Coming face to face with inmates in El Salvador’s mega-jail

With shaven heads, dressed in pristine white, and heavily tattooed, the prisoners know they are being watched and return the gaze from the other side of the bars.

• Leire Ventas
• BBC

We are in Cecot (Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism), a maximum security jail built a year ago by the Salvadoran government to imprison “high-ranking” members of the country’s main gangs.

A gargantuan complex constructed in the middle of nowhere, it symbolises President Nayib Bukele’s controversial security policy more than any other project.

Critics of the president have called it a…