Peru's Fujimori tours Bukele's CECOT mega-prison

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Peru's Fujimori becomes latest Latin American leader to visit notorious Salvadoran prison CECOT independent.co.uk

Peru's president Keiko Fujimori toured El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center on Thursday, the latest Latin American leader to visit the mega-prison Nayib Bukele built to hold gang members. She was received by Security and Justice Minister Gustavo Villatoro and Defense Minister Francis Merino Monroy, who explained the design, the surveillance protocols and the mechanisms used to isolate inmates.

The visit has a domestic backdrop. Fujimori took office in July after campaigning on a promise to build a prison like it, and Peru is in the grip of rampant extortion and rising homicides. Her tour came a little over a week after Costa Rica's president Laura Fernández visited the same facility on a trip to meet Bukele; Fernández has recently inaugurated a maximum-security prison of her own amid rising drug-related violence. According to El Salvador's presidential communications secretariat, the agenda covers technical exchange in citizen security, digital security and the modernization of state services, and Fujimori was scheduled to meet Bukele afterward. "A successful model, a very useful model," she said of his record, recalling that Peru confronted two major terrorist groups in the 1980s and early 1990s.

What the visitors come to study is the machinery behind the cells. El Salvador has been under a state of exception since March 2022 that suspends certain constitutional rights; more than 90,000 people have been imprisoned under it, and human rights organizations have documented thousands of arbitrary arrests. The country now has the world's highest incarceration rate per capita, with about 1.5 percent of its population behind bars. CECOT opened in 2023 and is built for up to 40,000 inmates.

The prison's international career began with the United States, which sent more than 250 Venezuelan deportees there over alleged Tren de Aragua ties without providing evidence of any. Some of the men sent in 2025, among them Kilmar Abrego Garcia, were later released; they allege they were beaten and tortured.