‘I never saw my son, until they handed him over in a bag’: inside El Salvador’s brutal crime crackdown

Cecot, El Salvador’s notorious maximum-security prison, is the centrepiece of Bukele’s war on gangs. Photograph: José Cabezas/Reuters

At midnight on a Monday in December 2021, dozens of soldiers and police officers stormed into the home of Sandra Carolina Velasco Mena. They were looking for her 22-year-old son, Jefferson Alexánder Hernández Velasco.

“They wanted to arrest young people,” Sandra says. “Two of the policemen said it was because they were short of three people in their quota.”