El Salvador has opened up what is being called the largest prison in the Americas. The mega-prison which can hold 40,000 prisoners is called the 'Terrorism Confinement Centre' and it's primarily to hold gang members who have been incarcerated in what Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele called a war on gangs one year ago.
Around 2,000 inmates were transferred there on Friday - the bulk of them heavily tattooed with the symbols of the once dominant gangs in that country: MS-13, and Bario 18.
We say "once dominant" because the gang structures in that country have been effectively dismantled, with all the active gangsters either in jail or fled the country to neighbors like Honduras, Belize, and Mexico.
And while those neighbors have to adjust, Salvador's murder rate has gone down significantly, from 2015, when it was at 103 per hundred thousand residents - the highest in the world, to 2022, when it was at 7.8, the lowest in the region.
In a video posted by Bukele, prisoners stripped down to white boxer shorts, with their heads shaved, are seen running through the new prison into cells - their heads kept low.
After a spike in murders last year, Bukele's government has been operating under what is called a "state of exception" - and it's more or less the same as what would be called a state of emergency in Belize. Since then, more than 64,000 suspects have been arrested in the anti-crime operations.
