The El Salvador diaries: The psychology of mass incarceration
In its efforts to ensure “no type of crime” is tolerated in El Salvador, the Bukele regime itself is committing one big crime.
Belen Fernandez
Contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine.
Published On 30 May 2022
30 May 2022
Salvadoran inmates are seen during a search by security teams in the prisons of Quezaltepeque, in the department of La Libertad, in El Salvador on March 28, 2022 [Handout/Presidency of El Salvador via Anadolu Agency]
On May 17, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, the head of El Salvador’s National Civil Police, took to Twitter to broadcast the news that “more than 31,000 terrorists” had thus far been “captured” since the inception of the national state of emergency at the end of March.
The state of emergency was occasioned by a surge in homicides following a collapse in negotiations between Salvadoran gangs and members of the administration of President Nayib Bukele, including Carlos Marroquín, the director for the reconstruction of social fabric.
Before the latest “terrorist” roundup, El Salvador already boasted a prison population of about 39,000; as of October 2021, the diminutive country had the fourth-highest per capita imprisonment rate in the world (first place goes to – who else? – the United States). Now, under the ongoing state of emergency, the Bukele regime has spontaneously enacted a “special law” paving the way for the rampant construction of new jails. After all, locking up poor young men is clearly a better way to reconstruct El Salvador’s “social fabric” than, say, offering options for economic survival that would allow folks to refrain from joining gangs in the first place.
As with any good “war on terror”, there has been plenty of collateral damage. Among the 31,000-plus captured “terrorists”, for example, was 21-year-old musician Elvin Josué Sánchez Rivera, who was interned in early April at Izalco prison northwest of the Salvadoran capital of San Salvador. When he died a few weeks later, his family was first told that the cause of death had been coronavirus.
More:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/30/the-el-salvador-diaries-the-psychology-of-mass-incarceration