The mayor ofMedellinon Friday touted the construction of a mega-prison in his city, Colombia’s second-largest, becoming the latest Latin American leader to mimic the iron-fisted approach to gang violence of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele.
The high-security prison will hold more than 1,300 inmates, according to Medellin Mayor Federico Gutierrez. It will be financed with public and private funds.
The city, located in central Colombia, was once among the world’s most violent before the death of drug lord Pablo Escobar in 1993.
A city hall official told AFP on Friday that the mega-prison is modeled after Bukele’s signature CECOT facility, which has faced criticism from human rights groups over reported abuses.
The move is the latest prison project in Latin America to copy the CECOT approach, including by Ecuador and Costa Rica.
Chile’s far-right president-elect JoseAntonio Kastalso visited CECOT recently and asked Bukele for help improving his country’s prison system.
Gutierrez toured the prison construction site on Thursday and vowed that the facility will be guarded by its own security team, not by officers from the national prison agency.
Powerful criminal groups remain active in Medellin.
The jail, which is expected to be ready in 2027, will have technological systems to prevent inmates from communicating, since one of the most common forms of extortion in the country originates from prisons.
Inmates will be “deprived of many privileges,” far-right Gutierrez told reporters.
Source: Insider Paper
