The inauguration of the new operations center, located in Colonia San Francisco, in the city of San Salvador, was presided over by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, Gustavo Villatoro, the Director General of Immigration and Alien Affairs, Ricardo Cucalón, the Under Secretary for Border Policy and Immigration of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Blas Nuñez-Neto, as the main strategic cooperating partner of the project.

The Centro Nacional de Análisis de Pasajeros (CNAP) is an initiative of the Directorate General of Immigration and Alien Affairs in collaboration with the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to safely expedite the entry into the country with sophisticated technological tools and high-level equipment for profiling and tracking information of nationals and foreigners whose final destination is El Salvador, migratory cycles of suspicious profiles, detection of possible threats to national security in the migratory context, persons at risk, criminal networks of human trafficking, international alerts, statistics, among others.

The functions of the analysis center also include collaboration with other institutions and agencies such as INTERPOL and the Policía Nacional Civil.

The CNAP works 24 hours a day and has the capacity to analyze more than 60 flights daily, equivalent to an average of 10,000 passengers entering the country by air. The strengthening of the migration intelligence and information exchange system at the CNAP headquarters also incorporates other related areas such as the Monitoring, Statistics and Migratory Movements units.

As part of this project, the DGME, with the support of CBP, recently visited the United States and Brazil to share experiences and best practices with similar intelligence centers such as the National Alerts Center in Washington and the Center for Migration Control Cooperation in Brasilia. These visits are also intended to lay the groundwork for the creation of a strategic international network of collaborative work that will further strengthen the scope and effectiveness of these analysis units and therefore border security.

Translated by: A.M