This story is taken from VICE magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.
“Are you having a good time?” hollered the director of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, while leading a gaggle of YouTubers on a tour through the supermax prison. A resounding “Yes!” came back from the content creators who were visiting for the day, snapping selfies with the inmates they described as “the most dangerous people in the world.”
Known as CECOT, the complex has a total capacity of 40,000, with the current population estimated to be around a third of that. Not that the people in charge are encouraging inmates to stretch out and make themselves comfortable. Every block contains 32 cells, each stuffed with up to 156 souls granted personal space of around 0.58m2 per person. To describe it as a ‘human zoo’ would be an insult to zoos; it looks more like a human vending machine.
This was one of several bizarre media tours organized by President Nayib Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party in recent years, which have allowed social media personalities into a space where professional journalists are routinely denied entry.
They had come here to film content for their channels, with the aim of transforming the hellish and often dubious imprisonment of others into millions of views.
CECOT is the first prison of its kind in Central America and was constructed during a state of emergency imposed a day after gangs massacred 62 people on March 26, 2022. It triggered the escalation of a domestic war between gangs and El Salvador’s military.
Bukele, a millennial authoritarian with a background in business, wasted no time in seizing the upper hand. Under the state of emergency, anyone suspected of gang affiliation could be imprisoned without evidence or judicial process. “Anyone can just point their finger at you and you are in prison, it’s as quick as that,” said Samuel Ruiz, activist and former FMLN-Guerilla.
The crackdown resulted in the incarceration of almost 2 percent of El Salvador’s entire population, as well as numerous accounts of human rights abuses and false imprisonment. Unwavering, the Bukele administration has proudly leaned into its new draconian image.
CECOT symbolizes the government’s punitive ‘super mano dura’ (or: iron fist) narrative. Upon opening, the brutal treatment of inmates wasn’t hidden away but paraded before the international press. Now, it is popular YouTubers who are invited in. “The people who we put in here will never come back out,” the director of CECOT explained, proudly.
“The public humiliation and harsh treatment resonates with people, not only due to the harm many have suffered at the hands of gang members but also because of the ‘public enemy’ narrative,” explained Sonja Wolf, author of Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador. “You often hear that human rights are for good citizens, not gang members.”
According to Wolf, uncritical media like YouTubers have been crucial in pushing two key narratives: “One is that gang members are monsters, solely responsible for their actions, not the context in which gangs arise. The other is that mano dura [policies] are the necessary strategy to deal with gangs,” she told VICE.
“Our job is to do what our viewers want to see,” argued Onur Uygur, the director of RND House, a Turkish content creator agency. (He participated in the visit to CECOT with his leading YouTuber, Alper Rende.) “People consuming our channels want certainty—and in the case of CECOT we can be certain that these are violent offenders and deserve to be punished.”
Uygur admitted that during the tour there were many questions he didn’t ask for fear of upsetting the tour guides. This didn’t stop Rende posting a video that’s had over 10 million views; it was his most popular video of 2024. He’s clear that his work is not journalistic in nature. “The power of YouTube is that anyone can open a YouTube account and make whatever form and style of popular content… We used the documentary format because it’s popular,” he said.
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This story is taken from VICE magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.
The post Gatecrashing One of El Salvador’s YouTuber Prison Safaris appeared first on VICE.
