The night has not yet ended when the gigantic door of the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) opens and reveals a corridor illuminated by blue-white spotlights with thousands of hunched torsos, shaved heads, and hands clasped behind their backs advancing in silence, clad in white underwear. In that single image, the new Salvadoran postcard is condensed, a spectacle of almost choreographic discipline that, for some, represents order finally recovered and, for others, a luminous warning of what happens when security wins every battle without a referee in sight. Can peace be photographed without underlining its price? Can tranquility be measured in square meters of cells?

Since the Legislative Assembly declared a state of emergency in March 2022, extended month after month, El Salvador has imprisoned more than 85,000 people under suspicion of gang ties, raising the prison population to a regional and global record. Against this backdrop, President Nayib Bukele's figure has become a double-faced mirror, on one side, a social media superhero for those who walk without looking over their shoulders, and on the other, an authoritarian ruler who erodes basic guarantees. Between ovation and alarm rises the same question: how much power is surrendered when fear gives way?

The numbers are the skeleton of this story. The Ministry of Security reports that 2024 closed with 114 homicides, a rate close to 1.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, the lowest since records began. The Executive itself marks each day without murders as a milestone on social media and celebrates having converted the "world's most dangerous country" into the "safest in the western hemisphere." The Police display charts of declining homicides, but organizations like WOLA remind us that the state of emergency suspends fundamental rights, including the right to be presented before a judge within 72 hours, and that mass hearings reduce individuality to a formality. Can a democracy sustain itself on hearings with hundreds of defendants processed in unison?

CECOT, inaugurated in 2023 and expanded to house up to 40,000 inmates, is the most spectacular stage of the strategy. Its pavilions, promoted by the Press Secretary with drone shots and epic soundtracks, feed on the same logic: concentration, isolation, and iron discipline. Last February, the president even offered to house criminals deported by the United States there, a proposal that mixed marketing, geopolitics, and prison accounting. A bold gesture, yes, but also a scandalous signal: what is the limit of a policy based on expanding confinement?

The street, for now, responds with approval. According to the latest CID Gallup poll, 83% of the population positively values Bukele's management, the highest percentage in Latin America. Merchants open later, tourists dare to walk through the historic center, and the surf route experiences an unusual boom. Popular humor portrays the transformation with irony: "now the gangs sleep together, and we sleep peacefully." However, popularity, while robust, cannot by itself shield an institutional edifice. Let's think about what will happen when the reduction in homicides stops impressing and citizens begin asking about employment, health, and education.

Human rights organizations add another layer to the debate. Human Rights Watch has documented allegations of torture, prison extortion, and at least 354 deaths in state custody between 2022 and 2024. The government maintains that each arrest responds to investigative processes, but activists allege that individualized evidence is scarce. We must remember that security based on preventive detentions undoubtedly becomes a regime of inverted presumption, that is, there is no presumption of innocence but quite the opposite, which goes against everything that the unification of legal frameworks worldwide has achieved.

Three years later, the exception has shaped daily habits in the country: there are military checkpoints in communities, mixed patrols in diverse areas, and less graffiti. Although the route appears to go in a straight line toward a country at peace and without gangs, logistical and sociological questions persist. Where will the 40,000 CECOT inmates work when they serve their sentences? Is any reintegration policy being studied, or will fear suffice to keep the crime curve low? And internationally, how much influence will the "Bukele Model" exert in countries with similar problems and temptation for instant solutions?

The final minute approaches and the spotlight returns to the image of aligned bodies. El Salvador today exhibits a compelling narrative, but alongside it persist open files for alleged human rights violations and constitutional doubts about immediate reelection. Neither hero nor villain, the president governs an open-air laboratory. Perhaps the most honest question is not whether the strategy is good or bad, but whether the experiment can ever be closed without the reagents spilling over the same society it sought to protect.