Chile’s president-elect, José Antonio Kast, visited El Salvador’s mega-prison for gang members on Friday and asked President Nayib Bukele for “cooperation” to improve security in Chile’s prisons. Visits to the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) are part of the usual protocol for Bukele’s special guests. Bukele has turned the prison into a symbol of the crackdown that pacified the country, but it has also become a target of allegations of human rights abuses.
“We want to ask you for cooperation on improving our penitentiary system,” Kast said after meeting Bukele at the government palace, following a tour of Cecot that the Salvadoran president did not attend. However, the future far-right Chilean president added that “we don’t necessarily have to do the same thing because conditions are different,” as his country faces rising crime.
For his part, Bukele said that, “differences aside” between the two countries, what El Salvador can do is “contribute its experience.” Kast, who said that “crime is organized from within some (Chilean) prisons,” arrived by helicopter at Cecot, a prison he first visited in 2024 and which holds about 15,000 inmates.
Guided by staff from the Salvadoran presidency, he observed the cells in a wing where inmates, dressed in white T-shirts and shorts, greeted him in unison, journalists reported. “Good morning,” said the detainees, their heads shaved. Then, in one cell, authorities asked some of them to take off their shirts so they could show their tattoos.
Several looked thin, while others sat with their arms crossed on their bunks under intense heat. Shaken by the harsh detention conditions, two Chilean journalists cried as they left the prison, located in Tecoluca, 75 kilometers (47 miles) from San Salvador. “It makes me sad and anxious,” one of them said.
Cecot inmates are accused of belonging to the violent Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs, which the United States has designated as terrorist organizations. The area around Cecot was heavily secured during the visit. Six kilometers before the facility, soldiers and police stood on both sides of the highway. Two armored vehicles were also parked in front of the building.
Bukele has carried out his offensive under a state of exception that allows arrests without a court order, which human rights NGOs say has led to the imprisonment of innocent people. Nearly 91,000 people have been detained under that regime and about 8,000 were released for lack of evidence, according to official figures.
Cecot, inaugurated in 2023 with an investment of $115 million, gained notoriety after the United States sent Venezuelan migrants there last year, where they remained for seven months.
