Exposing the Horrific Conditions at CECOT, the El Salvador Mega Prison
- Kevin Lankes
- Apr 7
- 10 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WMUbrG7eJbY
Close to half of Americans don’t even have a passport. Lucky for us, Citrus Caesar and his goons think It’s a great time for us to get out and see the world. We are so lucky in the sense that we have so many great opportunities to visit the country of El Salvador. Just El Salvador. And no need to worry about taking vacation days because Elon Musk is about to shut down your workplace anyway. So let’s go ahead take a fun virtual tour of the amenities at your new resort destination and talk about why we have this amazing chance to play the real-life Hunger Games in South America today.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for the Creamsicle Caligula Tourism Committee’s introductory video to your new digs at the El Salvador Mega Prison.
On this season of the White Lotus, a fun new vacation opportunity awaits. It’s hiding in a white van with a mask on to haul you off the streets or right out of the classroom or your job, and it won’t take no for an answer, because there’s really no one to complain to anyway and due process is suspended.
And we know this because it’s literally happened. A Tufts University grad student was taken off the street in what looks like an actual kidnapping. Her only offense was that she cowrote an article in the student paper that was critical of Israel. While she remains caught up in the immigration system while her case moves through the courts, others have not been nearly as fortunate.
Tell these other unlucky folks what they’ve won, Johnny! It’s a fabulous prize! An all expenses paid trip to a resort stay…… at the Terrorism Confinement Center…. (start out hamming it and then get progressively confused and upset as the sentence goes on) Huh.
Also known as CECOT, this El Salvador mega prison has been described as quote “the worst place in the world.” Recently released video from the government of El Salvador shows prisoners being taken off the deportation flights and struggling to walk while they’re forced to shuffle along bent over with their heads down and thoroughly chained up as they’re pushed along by stormtroopers in riot gear. The video showed a military escort for the bus they took to the prison, where they were then forced to kneel and have their heads shaved and thrown in cells.
The cells are designed to hold 80 prisoners each, but that can go as high as 150, for a total population of 40,000 people confined in the worst conditions imaginable. It’s sometimes so crowded that prisoners have to sleep standing up. CECOT is a huge compound on 410 acres with giant concrete walls topped with razor wire and electric fences, nineteen watchtowers, and eight separate airport-hanger-sized buildings with 32 cells apiece for holding prisoners. Even the decorative gravel surrounding the prison is loud when walked on and designed to serve as an alarm system if someone ever did the impossible and escaped.
The Terrorism Confinement Center or CECOT was a part of President Nayib Bukele’s controversial strategy to crack down on gang violence in El Salvador. Built in 2023 in Tecoluca, the mega prison is 45 miles east of the capital city of San Salvador. CECOT is a lot like the Chateau d’If from The Count of Monte Cristo. If you’ve ever read it or seen one of the movie adaptations, it’s where you send people to never be seen again. And I was actually today years old when I found out that the Chateau d’If is a real place and wasn’t just made up by Alexandre Dumas.
Just like in the olden days at the apparently factual torturous island dungeon for political prisoners, inmates at CECOT don’t have regular access to food or water. They hardly ever leave their cells and can go days without seeing sunlight or the outside world. They’re forbidden from having any visitors or contact with the outside world. There’s no recreation at CECOT, no education, no reading, no books, no screens, no workshops or programs like in other prisons. A jammer stops all wireless signals from a two-kilometer radius. Every now and then a handful of them get about an hour of calisthenics or get to listen to someone read from the bible. The El Salvadorian minister of justice has said that those held at CECOT will never return home. The people who are marched through those gates very genuinely become ghosts.
Human rights organizations are unsurprisingly very upset with the mega prison of El Salvador. They cite reports of dehumanizing conditions, torture, starvation, and brutality. Claims are circulating that at least 261 people died in El Salvador prisons last year.
