Prisons of horror: These are the centers in El Salvador where Trump has deported Venezuelan migrants.

BarcelonaHe President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has received the support of his American counterpart, Donald Trump, in his particular "war on gangs"In a gesture almost unprecedented in history, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. to deport 238 inmates to the Central American country members of the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua. Without specifying whether they were convicted or what crimes they were accused of, they were dragged from a plane by heavily armed men. Chained hand and foot, they were taken to the Terrorist Confinement Center, where they were made to kneel and shaved bald while being forced to give their names. They were then taken to one of the large cells of this impregnable mega-prison in Tecoluca, 80 kilometers from the capital of the Central American country.

This prison is the flagship project of the repressive policy undertaken by Bukele since coming to power in 2019, with the aim of ending the gangsGuarded by hundreds of soldiers and police, El Salvador's Alcatraz is intended to house 40,000 gang members, although 14,500 people are currently detained, to whom the members of the Aragua Train have just been added.

The agreement between Bukele and Trump coincides with the third anniversary of the State of Exception in El Salvador, which came into force on March 27, 2022. Since then, the Legislative Assembly, controlled by the Salvadoran president's party (Nuevas Ideas), It has been extended monthly up to 36 times This measure arose as a response to the massacre of 92 people perpetrated by the gangs in just three days.

This regime, which suspends several constitutional rights, has resulted in the arrest of more than 85,000 people accused of belonging to or collaborating with these criminal groups, which has tripled the prison population. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found that there is overcrowding of up to 300% in the country's 23 prisons, which have become a living hell for inmates. Furthermore, many of them have not even been tried.

Organizations such as Humanitarian Legal Aid raise the number of people deprived of liberty who have died in prisons to 374, including four babies, although it believes that the real figure may be around 1,000 in the last three years. Despite these complaints, the Exceptional Regime is the repressive policy that brought Bukele to a second term, after being re-elected by an overwhelming majority in February of last year, although several articles of the Constitution prohibited it.

The population thus endorsed the Territorial Control Plan implemented by the president since he assumed his first term, with which he intended to carry out an unprecedented challenge to the 70,000 members of the gangs that were still on the streets and have caused 120,000 violent deaths in the last thirty years. That's why he militarized the streets, closing off entire municipalities with soldiers and police to identify and arrest suspicious individuals.

In his second inaugural address, the president went so far as to say that he had managed to free his country from the cancer of the gangs and insecurity" and would have become the "safest in the entire Western Hemisphere, with a 97% reduction in homicides."

"Total tyranny"

The cost in democratic terms has been very high, according to the director of Humanitarian Legal Aid, Ingrid Escobar, who warned in statements to ARA that El Salvador has become a "dictatorship," given that "all power is concentrated in Nayib Bukele, who rules the Assembly." "Right now, he is even practically extorting local governments by telling them what to do," she criticized.

For Escobar, the country is heading toward a "total tyranny" in which even "human rights defenders are being persecuted," being "criminalized" for their work, while the powers that be are "co-opted, even the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which is the only hope." On the other hand, she criticized the State of Emergency as a "true setback" in terms of human rights, given that "more than 25,000 innocent people have ended up in prisons." Escobar recalls that Bukele himself has acknowledged that they have already released 8,000 people who had been in prisons like Izalco, where "there are gang members assets convicted of femicide, homicide, extortion, kidnapping or rape."

Finally, he estimates that the arrival of foreign criminals to El Salvador will lead to international lawsuits, since "they are ignoring judicial decisions of the US justice system." However, he believes that the government "economically. At the same time, it is guaranteed that the leaders gang members deportees "do not confess" in the pending trials in New York the "pacts" reached with Bukele during the Territorial Control Plan.