El Salvador's Prison Crisis

In 2015, El Salvador buried 6,657 of its own citizens. That is a homicide rate of 106 per 100,000 people, among the highest ever recorded in a country not formally at war. MS-13 and Barrio 18 did not merely commit violence, they administered daily life; taxing bus drivers, governing which streets civilians could use, determining who could walk home and who could not. A civil war that officially ended in 1992 had never truly concluded.

Nayib Bukele, elected in 2019, swore he would not fail where his predecessors had. By 2024, the official homicide rate had fallen to 1.9 per 100,000, a reduction of over 98%. He was re-elected that year with 84% of the vote, having previously described himself, without apparent irony, as ‘the world's coolest dictator’. His supporters found this charming. He had, after all, delivered the one thing every Salvadoran government for 30 years had promised and none had produced: the elementary, unremarkable experience of safety.

Those headline figures, however, require scrutiny. The U.S. State Department’s 2023 Human Rights Report officially noted that national homicide numbers, despite their recent decline, have become unreliable. Official figures do not account for human remains found in clandestine graves or disappearances. From 2021-2023, 171 such graves have been discovered; none of those deaths appear in official statistics. Casualties from confrontations with security forces, 122 between 2022 and 2023, are similarly excluded. El Salvador does not apply the Bogota Protocol, the standard for measuring homicides across Latin America. The decline is real. However, its precise magnitude has been shaped for political consumption.

What this safety costs, and who precisely is paying for it, is the question his administration’s considerable media apparatus prefers to leave unexamined.

In March 2022, following 62 murders in a single day, Bukele declared a régimen de excepción (a state of exception). The legislature was told it would last 30 days. It has since been renewed 51 times. By the end of 2025, over 90,000 people had been arrested under it, approximately 1.8% of the national population, in a legal environment stripped of the right to counsel, to charge before detention, to any judicial oversight whatsoever. El Salvador now holds the highest incarceration rate on earth. 3 in every 100 men have been removed from civilian life.

What fills that absence is not peace but a different kind of dread.

Dr. Sarah Bishop, a professor at Baruch College who serves as an expert witness on El Salvador for U.S. immigration courts, testifies before judges who must determine whether returning a person to El Salvador constitutes delivering them into credible danger. Her 2025 paper, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’, coauthored with Salvadoran expert Mneesha Gellman, makes a precise and unsettling argument: the Bukele government has not only suppressed visibility of its prison system, it has weaponised it. The continuous release of curated footage; drone shots of ranked detainees in white uniforms, cinematic reconstructions of police operations, crowds out evidence of abuse with imagery so compelling that the counter-record cannot compete. The spectacle is not a distraction from the violence. It is the instrument by which the violence is made to disappear.

Independent access to CECOT, a concrete fortress in Tecoluca built to hold 40,000 people, has been denied to every human rights organisation that has requested it. What Dr. Bishop’s research has recovered comes from released detainees, forensic records, leaked government documents, yearly fieldwork in El Salvador, and the testimony of 40 Venezuelan nationals held for 4 months in CECOT who later spoke to the New York Times, a majority of whose accounts satisfied the United Nations’ definition of torture: systematic beatings, denial of food and medicine, tear gas discharged into entire cells simultaneously, as collective punishment for the fact of proximity. Since the state of exception began, over 500 people have died in custody. Evidence from coroner’s reports, forensic records, and photographic evidence shows a clear pattern of blunt force trauma, hanging, and strangulation. ‘Inhumane conditions directly attributable to the state.’

Bukele acknowledged in November 2024 that 8,000 innocent people had been detained. Human rights organisations consider this figure a significant undercount. Former police officers have described arrest quotas that, once the identifiable pool of gang affiliates was exhausted, were met by arresting men from the wrong neighbourhood, men with visible tattoos, men whose neighbours had made an anonymous call. The state of exception had removed every legal friction that might otherwise have slowed this process.

In early 2025, the arrangement acquired an international dimension. The Trump administration began transferring deportees directly into Salvadoran custody, paying Bukele’s government millions of dollars for the service. Several of those transferred held no criminal convictions in the United States. The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia reached the Supreme Court. Deported without a criminal conviction and in explicit defiance of a judicial protection order, his case forced the highest court in the United States to rule on whether the executive branch had simply decided to stop obeying its own judiciary.

It was a laundering of accountability through a third-party state. The deportee leaves American legal jurisdiction on the aircraft and arrives in a country where there is no lawyer waiting and no hearing date scheduled. There is, Dr. Bishop has documented, a significant and largely unreported risk that the deportee, particularly if male, will be arrested on arrival regardless of any gang affiliation, absorbed into a system that has not stopped needing to fill its quotas.

Bukele offered this arrangement to Washington as an opportunity to outsource part of the American prison system. Leaders in Ecuador and Honduras have praised his model. It is being studied and replicated.

The momentary relief of communities that lived for decades under gang terror is genuine. What Dr. Bishop’s work demands is not that this be dismissed, only that it be weighed against what it has required. Constitutional rights suspended indefinitely. Hundreds dead in custody. Tens of thousands held without trial. And a media operation brilliant enough to make all of it look, from sufficient distance, like a miracle.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
Cristosal | Defending Human Rights in Central America
SOCORRO JURIDICO HUMANITARIO - SHARE Foundation
MOVIR - Movement of Victims of the Regime El Salvador

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