Posts
A year ago to the month, San Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, began a mass roundup of gang members. Within months, the government had detained about 40,000 members of the Mara-Salvatrucha and M-18 gangs, who were jammed like human sardines into the country's inadequate and delapidated jails, from where they conducted business as usual including blackmail, terrorist retaliations and murders.
Bukele's response was swift: he turned off the food. A howl of protest arose from various international human rights organizations. Bukele was ready for them as well: “And if the international community is worried about their little angels, they should come and bring them food, because I am not going to take budget money away from the schools to feed these terrorists.”
As if to underscore the point Bukele posted a video showing guards with billy clubs forcing inmates to walk, run and even descend stairs with their arms held behind their necks or backs. The inmates were stripped to their underwear, and their mattresses were taken away.
The San Salvadoran congress approved and extended the temporary state of emergency which included longer pre-hearing detentions, loosened procedural safeguards and the removal of unenthusiastic judges. The international NGO-Press was again in arms lamenting the perhaps 1,600 youths who had been mistakenly detained and some of whom got “lost” in the morass of cages that passes for a penitentiary system. It is a safe wager that Bukele's private response was that: you can't make an omelette without cracking some eggs.
By all accounts, except for legal perfectionists, the average San Salvadoran was enjoying the omelette. Make no mistake, these gangs are brutal. There is no other word for their behaviour. Their morality is an inversion of our own -- a negative universe where nightmares are sweet dreams.
Almost a year to the day, and Bukele has announced the opening of a new mega-prison in the middle of nowhere to house 40,000 inmates for sentences ranging from 25 to 40 years. To all intents and purposes, these gang members have been permanently extracted from civil society.
Well... what else is new? Using similar measures, Caesar “cleansed” the Mediterranean of pirates and the world was grateful to him for it.
Normally, inmates thus removed from society are inserted into an alternative society, such as Alcatraz, Devil's Island... Georgia... Australia... Life in such institutions and penal colonies is harsh both de jure and de facto, but it is a form of society nevertheless. In contrast, Bukele's Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) is not any form of society at all. It is purely and very simply a human warehouse.
The entire complex is a surgically antisceptic. Bright, white, shiny, and devoid of any discernible character. The bright hangars in which prisoners are to be housed contain nothing at all except concrete, metal and artificial lighting.
I mean nothing. No common areas. No television. No tables. No chairs. There is no privacy at all. Everything is empty, open, and closed off. The cells, housing about 40 inmates each, consist of nothing except fixed metal racks stacked four high. They look exactly like the pallet racks in warehouses. No sheets, much less pillows or mattresses are provided. The inmates must sleep like animals on the sheer metal surface.
The inmates themselves are stripped of everything, except one pair of white scivvies and (of course) their shackles and hand-cuffs.
Some reports have stated that the “facility” has a gym and an outside exercise yards. It does, but these are for the staff. Another report showed a large dormitory area with mattress beds and lockers. But these too were for staff.
Other reports have shown what purports to be “shops” where inmates will be able to work; but these are patently for show. They were not big enough to occupy 40,000 slaves; nor did they contain much of any visible machinery for anything.
No. The plan is to keep 40,000 human beings in a state of mere existence. Even the metal grating has been designed as a species of razor sharp wire, making it impossible to hang or swing therefrom. What is planned is a form of mass solitary confinement.
.
For those who act up, or go crazy, there are dark solitary confinement cells consisting of six walls of concrete and one heavy iron door. The aptly named minister of the interior brags that those so confined will not see any light at all. Bright hole, black hole take your pick.
None of the reports we have read made any passing mention of counselling, rehabilitation, remedial programs, religious services... nothing.
At some point, the government may decide that a docile work force of 40,000 is too profitable a thing to waste and will invite some German company to set up shop in a camp annex. But, as of the moment, the prison consists of nothing except housing cells, punishment cells and (supposedly) some sort of slop-preparation facility.
Thus, in addition to being deprived of all clothes and all amenities, the prisoners will be deprived of all purpose and all hope. In this excrutiatingly antisceptic void, the inmates will no doubt start to canabilize themselves at which point they will be dragged into dark holes or beaten and tear gassed into quiesence until life itself becomes mere listless stupefaction.
Bukele has evidently decided that gangs are a civil cancer and CECOT is the chemotherapy, one short step away from disinfecting gasses.
The amazing thing is how compliant the prisoners already are. A year ago, they were carrying on in the usual boisterous and violent manner. Today, a relative small handful of guards control 500 or 1000 men, who always keep their shaved heads bowed, who bow at the waist when they walk or run to a designated destination and who sit quietly on the floor, dick-to-asshole, without a murmur.
For those who act up, or go crazy, there are dark solitary confinement cells consisting of six walls of concrete and one heavy iron door. The aptly named minister of the interior brags that those so confined will not see any light at all. Bright hole, black hole take your pick.
None of the reports we have read made any passing mention of counselling, rehabilitation, remedial programs, religious services... nothing.