But President Bukele and President Dipshit -- President Trump -- are both aligned in their mission of convincing us that the cruelty is the point. Despite the fact that studies have shown harsh punishments and long prison sentences don’t deter crime in the slightest but may actually increase the rate of crime in a population, these fake tough guy dumbasses continue to spout harmful philosophies of hardened societies and “tough on crime” horseshit.
Unqualified and insane Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, a self-admitted puppy murderer, visited the Terrorism Confinement Center for a fun little photo op that’s of course sparked outrage from, well, everyone. She stood all heartless, stupid, and plastic in front of a cell jam-packed with hardened, expressionless, broken faces just staring at her in possible wonderment or delirium, and she had this to say: “They need to see that the United States is going to use every tool that we have to make our communities safer. That that is a consequence of someone who is a terrorist.” The whole thing was completely dehumanizing and shitty, with one social media user writing about the bizarre photo op, “Those are human f---ing beings behind you, not f---ing props. That looks like a concentration camp. This is utterly reprehensible. Shame on you.”
And even if any of what Puppy Killer Barbie said made sense…….who is she talking about? What terrorists? The administration is deporting “illegals,” and in some cases also people here legally doing nothing wrong, but we’ll get to that. Where does terrorism even enter this equation? Well, the answer is that the Terrorism Confinement Center only imprisons people who are terrorists, so Creamsicle Caligula has officially declared two South American gangs terrorist organizations. And they are Tren de Aragua, or TdA, and MS-13. So now, conveniently, all they have to do is just say that someone is a member of those groups and then they get to pretend to justify deporting them to CECOT. He’s following the playbook that President Bukele used to set up CECOT in the first place. It’s a terrorism dungeon that imprisons alleged gang members without due process, because gangs are now terrorists, and well, you can claim that anyone is in one of these gangs now.
And accusing people of being gang members so they can deport them to CECOT is exactly what the U.S. government is doing now. 26-year-old Franco Jose Caraballo Tiapa, who came to the United States from Venezuela as an asylum seeker, was detained following a routine check in with immigration and customs enforcement, and after that his wife lost touch with him. It was then discovered that he’d been placed on one of the mass deportation flights to El Salvador, a country where he’s never lived. The Department of Homeland Security has his name on a list of TdA gang members, but there’s no evidence of this anywhere else and Tiapa has no criminal record whatsoever. But he has tattoos apparently, and the administration has cited those as evidence without clarifying whether or not they’re gang tattoos.
However, and this is where things get super shitty, because unlike other gangs like MS-13, TdA doesn’t have any gang tattoos. Experts say that the tattoos Tiapa and lots of others have are simply tattoos that are just popular in Venezuela. One is a song lyric, one is because people like basketball, one is a memorial tattoo. So there’s no possible way that tattoos can be the reason for Tiapa’s illegal deportation, but that’s what they claim because they think their supporters are stupid and will believe them. Tiapa’s wife and lawyer have been speaking out about the complete lack of due process, which is, of course, unconstitutional and illegal anyway. There are multiple reports now of people being thrown in an inescapable dungeon prison because of their tattoos. Soccer tattoos, names of family members, symbols of faith, and one tattoo of a rose that one new prisoner’s partner said he didn’t even like but got it because of a friend who was getting into tattoo art and wanted to practice. God, I would hate to be that f*cking friend right now. Not only did you give your pal a shitty tattoo, but you got him deported to a mega prison, too.
Crown tattoos are said to be TdA by the trumpers, but they’re just popular tattoos associated with Three Kings Day, and are a Catholic tradition, which the Christian Nationalists running these deportations should probably know about and actually be behind.
The other big issue with all of this is that TdA is also being blown way out of proportion by trump in order to justify any of this. Reports suggest that it’s not even an established gang, and that it’s struggling to gain a foothold among other criminal organizations, and a document obtained by USA Today lists just three incidents homeland security has associated with them.
One of the people Citrus Caesar claimed is a TdA gang member in order to deport him is a makeup artist who came to America seeking asylum for being gay, and even Joe Rogan spoke out about how awful it was to send him to a mega prison.
