![Inside the prison of the living dead: DAVID JONES is the first British journalist to visit](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/02/08/00/94991283-0-image-a-74_1738973136466.jpg)
Sunk deep into shaven and elaborately tattooed skulls, a hundred pairs of eyes - hollow and dark -are boring directly into mine. The men they belong to have committed crimes evil almost beyond comprehension. Members of two of the most savage rival gangs the world has seen, El Salvador's Ms-13 and Barrio 18, they raped and tortured, murdered and mutilated, cut bodies to pieces and strewed them around the streets to strike terror in the neighbourhoods they controlled. On my journey to the world-renowned prison that holds them, the Latin American country's new Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), my government escorts had shown me photographic evidence of their grisly handiwork. One man had been impaled with a tree branch through his torso before being decapitated; another was anally gang-raped before being tied to a car and dragged to his death.