Bukele Blueprint: How to Dramatically Reduce Your Nation’s Murder Rate With This One Simple Trick

REVOLVER

Escape from New York may be a work of fiction no longer. In El Salvador, the government plans to crush crime by opening a new prison that is quite literally the size of a city.

Two thousand suspected gang members have been moved to a new mega-prison in El Salvador, built as part of President Nayib Bukele’s self-proclaimed “war on crime.” …

The mega-prison, officially called the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), was built to hold 40,000 prisoners. Bukele unveiled the center in January, saying it is “a fundamental piece to completely win the war against gangs.”

The prisoners transferred to the CECOT are reportedly members of the MS-13 and 18th street gangs, who gained strongholds in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras after getting deported from Los Angeles. [NewsNation]

If predictions about CECOT holding forty thousand prisoners come to pass, then it will be literally double the size of what is currently the world’s most populous prison, Turkey’s Marmara Prison.

The new ultra-prison is the climax of perhaps the most dramatic campaign against crime in modern world history. In the span of little more than a year, one in every fifty Salvadorans has been arrested by the police or the military.

This offensive is the work of one of the most unlikely presidents in the world. Nayib Bukele is only 41 years old and was elected in his 30s. He is ethnically Palestinian in a mestizo land. He is the son of an imam in a Christian country. But above all, he is one of the world’s only leaders possessed with authentic vision, willing to try anything, however unconventional, to improve his country.

In his quest to crush gangs, Bukele is quite literally leaving no stone unturned. MORE