Costa Rica’s top law enforcement official toured El Salvador’s notorious “mega prison” in a desperate search for answers to the bloody migrant gang war that has seen murder rates spike in his country.
Justice Minister Gerald Campos visited the controversial CECOT max lockup on Friday looking for ways to fight back as the Costa Rican homicide rate reaches unprecedented levels, The Tico Times reported.
“We are going to take all the good practices and see how we can bring them to a good conclusion in our legal system,” Campos told the outlet during the tour. “We need to build new prisons in line with the level of crime our countries are experiencing today.”
CECOT, a Spanish acronym for El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, opened in 2023 as a last resort effort to combat that country’s migrant gang problem — and has proven successful despite worldwide criticism from human rights advocates.
The prison, which is in Tecoluca, about 46 miles from the Central American country’s capital of San Salvador, can hold up to 40,000 hard-core gangbangers in eight heavily guarded buildings, each with 32 cells that will hold about 100 prisoners each.
Each cell has only two sinks and two toilets.
Inmates, including tattooed Tren de Aragua and MS-13 gang members, are forced to strip down and bow shoulder to shoulder under the watch of no-nonsense prison guards.
Last week, Homeland Security Security Kristi Noem released a message from inside the notorious prison in an effort to send a message to violent migrant gang members being rounded up in the US.
“People need to see that image,” Noem told Fox News. “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.”
Since taking office in January, President Trump has used the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act to deport gang members to the “hellhole” Salvadoran prison without trial, sparking complaints from critics.
However, authorities in Costa Rica are desperate for an answer to their own migrant violence, which has seen the homicide rate spike to 17.2 per 100,000 people last year — an all-time high.
The bodies are piling up so quickly that the recent autopsy of former Yankee Brett Gardner’s teen son was delayed because Costa Rican coroners were backed up on cases.
Although the number is lower than some American cities, it’s a shocking development in a country once considered among the safest in all of Latin America.
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