The following is a transcript of episode 24 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.
TOCZYLOWSKI: In that moment, they said he was removed to El Salvador. The immigration judge said, how is it possible that he was removed if there’s no removal order? And the ICE attorney that was in the courtroom said, “I don’t know.”
GRESSIER: Two weeks ago, Lindsay Toczylowski, president of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told MSNBC that her client Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay Venezuelan asylum seeker and makeup artist, had been summarily deported to El Salvador without due process. As The New Yorker reported on Monday, their supposed evidence of his belonging to Tren de Aragua? Two little crown tattoos with the words “Dad” and “Mom”.
Today we’re changing gears. Usually, we report multiple big stories a week. Now, on the first Friday of every month, we will expand our podcast reporting on a single issue of special interest to Central America observers around the world.
First up: What in the world goes on in Nayib Bukele’s prisons in El Salvador? And what is the nature of the place where Donald Trump sent Andry and dozens of other Venezuelan migrants?
Lights, camera, prison
You’ve likely heard of CECOT, the Center for Confinement of Terrorists. It’s been getting a lot of press lately. CNN even called it the “world’s deadliest prison”, with no apparent basis, when DHS Secretary Kristi Noem toured the facility with Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro.
NOEM: Do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed, and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.
GRESSIER: In late June 2022, Salvadorans had been living under a state of exception suspending constitutional guarantees for three months. Already overcrowded and underresourced prisons were swelling amid a campaign of mass arrests without due process. Nayib Bukele announced a new prison reportedly designed to hold 40,000 people, CECOT. It shot up from the weeds in rural El Salvador, in the department of San Vicente.
It was inaugurated in January 2023, just six months later, bypassing construction contract oversight. Since the opening, media access has been carefully selected and staged at CECOT. The Salvadoran independent press has not gotten in, but Nayib Bukele has let in a few big U.S. outlets and YouTubers.
“Lights, camera, police action.” And in go dozens of migrants deported by Donald Trump on accusations of belonging to Tren de Aragua. Even if, weeks later, by Bukele and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s own admission, many are simply asylum seekers.
In reality, CECOT is merely the shiny jewel of an archipelago of prisons. The Salvadoran press and rights monitors have collected testimonies pointing to a systematic policy of torture, deprivation of medical care and menstrual hygiene, a rise in tuberculosis, and 375 in-custody deaths in three years.
El Faro found a pattern of official autopsies toning down signs of torture as “pulmonary edema.” The newsroom put a name and face to the lead torturer of Mariona Prison: William Ernesto Magaña, a prison guard known and feared by inmates as “Montaña”.
And that’s just it: The key to understanding El Salvador’s prisons, and the Bukele administration that runs them, are facilities that most observers abroad have never heard of: Mariona, Izalco, or Zacatecoluca, which over the years even gained the nickname Zacatraz, a riff on Alcatraz.
The vice minister's office
If you remember one name from today’s episode, let it be Osiris Luna: the Vice Minister of Security and Justice and Director of Prisons in El Salvador. Under Joe Biden, he was on the sanctions radar of the State Department and under investigation by the DOJ. One question, six years into Luna’s tenure, lingers: Why has Bukele, who declared a “war against corruption”, not sacked him?
According to anti-mafia prosecutors, Osiris Luna embezzled $1.6 million dollars in pandemic relief —food for families going hungry— in 2020 and resold the goods, with his own mother as broker. They also concluded that Luna overpaid supervisors in return for cash kickbacks. Police intelligence even privately profiled the vice minister in April 2020 as a possible drug trade operative. In May 2023, anti-narcotics police arrested his longtime aide on accusations of taking bribes from accused drug traffickers to exit Mariona Prison for unauthorized visits.
Under the state of exception, the Prison Bureau has prevented all above-the-table family visitation for three years. As an El Faro investigation showed this week, this has fed a corruption network trafficking phone calls and conjugal visits for hundreds or even thousands of dollars, in a country where the minimum wage is between $150 and $365 dollars a month.
But the greatest —and perhaps even most delicate— smirch on Osiris Luna’s tenure at the Bureau of Prisons is his role as a lead negotiator, from 2019 to 2022, with the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs for a reduction in homicides and electoral support for the ruling party Nuevas Ideas, as revealed by El Faro in two investigations in September 2020 and August 2021.
Four days after El Faro first revealed the pact, prosecutors raided the Bureau of Prisons. Officials reacted by pulling hard drives and hundreds of logbooks documenting the negotiations from their facilities. But prosecutors found new documentation supporting El Faro’s reporting that Osiris Luna escorted the unofficial entry of men in balaclavas to meet with gang leaders.
In those days, El Faro was intensely and illegally surveilled by a Pegasus spyware operator based in El Salvador, according to The Citizen Lab and Access Now. Bukele baselessly accused El Faro of being under investigation for “serious money-laundering”.
As part of Bukele’s gang negotiations, official Carlos Marroquín, a subordinate of Luna and key point of contact with the gangs, admitted to taking a senior MS-13 leader, Élmer Canales Rivera, or “Crook”, from prison illegally and to Guatemala. Crook was captured in Jalisco, Mexico, and transferred to U.S. custody, where he is still purportedly awaiting trial.
This is Carlos Marroquín admitting to aiding Crook in his transnational jailbreak, in audio published by El Faro in May 2022, referring to the gang leader by another nickname, Viejo:
MARROQUÍN: I pulled Viejo out from inside, brother, as a way of helping all you guys and to show you my loyalty and trustworthiness… I personally went to get him and took him to Guatemala.
GRESSIER: In March 2022, MS-13 felt that Bukele had betrayed the terms of the pact and murdered 87 Salvadorans in cold blood. Bukele reacted by breaking with the gangs and decreeing the state of exception. The mass arrests dismantled the traditional gang structures that controlled many Salvadoran communities for years.
With around 87,000 Salvadorans detained without basic procedural rights, Bukele has solidified an alliance with Trump. Deported Venezuelans have now entered the black-box prison system, reliving the arbitrariness that tens of thousands of Salvadorans and their families have endured for three years.
Roman Gressier wrote this episode of Central America in Minutes, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.
