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.

On December 11, 2025, Dr. Beatriz Magaloni sat down with Saúl Hernández Alfaro, co-founder and director of FOCOS, for an exclusive video interview examining the “Bukele model” from the inside. The Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, director of the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab, and the first Latin American woman to receive the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, Magaloni draws on more than 100 hours of fieldwork across El Salvador to argue that the estado de excepción in force since March 2022 and renewed 45 consecutive times has become “an institutionalized regime of terror.” The conversation moves from the documentation of “torture camps” inside prisons such as Izalco and Mariona, to the dismantling of judicial and legislative checks, to the regional risks of replicating the model, and to the role of international allies — foremost the Trump administration — in sustaining it.

Magaloni is careful to acknowledge what Bukele genuinely achieved: gang territorial control was broken, and the extortion economy collapsed. Her quarrel is not with the original intervention but with the decision never to end it. “Bukele should have suspended the state of exception after six months,” she tells Hernández. “Instead he has continued it, and what was once a crisis measure has become a permanent instrument of political control.”

A regime of terror, documented from the inside

Magaloni’s field testimonies — gathered from victims, released detainees, mothers of the disappeared, lawyers, and rural community members — describe arrests driven by police quotas rather than evidence, $300 bounties paid to anonymous denouncers, and detentions of farmers, fishermen, construction workers, and elderly Salvadorans with no gang ties. Bukele himself acknowledged releasing some 8,000 innocents early on; Magaloni now estimates at least 20,000 wrongly detained people remain inside. Conditions in Izalco and Mariona — not the televised CECOT — include systematic beatings, denial of food and water, and treatment she does not hesitate to call torture. In her words, the estado de excepción has turned victims of the gangs into victims of the state.

Institutional capture and a hollowed-out democracy

The political mechanics behind the security model, Magaloni explains, are as important as the prisons. After Nuevas Ideas’ 2021 supermajority, Bukele removed Constitutional Court magistrates and the attorney general, aligned the judiciary with the executive, and approved indefinite reelection; the legislature is now about 93 percent his party’s. Independent outlets like El Faro and Cristosal have been forced into exile in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Mexico, and defenders such as Cristosal’s Ruth López have themselves been swept up by the excepción. Six in ten Salvadorans now fear expressing opposition, half of them fearing prison. V-Dem and Latinobarómetro place El Salvador alongside Venezuela under Maduro and Cuba.

Why high approval does not equal democracy

One of Magaloni’s central contributions is distinguishing popular satisfaction from democratic legitimacy. Bukele, like Chávez before him, arrived at a moment of genuine institutional failure and responded to a genuine crisis; high approval does not, on its own, certify that institutions still function. Comparisons to “benevolent dictatorships” such as Singapore or Vietnam are inapt: those regimes paired authoritarianism with sustained economic development, while El Salvador remains remittance-dependent, with poverty above 30 percent. Democracies retain the indispensable capacity to remove bad leaders; autocracies, even when initially effective, tend toward extraction and entrenchment.

Regional contagion and the Trump factor

The interview’s final concern is regional. Magaloni warns that publics across Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras — exhausted by chronic violence — are vulnerable to the model’s false choice between security and rights, a tradeoff she insists is empirically wrong. In her reading, the Trump administration has materially emboldened Bukele’s most repressive moves in 2025, from public praise to using CECOT as a deterrent backdrop for U.S. immigration policy. “A U.S. administration with a human rights orientation would constrain him,” she tells Hernández. 

Watch the full interview here (FOCOS, December 2025).

The Democracy Action Lab (DAL) at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law released El Salvador: A Carceral State of Terror, a short documentary directed by journalist and sociologist Manuel Ortiz and grounded in more than a year of field research led by Dr. Beatriz Magaloni, the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, FSI Senior Fellow, and co-director of DAL. The film is an exercise in what Ortiz calls audiovisual sociology: the deliberate use of documentary photography and video, alongside written scholarship, to carry rigorous social science research past the walls of academic journals and into the hands of the people who most need to see it.

