On October 9, 2025, Dr. Beatriz Magaloni sat down with Adam Isacson, Director for Defense Oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), for a special episode of the WOLA Podcast released as part of the organization's annual Human Rights Awards Month. The conversation, titled "The Grim Side of El Salvador's 'Security Model,'" coincided with WOLA's decision to honor MOVIR — the Movement of Victims of the Regime — with its 2025 Human Rights Award, recognizing the group's work accompanying families of Salvadorans arbitrarily detained under Nayib Bukele's prolonged estado de excepción. Over the course of the episode, Magaloni draws on more than a year of fieldwork alongside MOVIR and on her recent Foreign Affairs article, co-authored with Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, to walk Isacson through what she describes as "a system of state terror and resource extraction" hidden behind El Salvador's celebrated drop in homicides. The discussion ranges from the mechanics of mass detention and the economics of the carceral system, to Bukele's sophisticated narrative machinery, to the structural fragilities — economic stagnation, corruption exposure, and the slow leak of information about innocent detainees — that, in Magaloni's reading, make the model less durable than its growing list of international admirers assumes.

Nayib Bukele has jailed close to two percent of El Salvador’s population — the highest incarceration rate on the planet—and turned plunging homicide figures into an export commodity for politicians across the Americas. In a conversation with WOLA’s Adam Isacson, Stanford political scientist Beatriz Magaloni argues that what looks from a distance like a security miracle is, on closer inspection, “a system of state terror and resource extraction” whose foundations are far shakier than its admirers believe.

A machine that milks the poor

Drawing on more than a year of fieldwork with hundreds of victims’ families — many connected through MOVIR — Magaloni describes a carceral system that has stopped merely warehousing the poor and now openly profits from them. Police and soldiers operate under monthly arrest quotas; anonymous denouncers can collect $300 bounties through a state hotline. Detainees’ families must bring food, soap, clothing, and bedding packages costing $70 to $200, of which guards reportedly steal roughly half. A parallel prison commissary sells essentials at two to three times market price, and the much-publicized Cero Ocio forced-labor program requires relatives to buy work boots and uniforms so that incarcerated men — uncompensated — can build state infrastructure. “Their crime is to be poor,” one family told her. “But that is not a crime.”

A society split by what it is allowed to know

Bukele’s sky-high approval ratings, Magaloni argues, conceal a country sharply segmented by knowledge. Urban middle-class Salvadorans experience the security dividend — the end of extortion, safer streets — while rural poor communities, often with little prior gang presence, absorb the costs of arbitrary detention. Roughly 60 percent of Salvadorans in her surveys report fearing to express opposition to the president; half name imprisonment as the consequence they expect. With more than 85 journalists driven into exile and outlets like El Faro and Cristosal operating from abroad, the people who know the most about the prisons of Izalco, Mariona and Santana are precisely those least able to speak.

Why the model may crack

Magaloni and her co-author Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, writing in Foreign Affairs, identify several pressure points. Poverty remains above 30 percent and is not falling; the economy depends on remittances rather than job creation; a pilot national survey shows that Salvadorans now rank unemployment and failing public services — not crime — as their top concerns. Corruption is a second vulnerability: Bukele has dismantled budget transparency and moved aggressively against investigators such as Cristosal’s Ruth López, but the underlying exposure remains. A third is what Magaloni calls the cruelty-revelation question: whether wider public awareness that many detainees are demonstrably innocent — farmers, construction workers, neighbors with arraigos attesting to their character — will erode support, or whether years of gang terror have hardened the public into accepting any incarceration as deserved.

Counter-narrative, and the alternatives Bukele declined

A former advertising professional, Bukele has built a communications operation — polished CECOT spectacles, rapid-fire social media, friendly influencers from Mexico and the United States — that human rights organizations have not learned to match. Magaloni is blunt: text-based research does not travel on the platforms shaping Salvadoran opinion. Civil society needs video, audio, and storytellers as skilled as the regime’s. Drawing on her evaluations of Rio de Janeiro’s early UPP community-policing program, Medellín under Sergio Fajardo, and Mexico’s militarized drug war under Calderón, she insists that rights-respecting security gains are possible but politically fragile and rarely survive an electoral transition. Bukele, she notes, could have ended the estado de excepción six months in, acknowledged the innocent caught in its net, and “deserved the credit.” He chose, instead, to institutionalize it.

Listen to the full podcast here.