How a Salvadoran prison became a political human zoo

Washington Post

19-05-2025

At the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, amid pavilions featuring X-ray machines and edible curiosities (including a butter sculpture of President Theodore Roosevelt), there were 'anthropological' displays in which Indigenous people from around the world inhabited elaborate dioramas designed to resemble their native lands. These 'human zoos' — a popular form of entertainment at the time — featured Tehuelches from Patagonia and Mbuti 'pygmies' from the Congo region of Africa, as well as Apache leader Geronimo, who was required to pose for photographs with fairgoers — when he wasn't playing Hunkpapa leader Sitting Bull in daily reenactments of the Battle of Little Big Horn.
Among the most notorious of these displays was the Philippine Exposition, a 47-acre exhibit that featured various ethnicities from the United States' newly acquired territory in Southeast Asia. A star attraction was the display of Igorot people from the island of Luzon, presented in a village of thatch huts and identified in the related literature as 'head hunters.' As part of ritual ceremony in their homeland, the Igorot occasionally sacrificed and ate dogs, and the fair's organizers turned this sacred tradition into an attraction, requiring the Igorot to eat up to 20 dogs a week for the benefit of prurient crowds. The spectacle promoted the idea that some races were more 'advanced' and others more 'primitive.' It courted fairgoers with the promise of an exotic encounter that came with a whiff of menace. One image from the exhibit shows White men in suits milling about a group of Igorot men and boys in loincloths who look as though they would rather be anywhere else.
A group Igorot men and boys at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. (Jessie Tarbox Beals/Missouri Historical Society)
Igorot men kill a dog at the 1904 World's Fair. (Jessie Tarbox Beals/Missouri Historical Society)
The demeaning spectacle of the human zoo comes to mind as one U.S. official after another has traveled to El Salvador for photo ops inside the notorious prison known as CECOT (in English, the Terrorism Confinement Center). Opened in 2023 and designed to incarcerate top-level gang members, this maximum-security detention center has become infamous for its austere conditions — partly because Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele loves to share slick social media videos about it that show prisoners being frog-marched to warehouse chambers where they reportedly never see the light of day. In late March, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem (and her $50,000 Rolex) made an appearance at the prison, where she stood before a cell stuffed to the rafters with tattooed inmates on metal bunks to deliver a message to would-be immigrants to the United States: 'If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.' Less than a month later, she was followed by Republican Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia, who used the opportunity to throw a double thumbs-up and take selfies in front of a similar cell.
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They are not the first outsiders to use CECOT as a place to manufacture content. Last year, then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) appeared on Bukele's TikTok feed praising the prison as he walked between rows of cells. And social media stars such as Luis Villar Sudek, a Mexican influencer better known as Luisito Comunica, along with Nick Shirley from the United States, have also toured the prison (at least, the parts the Salvadoran government allows them to see). Both posted breathless videos about the facilities — which featured the now-obligatory footage of crowds of men peering stoically from behind bars.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem tours CECOT in El Salvador on March 26. (Alex Brandon/AFP/Getty Images)
In these videos, the inmates, most of whom have Indigenous features, remain, for the most part, mute — removing their shirts at the command of the wardens to reveal for the cameras the gang tattoos that cover their bodies. 'This group alone, which is behind my back,' Shirley exclaims, as he stands in front of one such cell, 'is very possibly directly or indirectly responsible for more than 200 homicides. What a bloodcurdling piece of information.' Though how exactly Shirley arrived at this information is unclear. Later, as he babbles on about the lack of privacy in the crowded cells, the camera cuts to a man attempting to urinate.
The grotesque images that have emerged from CECOT, like the human zoos that preceded it, are about presenting a barely contained savagery, reinforcing the idea that some people don't qualify as fully human. I don't mean to apologize for gang members who have, over the years, held El Salvador in their violent grip — running drugs, extorting business owners and mercilessly killing or kidnapping those who have gotten in their way. Permanently seared into my brain is a 2018 episode of the podcast Radio Ambulante in which a young woman in San Salvador relayed a harrowing tale of being targeted for the color of her hair.
In a photo released last year by the press office of El Salvador's president, alleged gang members are held at CECOT. (El Salvador presidential press office/AFP/Getty Images)
In a photo released by the press office of El Salvador's president, an alleged gang member deported by the United States kneels down as his hair is cut at CECOT on April 12. (El Salvador presidential press office/Reuters) In this photo provided by El Salvador's presidential press office, a prison guard transfers deportees from the U.S., alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to CECOT on March 16. (El Salvador presidential press office/AP)
But the display of these men — in a prison that flouts international standards of incarceration, under a regime where due process can be more rumor than fact — is not only unseemly. It has turned them into props in a propaganda war that visually conflates undocumented immigration with membership in a criminal organization.
