El Salvador held a mass trial on Tuesday for 486 prisoners, alleged to be members of the infamous Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, who stand accused of 47,000 crimes between them.
The trial was held at the Terrorism Confinement Center or CECOT, the tough “mega-prison” for gangsters that began operations in 2022. Photos of the proceedings showed rows of seated prisoners clad in simple white garb and face masks listening to the long list of charges against them.
The office of El Salvador’s Attorney General said the allegations covered criminal activity from 2012 to 2022. Some of the latter-day offenses were part of a massive wave of gang violence that prompted President Nayib Bukele to declare a state of emergency in 2022. At the height of that spasm of violence in March 2022, 87 people were murdered in a single weekend.
The state of emergency was originally meant to last for one month, but it continues to this day. In July 2023, the Congress of El Salvador passed amendments to the criminal code that allow mass trials for gang members, and extended the maximum prison sentence for a single charge from 45 to 60 years.
As of 2026, over 91,500 suspects have been detained. CECOT is large enough to hold about 40,000 of them. The mass trial that began on Tuesday included prisoners housed in four other facilities.
The Attorney General said that 413 of the defendants in the mass trial are currently incarcerated, while the other 73 remain at large pending arrest warrants. The charges against them include homicide, extortion, and weapons trafficking.
The Bukele government argues that cracking down on gang activity has made El Salvador far safer for law-abiding citizens, with the homicide rate plummeting from 7.8 per 100,000 people in 2022 to just 1.3 today.
The Attorney General’s office said on Tuesday that the gang network “operated systematically” for years, “instilling fear and grief in Salvadorean families.” Furthermore, some of the defendants at the mass trial were accused of “attempting to maintain territorial control to establish a parallel state.”
The United Nations, on the other hand, categorically disapproves of mass trials, and human rights groups have accused the Salvadorean government of compromising due process and the presumption of innocence during its gang crackdown.
“This regime suspends the rights to a legal defense and to the inviolability of communications, and also extends administrative detention timelines,” the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said on Tuesday, criticizing both the mass trial and the extended state of emergency.
Bukele remains one of the most popular elected leaders in the world with approval ratings north of 90 percent, including strong public approval for his war on gangs. A prolific user of social media, he wrote a post on X on Sunday noting that the Salvadoran people have rejected attempts to meddle in the war on gangs by international human rights groups.
He noted an effort by “a group of experts funded by the Open Society (Soros)” to demand the release of all gang members arrested during the state of emergency became “a public relations disaster for these organizations that purport to defend human rights.”
Bukele said the “outcome was even worse” when those same forces tried to manipulate the U.S. Congress into taking action against his government, because “when asked directly whether they agreed that MS-13 is a terrorist organization, they were unable to answer.”
“Do not let them deceive you: they are not defending supposedly innocent people; they are defending terrorists,” he charged.
In February 2025, the U.S. State Department designated six drug cartels as terrorist organizations, including MS-13. The U.S is seeking to deport MS-13 members to El Salvador, a program Bukele enthusiastically supports.
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