Rights groups are already aware of hundreds of deaths in El Salvador’s prisons. Eye witness testimony reports prisoners dying from torture, prisoner-on-prisoner violence, and lack of medical care. And they report bodies being left in cells for days.

Even if the guards aren’t executing people with their own hands, this place is clearly designed to cause mass death. Just look at the photos of it. Giant cells packed with dozens of people, political prisoners mixed with violent gang members. And there will be one guard in front of a cell holding a hundred people. And everyone there has life without parole; they literally have nothing to lose. How could such conditions cause anything but mass death?

CECOT is a death camp designed around plausible deniability. The state doesn’t have to directly execute anyone; the whole camp is physically designed to make large scale prisoner-on-prisoner killings inevitable. If you have that many people locked up, with that little oversight, and everyone in there has a life without parole sentence? What keeps the guy next to you from strangling you just to get a double serving of lunch today? He already has life without parole. The innocent are locked up with the guilty there. There actually are a fair number of people there who in a moral justice system would be locked away for life. And those psychopaths are allowed to do whatever they want to the other prisoners.

The real bitter irony is that El Salvador technically doesn’t have the death penalty. Courts can’t sentence people to death. So Bukele figured out a way to have the death penalty without having the death penalty. Every prisoner in there literally cannot receive a sentence harsher than the one they are already serving. Murder is effectively legal in CECOT.