I have aspirations to be a sane alternative to Joe Rogan who does things like provide factual information instead of nonsense, so if you’re down with that, please make sure to like and subscribe to support the work I’m doing, and maybe buy me a coffee on Patreon. All of that is down in the digeridoodles with the sources for this episode.
All of this is so dystopian and illegal and maddening that it’s hard to hold the realities of it in your head all at once. And then you have to wonder, how is this happening at all? For one thing, trump has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to allow him to do these deportations. The act allows noncitizens to be deported without due process or involvement by the courts. This has only been used three times in American history. The first time was during the War of 1812, and the next times were during World War One and then World War Two. It was the justification for imprisoning 120,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps, where 1,862 of them would die. Many of them were born here and were as American as you or I, same as the people who are now being deported to a country they’ve never set foot in.
All because of trump’s insane violent rhetoric. And that’s all it is--it has no basis in factual reality whatsoever. It’s not legal to invoke the Alien Enemies Act outside of wartime, so trump said that TdA gang activity in America constituted an invasion. Hence, we’re at war, I guess, with a group of people who are barely a gang and have committed three known incidents in the U.S. Better to go to war with falling ladders for fuck’s sake, they’ve killed more people than a gang that barely exists.
Not to mention, any sound bite about an immigrant invasion is nonsense to begin with. It’s completely untrue. Border arrests were much higher under the Biden administration and border enforcement was much harsher. After trump took office, immigrants arriving in the U.S. dropped to their lowest numbers since the 1960s. Trump is doing less and complaining more, and resorting to completely illegal and morally horrific acts in order to pretend that this (image of his flab) is some kind of paragon of manly ancient kingliness. A U.S. district court judge has ordered the administration to stop the deportations, but that hasn’t happened.
Probably because Trump made an agreement with Bukele to pay six million dollars to keep this operation going for at least a year. Hundreds of people have been deported so far. Like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father with legal protective status who can’t legally be deported and who the administration has just admitted to condemning to the mega prison due to an “administrative error.” At the same time they say that it’s impossible to get him back. This comes just after trump freed known sex trafficker and overall shithead Andrew Tate from custody in Romania. He didn’t have any problems getting that human stain out of trouble. Garcia’s wife is currently suing the trump administration to get the courts to force officials to even try to get him back, because so far they haven’t done shit.
This is an unspeakable, terrifying situation. It’s beyond the pale, past even the darkest imaginations, and just completely unbelievable that this is now real life.
I mean, what am I saying? Free vacation, exotic South American locale that’s off the beaten path, free housing, new friends! I mean, what else could you want? Maybe a functioning democracy, I don’t know.
Something needs to be done. I think what Cory Booker did was great, and powerful, and impressive, but it would have been great a few months ago, and now we’re way beyond that level of response. Human beings are getting kidnapped and sent to a torture dungeon in a country they’ve never been to, never to be seen again, and the opposition is just wagging their finger extra hard. It’s time to force accountability. Here’s what you can do. Flood your elected leaders with calls, texts, emails, smoke signals, tarot readings, whatever you can and have the time to do. There are a number of tools out there to help make this as easy and painless as possible. The 5Calls app is a great place to start if you’re comfortable on the phone. They spoon-feed you the exact people to call and the exact things to say in the form of a prewritten script, and all you have to do is read it off. ResistBot is a tool that will turn your texts into emails, faxes, and physical mail and will find your representatives to send all of it to them without you having to do much of anything. If you want to stop by in person, your elected officials have local offices where you can show up and talk to somebody. You can look those up. If you can’t do any of that, and you have some money left over from trump’s tariff war and inflation-scarred economy, then donate to crowdfunding campaigns or advocacy organizations that are working on bringing the administration to justice and getting innocent people back to their families.
Let’s get together on this and become so loud that our collective outrage will shake the walls of the mega prison of El Salvador. Let’s do some f*cking good about illegal deportations to unspeakably inhumane torture dungeons.
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