{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"The Grim Side of El Salvador\u2019s \u201cSecurity Model\u201d","description":"A special episode as part of WOLA\u2019s 2025 Human Rights Awards Month President Nayib Bukele\u2019s government has jailed nearly 2 percent of El Salvador\u2019s entire population\u2014the highest incarceration rate in the world. Still, because violence has dropped sharply, political figures across Latin America speak about emulating Bukele\u2019s \u201csecurity model.\u201d But behind the videos of mega-prisons and tweets about plunging homicide rates lies a darker, less sustainable reality. In this WOLA Podcast episode, Adam Isacson speaks with Beatriz Magaloni (personal site \/ Stanford site), a political scientist at Stanford University and co-author (with Alberto D\u00edaz-Cayeros) of a Foreign Affairs article published September 11, 2025: \u201cDoes the Bukele Model Have a Future?\u201d Their conversation reveals what Magaloni calls \u201ca system of state terror and resource extraction,\u201d and explores why El Salvador\u2019s experiment in mass incarceration may ultimately collapse under its own weight. In fieldwork conducted since last year, Dr. Magaloni interviewed the families of hundreds of victims of the security crackdown, many aided by MOVIR, the Movement of Victims of the Regime, which WOLA is honoring with its 2025 Human Rights Award. \u201cOur crime is to be poor,\u201d families told her. Police and soldiers face monthly arrest quotas, Magaloni explains. Civilians can denounce neighbors by calling a hotline\u2014and are sometimes paid $300 bounties. Poor Salvadorans, many in communities with little or no gang presence, end up seized and jailed in prisons like Izalco and Mariona, where conditions amount to systematic torture. This, Magaloni says, has turned the carceral system into \u201ca machine that milks the poor.\u201d Bukele\u2019s ongoing emergency decrees, renewed 42 times, now serve dual purposes: silencing critics and funding repression. Despite its popularity, Bukele\u2019s \u201cmodel\u201d rests on brittle foundations. Poverty remains over 30 percent and is not declining. The economy depends on remittances from abroad, not job creation. Corruption persists, while transparency laws and data access have been erased. Bukele\u2019s control of the media, polished propaganda videos, and rapid-fire social-media presence drown out criticism. Civil society\u2019s challenge, Magaloni argues, is to build equally powerful counter-narratives that humanize victims and expose hidden abuses. Drawing on decades of field research in Mexico and Brazil, Magaloni concedes that effective citizen security sometimes does require force, but points to past experiments that achieved short-term safety without repression, human rights abuse, or democratic dismantlement. These include efforts like community-based policing in Medell\u00edn or Rio de Janeiro\u2019s early UPPs, which showed progress before political will and funding eroded. Bukele \u201ccould have stopped six months in, admitted mistakes, freed the innocent\u2014and he\u2019d have deserved credit,\u201d Magaloni says. \u201cInstead, he institutionalized terror.\u201d   ","author_name":"Latin America Today","author_url":"http:\/\/www.wola.org\/podcast\/","html":"