DAILYCALLER (Derek VanBuskirk) - My Exclusive Interviews With El Salvador’s Most Dangerous Criminals
‘We chose this life, and there’s no way out’
I saw the volcano before I saw the prison. Guards lined the tropical road beneath the active San Vicente, where we had already been stopped and frisked before our van was allowed to continue. Soon, we arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, the massive prison built in 2023 to house the country’s worst of the worst: thousands of convicted murderers from the gangs that had terrorized the nation for decades. (RELATED: From Bloodshed To Bukele: A Timeline Of El Salvador’s War, Gangs And Crackdown) Upon seeing the 57 acres of concrete walls that made up the prison’s exterior, my mind immediately turned to Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime: the often-overlooked cousin of beauty that, rather than delighting…Open