Prisoners at the Terrorism Confinement Centre, a prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador, built to house 40,000 gang members convicted or detained.
Rodrigo Sura / EPA
Governments across Latin America are resorting to draconian measures in an attempt to rein in surging gang violence.
Men who were detained under the state of emergency are transported in a cargo truck in Soyapango, El Salvador in October 2022 after President Nayib Bukele began a crackdown on gangs that suspended constitutional rights and threw one in every 100 people in jail.
(AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
Mass arrests and the suspension of constitutional rights have been a feature of President Nayib Bukele’s tenure. A fresh mandate from voters will likely entrench his hardline approach.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele thought making Bitcoin legal tender would revolutionise his country’s economy, He was wrong.
Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele promised voters change. Instead, he seems to be reviving El Salvador’s authoritarian past.
Camilo Freedman/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
El Salvador ‘is inching back toward its authoritarian past’ after President Nayib Bukele fired five supreme court justices and the attorney general – essentially the only checks on his power.
Even before COVID-19, El Salvador’s prisons were contagious disease hotspots. Here, MS-13 gang members with tuberculosis at Chalatenango prison, March 29, 2019.
Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images
El Salvador is arresting thousands of people for violating its COVID-19 quarantine, further packing a ‘hellish’ penal system once described as a ‘petri dish’ for infectious disease.
Can 37-year-old Nayib Bukele get El Salvador back on track?
Reuters/Jose Cabezas
Thirty-seven-year-old Nayib Bukele is the first modern president who doesn’t represent either of El Salvador’s two mainstream parties. Can he fix what ails this troubled Central American country?
Nayib Bukele: El Salvador’s new president.
EPA Images
Doctoral Candidate in Public Policy at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, USIP Peace Scholar, and Fulbright-Hays Fellow, UMass Boston