Searching for Devils at CECOT

To grasp why El Salvador built the Terrorism Confinement Center—the prison known as CECOT—you need to know about the killings that plagued the country before it existed. For more than a year, I have walked crime scenes, interviewed victims, and heard President Nayib Bukele himself describe the vicious murders perpetrated by the nation’s gangs. In May, local investigators led me to one of the killing fields, and into a world of macabre rituals. At Mount St. Bartolo, an old farmer showed me a “killing tree,” its trunk scarred by machetes. “Farmers don’t strike trees,” explained one of my guides, a man named Carlos. “That’s where a torso hung.”