The president of Guatemala, the social democrat Bernardo Arévalo, has given this Friday the starting signal to the works of what will be the country's first maximum security prison, named El Triunfo, which will be built in the municipality of Morales, in the department of Izabal.
"The start of this construction is a triumph, a triumph of justice over crime, a triumph of good over evil, a triumph of the rule of law over organized crime, a triumph of the people of Guatemala over their executioners," the Guatemalan president stated during the event.
Arévalo has celebrated that Izabal is going to become "a resource to protect, to provide security, to isolate those who have renounced peaceful coexistence among brothers and have opted for violence" and "for death".
"This construction is necessary to protect all Guatemalans, but it is also an opportunity to remind whoever needs to hear it: in Guatemala criminals do not rule, in Guatemala drug traffickers do not rule, in Guatemala terror does not rule," he/she has expressed.
The president has emphasized that the project is being promoted "within the strict framework of his constitutional powers and with full respect for the guarantees that all people deserve." "We have done it forcefully, without losing sight of what is at stake, without losing sight that our main task is to protect Guatemalans," he reiterated.
For his part, the Guatemalan Minister of Defense, Henry Saenz, has defended during the ceremony that this new prison represents "a firm decision to close the spaces of impunity and strengthen the legitimate and sovereign authority of the State".
"This work does not arise in an isolated manner, it is part of an integral strategy to recover and consolidate absolute control of penitentiary centers throughout the country," he explained, adding that this infrastructure seeks "the effective isolation of the most dangerous inmates" and of "those who have tried to convert correctional facilities into organized crime operation centers."
The Executive has highlighted that this penitentiary complex --which will have up to 12 modules and capacity for more than 2,000 inmates-- aims to respond to the chronic problems of the Guatemalan prison system, among them overcrowding and the lack of control within the prisons.
The Salvadoran iron-fist model against organized crime promoted by the president, Nayib Bukele, has already been exported to numerous countries in Latin America and Central America, such as Ecuador, where the Santa Elena prison was built for high-risk inmates.
In Peru, the Government of the then-president José Jerí enabled a maximum security pavilion in the Ancón I prison, north of the capital, Lima, while her predecessor, Xiomara Castro, also announced the construction of the so-called Emergency Confinement Center (ECC), with capacity for 20,000 inmates.
This type of penitentiary scheme --inspired by the controversial Salvadoran Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), with space for some 40,000 inmates and questioned by NGOs for alleged abuses, torture, and even sexual violence-- is characterized by concentrating and isolating thousands of gang members linked to criminal organizations in a single facility.