Although it is the smallest with an area of 21 thousand square kilometers in Central America, and its population is barely 6 million and 600 thousand, El Salvador, led by the Palestinian origin Najib Bouguila, can extract from Turkey a “glory” that we find in the phrase “the largest prison in the world”, referring to a book Guinness World Records to Marmara Cezaevi, or “Marmara Prison”, which they inaugurated in 2008 in Silivri, in the Istanbul province on the Sea of Marmara.
Guinness approved an investigation carried out by the Turkish parliament in October 2019 about the prison, 78 kilometers from Istanbul, according to news read by Al-Arabiya.net today in the British newspaper The Times. It found that 22,781 prisoners were in it, a little more than half the number of prisoners. There are 63,000 adults in 20 prisons throughout El Salvador. Although the New Bilibid prison in the Philippine capital of Manila holds 30,000, its official capacity is only 6,345, as reported in the Philippine Department of Corrections, so Guinness gave the title to the Turkish prison.
As for the “prison complex”, which President Nayib Bukele, 41, said in a televised appearance on Thursday, he ordered to be completed in no more than 60 days, and that it is impossible to escape from it, it contains 37 watchtowers and 8 cells block, and it accommodates 40,000 prisoners in its buildings that span an area of 410 square meters. Thousands of square meters in the countryside 73 km from the capital San Salvador, which was also reported in a briefing written by Romeo Rodriguez, Minister of Public Works, where he said that 600 soldiers and 250 policemen will serve 24 hours a day in the world’s largest prison.
In a “war on gangs,” the Palestinian-born president acknowledged, prisoners currently have “access to prostitutes, Playstations, screens, cellphones and computers with the escalation of gang violence,” as we hear him say in a video below. .
War against the biggest and most dangerous gang
The video is of a tour that Boughila made yesterday, Wednesday, of the sections that have been completed in the building of the prison, which he called the “Center for Confining Terrorism” known by the letters CECOT for short, as part of a war he is leading on gang, and through it he seeks to renew his term for another five years with promised presidential elections next February.
El Salvador, which borders Honduras and Guatemala on the Pacific Ocean, declared a state of emergency last March after members of its largest and most dangerous gang, Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, Al Arabiya.net read in its biography , killed 87 people. In 3 days, and as a result, the police stormed some slums and arrested thousands of known criminals.
The gang is not only active in El Salvador, as shown by a study published two months ago by the “National Center for Gang Intelligence in America”, where the total number of gang members varies from 50,000 to more than 70,000 members, of which between 8 000 and 10,000 are in the US alone, while thousands more are active in Canada, Mexico and the rest of Central America. But he who went down to the battlefield alone, is Boughila so far.
#Palestinian #president #American #state #building #largest #prison #world
