Inside El Salvador's Secretive Prison Pits Full Of Gang Members (Photo Gallery)

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 **Did I Hear You Say Kirikiri Prison Is Rugged? Checkout El Savador's Prison And Think Again...**

Inside El Salvador's secretive prison pits where notorious gangs are crammed together like livestock in cells the size of a shed.  New report reveals the shocking conditions that members of El Salvador's violent and bloody MS-13 and M18 gangs are forced to live in Huddled in holding cells designed for 72-hour stays - some men have been exposed to unsanitary and diseased conditions for over a year
An uneasy truce has existed since March 2012 between the two gangs

Continue After The Break.

Huddled together like cattle in a cage no bigger than a shed some of the men of El Salvador's prison pits have languished in these rancid, disease ridden holding cells for more than a year.

Designed only for temporary 72-hour stays, the sweltering cells, each 12 feet wide and 15 feet tall are crammed with more than 30 people - all veterans of the country's vicious war between the MS-13 and M18 gangs.

Segregated along tribal gang-lines, the men in these inhumane cells are hidden from public view, but one reporter from counter-culture magazine VICE, managed to gain access to throw light on the grizzly conditions they are consigned to spend their days living in.


The uptick in murders in the Central American nation echoes killing rates before the March 2012 truce between the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang and rival Barrio 18.

'We said last year that the truce was fragile and that it could fracture in any moment. Time has proven us right,' Miguel Fortin, Director of the Supreme Court's Institute of Legal Medicine (IML) told local media.

The truce, which is backed by the Catholic Church and the Organization of American States (OAS), aimed to reducing homicide rates of 66 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2011, according to the United Nations, making El Salvador the world's most violent nation.

 Both gangs have their roots in Southern California, where young men seeking refuge from Central America's civil wars formed violent gangs on the streets of Los Angeles and its suburbs in the 1980s 

 Murder Rates: A U.N. report said El Salvador and neighboring Honduras have the highest homicide rates in the world with 66 and 82.1 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, respectively, in 201.

 Inhumane Conditions: Killings in El Salvador, which can average 12 to 15 per day, do appear to have declined after the truce was declared in March 2012 

Tattoos: The prisoners sport their gang tattoos - which denote the membership of either the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or Barrio 18 (M18) gangs 

Naija Gist,

Nigeria.