deaths in custody, and abuse-ridden prosecutions" among the violations.

"We are eliminating this cancer from society," Villatoro tweeted about the inmates. "Know that you will never walk out of CECOT; you will pay for what you are ... cowardly terrorists."

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Bert Hoover

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