At some point, the government may decide that a docile work force of 40,000 is too profitable a thing to waste and will invite some German company to set up shop in a camp annex. But, as of the moment, the prison consists of nothing except housing cells, punishment cells and (supposedly) some sort of slop-preparation facility.
Thus, in addition to being deprived of all clothes and all amenities, the prisoners will be deprived of all purpose and all hope. In this excrutiatingly antisceptic void, the inmates will no doubt start to canabilize themselves at which point they will be dragged into dark holes or beaten and tear gassed into quiesence until life itself becomes mere listless stupefaction.
Bukele has evidently decided that gangs are a civil cancer and CECOT is the chemotherapy, one short step away from disinfecting gasses.
The amazing thing is how compliant the prisoners already are. A year ago, they were carrying on in the usual boisterous and violent manner. Today, a relative small handful of guards control 500 or 1000 men, who always keep their shaved heads bowed, who bow at the waist when they walk or run to a designated destination and who sit quietly on the floor, dick-to-asshole, without a murmur.
What turned thousands of hardened, brutal, tough criminals into docile cows? It cannot have been beatings. These men are tough and thrive on physical violence. Moreover none of them looked physically damaged. No one has asked this question.
My guess (and it is only a guess) is that they were starved into submission. “Any one acts up and no one eats for a week” is a mighty effective inducement.
The brutality of the gangs was (and is) appalling. Equally appalling, though, is the government's response. From Supermax prisons in Colorado, to Metropolitan Detention centers in LA and NYC and now to gang warehouses in San Salvador, we have perfected the art of anodyne torture and dehumanization. The dystopia of the New American Century is bright, light and empty space inhabited by carbon-based objects.
I have very little confidence in rehabilitative programs. Aside from the Nordic and Germanic countries, prisons only make criminals worse.
The reason for this is that most prison regimes are based on retribution: making the criminal suffer for the crime he has committed. If beating an animal or chaining it to a post does not make it more social, it is a mystery to me why people would expect locking a man in a cage to produce any better results.
.
It seems to me that the only way to undo the defect and the hurt that underlies most anti-social behaviour is to give criminals the respect, love, security, encouragement they were denied as children. In other words, to throw roses at pigs.
Obviously most people gag at “love your criminal” notwithstanding that on Sundays they promise to love their enemies.
Be that as it may, Bukele's inmates are not merely pigs but wild and savage boars. One can only imagine what deprivation and violence turned once soft and helpless babies into such cruel and hardened lovers of all things dark. And it's not just the “turning into” but also the “training in.” What we have in gang memebers is a life that is the inverse of “justification” and “sanctification”
Having been turned into criminals, they are now too far down the road of habituated vice to be called back. Bukele's solution to this human ruination is to replace it with another type of ruination. While I am not the least bit indifferent to the pain and suffering these gang members callously and even happily inflicted on their many victims, I cannot but feel sorry for a creature who was doomed from the start of his life. I have to ask myself, what kind of god is it that throws so many human lives to waste.
Whatever God or Bukele want to do, I cannot but think that we cannot go down that road; that writing off people whom Fate herself had written off is not the decent thing to do. It creates in us, the good and the decent, an attitude that is all too amenable to inhumanity and evil... Once we loose our feeling of compassion, once we treat other living things as disposable objects we become the greatest of Creation's monsters. Did not the 20th century teach us that not once but multiple times?
And so it is that I think that for our own sakes, we must play the fools and provide these inmates with some occasion to practice a positive form of community. If all Bukele is going to do is turn them into warehoused objects he might as well just gas em and be done with it.
It seems to me that the only way to undo the defect and the hurt that underlies most anti-social behaviour is to give criminals the respect, love, security, encouragement they were denied as children. In other words, to throw roses at pigs.
Obviously most people gag at “love your criminal” notwithstanding that on Sundays they promise to love their enemies.
Be that as it may, Bukele's inmates are not merely pigs but wild and savage boars. One can only imagine what deprivation and violence turned once soft and helpless babies into such cruel and hardened lovers of all things dark. And it's not just the “turning into” but also the “training in.” What we have in gang memebers is a life that is the inverse of “justification” and “sanctification”
Having been turned into criminals, they are now too far down the road of habituated vice to be called back. Bukele's solution to this human ruination is to replace it with another type of ruination. While I am not the least bit indifferent to the pain and suffering these gang members callously and even happily inflicted on their many victims, I cannot but feel sorry for a creature who was doomed from the start of his life. I have to ask myself, what kind of god is it that throws so many human lives to waste.
Whatever God or Bukele want to do, I cannot but think that we cannot go down that road; that writing off people whom Fate herself had written off is not the decent thing to do. It creates in us, the good and the decent, an attitude that is all too amenable to inhumanity and evil... Once we loose our feeling of compassion, once we treat other living things as disposable objects we become the greatest of Creation's monsters. Did not the 20th century teach us that not once but multiple times?
And so it is that I think that for our own sakes, we must play the fools and provide these inmates with some occasion to practice a positive form of community. If all Bukele is going to do is turn them into warehoused objects he might as well just gas em and be done with it.
©
No comments:
Post a Comment