In his video, Gaetz states ominously, 'A lot of the people behind me would have found a way to make their way to the United States and harm Americans.' Never mind that the reason many Salvadorans have fled the country has been to evade gangs.
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Noem described the prison as 'one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.' Before her arrival, the U.S. government had sent 238 Venezuelan migrants to CECOT — without due process — alleging they were 'Tren de Aragua terrorists' (a Venezuelan gang), along with almost two dozen Salvadorans it accused of being members of the MS-13 gang. In a post on X, accompanied by a video set to ominous music, Bukele described the detainees as 'murderers and high-profile offenders.'
Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego García was deported to CECOT in April, spurring nationwide protests. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
Yet, as '60 Minutes' reported in April, the overwhelming majority of the Venezuelans who were shipped to CECOT have 'no apparent criminal convictions or even criminal charges.' And at least one of the Salvadorans — Kilmar Abrego García — has no verifiable connection to a gang; federal officials admit that his deportation was an 'administrative error.' (Abrego García has since been sent to a low-security prison within El Salvador, as the Trump administration continues to defy an order affirmed by the Supreme Court to facilitate his return.)
In sending these men to CECOT, then using the prison as a public stage from which to issue public statements about immigration, officials such as Noem and Moore deliver the message that to be undocumented or to seek asylum is to be a criminal — especially if you are a brown man with tattoos.
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And what a stage CECOT is. Inmates share stark concrete cells and sleep on triple-stacked bunks without bedding. Lights are kept on day and night, and there is no outdoor exercise space. The prison's director told the BBC last year that external nongovernmental organizations are not allowed to enter the prison to evaluate conditions, but he insisted that CECOT complies with international standards. An extensive report published by BBC Mundo in 2023, however, calculated that the cells do not meet the minimum floor space requirements as established by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Moreover, the prison violates a number of the standards put forth by the United Nations' Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the Nelson Mandela Rules, which require access to daylight, fresh air and a prison library, as well as space for outdoor exercise. In 2023, Spanish media outlet El País described El Salvador's prisons as 'a hell,' and a 2023 report issued by the U.S. State Department describes 'harsh and life-threatening prison conditions.'
A prison officer guards a cell at CECOT last month. ()
In a photo released by the press office of El Salvador's president, guards arrange alleged gang members at CECOT on March 16. (El Salvador presidential) Prisoners look out of their cell at CECOT on April 4. ()
Bukele has said in the past that CECOT has space for '40,000 terrorists' — namely, high-level gang members who had been running their organizations remotely from other, less-punitive prisons. But there is little transparency about who is housed at CECOT and why, partly because inmates are held incommunicado. Since 2022, Bukele has governed under a 'state of exception' that has suspended basic rights such as freedom of assembly and has undermined due process. Along with gang members, plenty of innocent people are imprisoned on the flimsiest of allegations — and they remain in prison until their cases are heard. Human Rights Watch estimates that 1.7 percent of the Salvadoran population is incarcerated. The State Department's travel advisory regarding El Salvador, updated last month, notes that 'tens of thousands of people are currently in prison under the State of Exception,' including 'several U.S. and other foreign citizens' who 'have yet to face trial.'
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Worse yet: The Salvadoran government has negotiated with gangs to tamp down the violence, allegedly offering 'financial incentives,' as well as prison privileges to jailed gang leaders that include cellphones and visits from prostitutes. In 2021, the U.S. government sanctioned two Salvadoran officials for their roles in such negotiations, which included requests to have gang leaders back Bukele's political party. This month, the Salvadoran news outlet El Faro published eye-popping interviews with two high-ranking leaders associated with the Barrio 18 gang, who described coercing the inhabitants of their territories into voting for Bukele. One gang member, who goes by 'Liro,' told the cameras: 'From the gang, it became obligatory to say, 'You're going to tell your mother, you're going to tell your uncle, you're going to tell your nephew, you're going to tell your grandmother, you are going to tell your wife, and your wife's family, to vote for Nayib. If you don't do it, we'll kill them.''
President Donald Trump greets President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador at the White House on April 14. (Al Drago/For The Washington Post)
The allegations, if true, transform CECOT into a bit of a fiction. Bukele has held up the prison as evidence of how he has cracked down on gang violence and made El Salvador safer. But an election pact with gang leaders would suggest that the president has simply weaponized gang violence to his benefit. The degrading display of the tattooed men in cages is therefore a show — for the benefit of his supporters and an international right wing enamored of his theatrical displays of mano dura (hard hand) policies. It's perhaps no coincidence that many of the available images of CECOT are supplied by the Salvadoran government itself. And this raises the question: Who are the prisoners who don't get trotted out before the cameras? In what conditions do they languish?
Inside CECOT, as in the human zoos of old, the display takes fragments of the truth, then twists and sensationalizes them to transform reality into something brutish, inhuman and extreme — all for entertainment on TikTok.