CECOT and the Church in El Salvador

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele announced this month an agreement with the U.S. government, which would apparently house in Salvadoran prisons U.S. deportees who had been convicted of crimes.

While details have not been announced, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that “we can send [migrants] and [Bukele] will put them in his jails,

The prisons that might eventually house American detainees is CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, a large, recently built, and controversial and high-security prison in the country, built to house up to the 40,000 prisoners.

The Catholic episcopate in the country has mostly taken a hands-off approach to Bukele, who is a widely popular figure in El Salvador, despite frequent charges of human rights abuses, corruption, and making changes to the country’s constitution to perpetuate himself in power.

Still, the president’s iron fist security and environmental policies have led to clashes with some of the country’s bishops

So what is CECOT? What does the Catholic Church in El Salvador have to say about it? And is there Mass there?

The Pillar takes a look.

What is CECOT?

CECOT — the Terrorism Confinement Center — is a mega-prison Bukele opened in January 2023, as one of the keystone projects of the president’s war on gangs in El Salvador.

CECOT was specifically built for high-ranking members of gangs like as MS-13 or Barrio 18, which wreaked havoc in the country throughout the 21st century, with members responsible for thousands of homicides, and for large drug-dealing and recruitment operations across El Salvador.

Bukele came to power in 2019 promising to drop El Salvador’s staggering homicide rate.

In 2015, the homicide rate in El Salvador reached its highest point: 106.3 per 100,000 inhabitants. When Bukele came to power in 2019 it was sitting at 38 homicides per 100,000 people, which still made it one of the highest rates in the world.

Bukele security policies brought the homicide rate in 2024 to a much lower 1.9-per-100,000.

For his part, Bukele boasts that his country went from having the highest murder rate in the world to having a homicide rate lower than Canada.

A crackdown on gangs, especially after 2022, led to thousands of arrests -– including innocent people, according to local human rights organizations –- but El Salvador did not have enough space in its prisons for many of the people arrested.

That led Bukele to build CECOT, with a capacity of 40,000 prisoners. To date it has only around 12,000 inmates, which is likely the reason why importing American prisoners and detainees is regarded as an attractive proposition..

Both his security policy and the prison have given Bukele worldwide recognition, as one of the few cases in which a Latin American country has seemed to effectively curb widespread gang influence without starting a small civil war.

But the change did not come without controversy.

Since a state of emergency declared in 2022, 70,000 Salvadorans have been arrested and incarcerated, many without charges. Human rights organizations indicate that there have been 261 deaths in state custody since 2022, while allegations of torture in prisons like CECOT are rampant.

Prisoners in CECOT are not allowed to communicate with their families, who, many times, do not even know where there loved ones are incarcerated.

Is there a Catholic chaplain in CECOT?

Neither the national press office nor CECOT authorities could be reached for comment by The Pillar,

But it is unlikely that CECOT has a Catholic chaplain.

The Catholic Church has an extensive prison ministry in El Salvador. For example, the Mercedarian Order, involved in prison ministry worldwide, has chaplains in four Salvadoran prisons and they coordinate the national prison apostolate, which is active in 21 prisons in El Salvador.

Most prisons have ia own chaplain, and there are more than 500 Catholic volunteers in total, including a significant number of laypeople associated with the charismatic renewal.

But CECOT seems to be an exception. Except for media tours, no visits of any kind are allowed in its facilities.

In media interviews, CECOT authorities emphasize that no visitors are allowed into the facilities, and that the inmates do not have any kind of leisure activities in the prison.

In fact, in a 2023 report, BBC Mundo showed the facilities during Christmas. In the report, an inmate is shown leading the others in prayer, with no visible presence of chaplains in the prison.

If true, an absence of chaplains would seem to violate Rule 65 of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, commonly known as the “Mandela rules,” which says that:

“If the prison contains a sufficient number of prisoners of the same religion, a qualified representative of that religion shall be appointed or approved. If the number of prisoners justifies it and conditions permit, the arrangement should be on a full-time basis.” and that “access to a qualified representative of any religion shall not be refused to any prisoner.”

What has the Church said about CECOT?

Virtually nothing.

However, the Church has involved itself in negotiations with El Salvador’s gangs, and spoken out about Salvadoran prisons, for more than a decade.

In 2012, Bishop Fabio Colindres, then bishop El Salvador’s military ordinariate, announced he had taken part in a secret negotiation to stop fighting between MS-13 and Barrio 18, two of the largest Salvadoran gangs – despite the refusal of the country’s bishops’ conference to endorse his negotiations.

In 2015, the bishops’ conference challenged the “lack of humanity” in Salvadoran prisons because of the facilities’ overcrowding.

In that year, Salvadoran prisons had a total capacity of 8,000 inmates but held more than 30,000 — with many cells holding 30 inmates in a space smaller than a one car garage.

In July 2019, Archbishop José Luis Escobar of San Salvador, the country’s capital, applauded Bukele’s security policy, saying: “I am pleased that they are working so fast and concerned with fighting against violence because everyone knows that we need a solution. Violence is the topic that affects the Salvadoran society the most … when the president faces this problem with such speed and concern, people are happy and hopeful.”

But in August 2023, Escobar challenged the government for detaining innocent people during its war on gangs, and for the lack of resources available to incarcerated people.

The archbishop said that “even those who are guilty … must receive spiritual and psychological help, and be allowed to invest their time not only with work … but also with study so their sentence can help their conversion, and not become something that submerges them in despair.”

What is the relationship between Bukele and the Salvadoran bishops?

Quite cold.

Bukele is a very popular figure in El Salvador.

He was re-elected in 2024 with 84% of the vote, in an election in which 52% of eligible Salvadorans voted.

International observers questioned the use of public resources for the Bukele campaign, government pressure on the media, and a change to electoral rules, but none charged that the results themselves had been manipulated, especially given Bukele’s popularity in opinion polls.

In light of that, Salvadoran Church-watchers say the country’s bishops have been reluctant to challenge Bukele on elements of a policy approach that is immensely popular.

But while there has been relative silence from most of the hierarchy, the most glaring exception has been Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez, emeritus auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, who is seen as a pupil of Saint Óscar Arnulfo Romero.

Rosa Chávez said in a May 2023 interview that the Church had no openness to any dialogue on the part of Bukele’s government.

“A wall has been erected, which has cooled the relations between the Church and the government, something that had never happened,” Rosa Chávez said.

“In other governments, there was a direct phone line in which you could call and speak to some officials and even the president, or there was a link with whom we could get in touch with the government, but today there’s nothing of the like, there hasn’t been any contact since president Bukele came to power.”

In the same interview, Rosa Chávez said the state of emergency imposed in 2022 to fight gangs in the country constituted a “regime of terror.”

In October of the same year, Rosa Chávez questioned the state of exception imposed since 2022 to fight gangs in the country, saying that there was no due process or right to a fair trial in El Salvador.

“The testimonies of those who recover their freedom are frightening (…) the Salvadoran bishops have asked for the humanization of prisons,” he added.

“A lot of people in my country are victims of fear, which is natural when there is no one to defend us from the arbitrarities committed by law enforcement,” he concluded.

The most recent confrontation between the government and the Church came in January 2025, after the Salvadoran government legalized industrial mining in the country, which led the Church to criticize the move, saying that it was “unpopular and damaging” and to launch a campaign called “Yes to life, no to mining.”

Bukele responded with a post on his twitter.com account saying “what an effort to stop mining … but they never said anything when [gangs] killed 30 Salvadorans per day. On the contrary, they endorsed and gave their “blessing” to negotiations with them.

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