Since Monday, El Salvador has been applying “more drastic and tougher” security measures in prisons that host 16,000 gang members to stem a wave of homicides that have already killed 58 people. Sealed cell doors, restricted communications and visits and search for weapons and media in the cells are some of the measures taken by the Director-General of Prisons, Osiris Luna, who decided to place detainees in some prisons in the same room to prevent rebellions and homicides and for searches to be carried out, as the BBC writes.
In the shared images, you can see hundreds of men wearing only their underwear, all sitting inches apart, with only a few wearing masks.
Luna guarantees that the measures, applied in response to a wave of murders registered between Friday and Sunday, are “within the law” and are “necessary”. The Salvadoran Attorney General’s Office confirmed to the Spanish agency Efe that 24 homicides were recorded on Friday, 12 on Saturday and 22 on Sunday.
The Salvadoran government has also secured the blocking of communications within prisons, but gangs have begun to send execution orders through inmates on probation or on precarious leave.
Luna wants all prisons to resemble Zacatecoluca’s maximum security prison, with a “strong, tough, orderly, controlled, disciplined” regime, and the measure that goes through sealing cell doors with metal bars was already applied in this prison.
“Not a single ray of sunlight will enter any of the cells” and the detainees “will not be able to have any kind of communication”, he assured, in a press conference.
According to local authorities, El Salvador has one of the most overcrowded prison systems in the world and several humanitarian organizations have in the past pointed out the vulnerability of prisoners to becoming ill with tuberculosis.
Efe found that detainees in prisons do not wear masks or keep the safety distance to contain the spread of Covid-19 disease. Still, there is no official record of any infected prisoners among the 323 people detected with the new coronavirus.
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