🇸🇻❗️⛓ — Response from the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, to a question about alleged human rights violations at CECOT, during a meeting attended by Chile’s president-elect, José Antonio Kast:

“Look, uh… I am the first to defend human rights… but the human rights of honest people, decent people, people who work, people who produce, people who do not harm anyone. The human rights of criminals… they also exist, of course they exist. No one can be tortured, no one can be killed, no one can be raped… inside prison. They have the right to food, they have the right to medical care, they have the right to visits… but that is all. What they do not have is the right to continue committing crimes from prison. They do not have the right to have cell phones to keep ordering murders.

They do not have the right to have computers to continue running criminal structures. They do not have the right to have parties with prostitutes inside prisons. They do not have the right to record videos and upload them to YouTube mocking the State and the victims. And what angers me most is the double standard of certain human rights organizations… and certain media outlets. For 30 years, gangs amputated hands, amputated feet, dismembered people, raped 9-year-old girls, killed children in front of their parents, killed pregnant women… and those human rights organizations never said anything. Or they said very little. Or they justified it. Or they stayed silent.

But now that criminals are in prison, now they care about human rights. Now they care whether they eat three times a day, whether they have a bed, whether they have electricity… Where were they when 20 Salvadorans were being killed every day? Where were they when gangs controlled 80% of the territory? Where were they when mothers cried because their children were murdered?

So yes, we defend human rights… but starting with the rights of the victims, of honest people. And then, the minimum rights that the law grants to criminals. But no more privileges. No more universities of crime. No more control of territory from inside prisons. And if that bothers some NGOs or some media outlets… then let it bother them. Because we care more about the lives of Salvadorans than about the opinion of those gentlemen.”