That premise matters here more than usual. Magaloni's research on El Salvador's estado de excepción — the state of exception President Nayib Bukele declared in March 2022 and has since renewed more than forty times — is built on over one hundred hours of interviews conducted across urban and rural El Salvador: with released detainees, mothers of the disappeared, lawyers, community members, and officials. It is dense, careful, and, in its written form, largely inaccessible to the Salvadoran families it is about. The film exists to close that gap, translating fieldwork and testimony into a format that can travel — to newsrooms, to classrooms, to the diaspora, and to the communities where the research was gathered in the first place.

On May 11, 2026, Dr. Beatriz Magaloni, the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, FSI Senior Fellow, and co-director of the Democracy Action Lab at CDDRL, joined Blanca Heredia and Carlos Elizondo Mayer-Serra on Realpolitik México for an hour-long conversation about what she has seen and heard inside El Salvador. Drawing on three field visits, more than 100 hours of interviews with released detainees and victims’ families, and her ongoing nationally representative survey, Magaloni walks the hosts through the mechanics by which innocent people enter the prison system, the conditions they describe once inside, and the economic toll the estado de excepción exacts from poor families. The interview opens a question Latin America cannot avoid: how much, exactly, are publics willing to pay for peace? Magaloni’s answer — grounded in nearly a decade of comparative research from Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to rural Michoacán — is that the price El Salvador is paying is neither necessary nor replicable as a package.

How innocent people enter the system

Of the more than 85,000 people detained under the estado de excepción since March 2022, Magaloni estimates that some 20,000 are innocent — figures consistent with other researchers and with Bukele’s own admission of 8,000 wrongful releases. Three structural mechanisms drive the influx. A state hotline pays approximately $300 per denunciation, weaponizing personal grievance in small rural communities where everyone knows everyone. Police and military deployed under the excepción earn bonuses tied to monthly arrest quotas, making any present body a potential detainee. And the charge of asociación ilícita — classified as terrorism — strips the accused of defense rights from the moment it is filed. Collective trials are conducted by Zoom, hundreds of detainees at a time, with attorneys who cannot speak to their clients. Each two-month extension of the excepción adds two more years without case review.

What released detainees describe

The interview’s starkest segment is Magaloni’s account of conditions inside Mariona, Izalco, and Santana — not the televised CECOT. The testimonies, she emphasizes, are strikingly consistent across detainees who never met one another. On arrival, men are stripped to their underwear and beaten by lined-up guards as a ritual of initiation. Inside, official rations amount to one glass of water and one tortilla a day. In cells of roughly 60 square meters, 150 to 200 people are held simultaneously — unable to sit or lie down, sleeping pressed standing against one another, with widespread outbreaks of scabies producing deaths in custody. Detainees report being thrown from upper-floor balconies. “I have worked on torture, on police abuse, in Brazil and Mexico, for years,” Magaloni tells Heredia and Elizondo. “What I found in El Salvador exceeded all of that.”

A carceral economy built on poor families

A dimension this interview develops more fully than her other conversations is the economic extraction the system imposes on families of the imprisoned. Most are poor; many live in rural communities. They are required to deliver monthly supply packages — food, soap, clothing — costing $70 to $250, which released detainees confirm often do not reach their relatives. A parallel commissary sells essentials at roughly three times market price. Released prisoners must report weekly to sign in, sometimes traveling hours from home. The cumulative burden, Magaloni argues, is not incidental but structural: Bukele’s government draws revenue from the families of innocent prisoners, and the excepción’s constituency of beneficiaries — police, guards, prison administrators — has become an institutional ecosystem with its own incentives to perpetuate it.

Why the model travels — and what should not

Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, and Argentina’s Patricia Bullrich have already announced CECOT-style prisons or open interest in the Bukele model. Magaloni’s concern is not the popularity — Latin America is the most violent region in the world outside active wars — but the failure to distinguish what is replicable from what is structurally toxic. A bounded four-to-six-month emergency with a built-in off-ramp, she argues, was defensible and effective; an indefinite estado de excepción, renewed 43 times and converted into a permanent instrument of political control, is not. With indefinite reelection secured and opposition, press, and judiciary neutralized, she sees no short-term path to democratic recovery and fears El Salvador will follow the structural arc of Venezuela or Nicaragua. Watch the full interview here.