Q COSTARICA — Days ahead of the historic vote in Costa Rica, where he could be stripped of his immunity, President Rodrigo Chaves, is chumming it up with his counterpart in El Salvador, Nayib Bukele.
Chaves arrived in El Salvador on Thursday to meet with Bukele and visit the Cecot, a maximum-security prison for gang members, where more than 200 Venezuelans deported from the United States were also detained.
Chaves arrived at the San Óscar Arnulfo Romero International Airport at midday and was received by Salvadoran Foreign Minister Alexandra Hill Tinoco, according to the Casa Presidencial.
The main focus of Chaves’s official visit to El Salvador is “the meeting with President Bukele,” Casa Presidencial stated.
Furthermore, he is expected to visit the Cecot today, Friday, a mega-prison that has become a symbol of the so-called war on gangs being waged by the Bukele administration under a state of emergency.
Chaves would be the first head of state to visit the Cecot prison, which has also been visited by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and former Argentine Security Minister Patricia Bullrich.
The Cecot is located in an isolated and arid area in the central town of Tecoluca, more than 75 kilometers from the capital, San Salvador.
Neither the local press nor the international media have been invited to cover the visit by Chaves.
Casa Presidencial added that Chaves’s visit “will strengthen the bonds of friendship and cooperation between our countries, as well as consolidate a strategic agenda for joint work for the benefit of our people and the Central American region.”
Chaves’s arrival in El Salvador comes more than a year after Bukele visited Costa Rica on November 12, 2024, and, among other activities, toured Costa Rica’s main prison, known as “La Reforma.”
In that prison, the Salvadoran president held a press conference in which he warned of “symptoms” of criminality similar to those his country faced at the beginning of the gang phenomenon and suggested reforms to the prison system so that the government would have total control.
That day, Bukele recalled that during his administration, the largest prison in Latin America, with a capacity for 40,000 inmates, was built at a “very low cost” of US$115 million and designed by the government itself.
The government of Rodrigo Chaves recently announced the construction of a prison with a capacity for 5,000 inmates—construction of which has not yet begun—inspired by the Salvadoran infrastructure, which is expected to be completed by mid-2026.