"El Salvador: A Carceral State of Terror" — When Research Meets the Camera
"El Salvador: A Carceral State of Terror" — When Research Meets the Camera
Drawing on more than a year of fieldwork, a Democracy Action Lab film translates social science research on mass incarceration in El Salvador into testimony viewers can see and hear.
In Brief
- A short documentary from the Democracy Action Lab brings Beatriz Magaloni’s more than year-long field research on El Salvador’s state of exception to audiences beyond academia.
- Magaloni’s research finds that the crackdown achieved real security gains early on but has since become a permanent instrument of political control, marked by wrongful detentions and abuse in prisons.
- Other Latin American countries, from Brazil to Ecuador to Peru, are weighing Bukele-style prisons, and the research argues that the choice between security and due process is a false one.
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.
What the research found
Magaloni is explicit that Bukele's crackdown produced a real security achievement: gang territorial control was dismantled, the extortion economy that had strangled daily life in El Salvador collapsed, and homicide rates fell from more than 100 per 100,000 residents to the single digits. Her critique is not that the intervention was wrong. It is that it was never allowed to end. "Bukele should have suspended the state of exception after six months," she has said. "Instead, he has continued it, and what was once a crisis measure has become a permanent instrument of political control."
What the research documents beneath that record-low homicide rate is a system built to keep running. Arrests are driven less by evidence than by police quotas, reinforced by a state hotline that pays roughly $300 to anyone willing to denounce a neighbor — an incentive structure that, in small communities where everyone knows everyone, has torn at the social fabric long after the gangs themselves receded. Bukele's own government has acknowledged releasing some 8,000 wrongfully detained people; Magaloni's fieldwork puts the number still held at 20,000 or more, drawn disproportionately from the poor: construction workers, farmers, fishermen, students, people with no gang ties, no tattoos, and no criminal record.
Inside facilities like Izalco and Mariona — not the internationally televised CECOT megaprison — released detainees describe ritualized beatings on arrival, food and water withheld as instruments of control, and cells so overcrowded that prisoners sleep standing, in rotation. "I have worked on torture, on police abuse, in Brazil and Mexico, for years," Magaloni has said of her research. "What I found in El Salvador exceeded all of that." Families, meanwhile, bear a direct economic cost: mandatory supply packages, marked-up prison commissaries, and, for released detainees, a weekly reporting requirement that can consume a day's wages in travel alone.
The research places this alongside a broader institutional story. Since Nuevas Ideas' 2021 legislative supermajority, Bukele has replaced Constitutional Court magistrates and the attorney general, secured indefinite reelection, and pushed independent outlets like El Faro and rights organizations like Cristosal into exile or dissolution. Six in ten Salvadorans, by Magaloni's polling, now say they fear expressing opposition to the president. Magaloni's central analytical point is that these two facts — high approval and eroded democracy — are not in tension. Popular satisfaction, she argues, is not evidence that democratic institutions are functioning; it can just as easily mean the public has redefined what it expects democracy to deliver.
The concern is not only for El Salvador but for the region. Brazil, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, and politicians in Argentina and elsewhere have already floated Bukele-style prisons or openly admired his model, and Magaloni's research argues that publics across a chronically violent region are being sold a false choice — that security requires sacrificing due process. Her findings, coauthored with Alberto Díaz-Cayeros and published in Foreign Affairs, argue that the choice is false: the security gains came in the first months, and everything since has been a cost without corresponding benefit.
From the page to the screen
Translating that argument into fourteen or so minutes of film is its own discipline, and it's the one Ortiz brings to the project. A sociologist and documentary filmmaker who has covered migration, democracy, and human rights across Latin America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, Ortiz treats the camera as a research instrument, not an illustration for one — the same fieldwork ethic that shaped Magaloni's interviews shapes how the film listens to the people in it. The result is less a summary of the written research than its own account of the same material: mothers who do not know whether their sons are alive, released detainees describing what happened to them in Izalco and Mariona, and a portrait of a country where a security policy became something closer to a permanent political architecture.
The film had its first public airing at a Stanford screening and discussion in April, alongside Cristosal executive director Noah Bullock and moderator Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, and its release now makes that conversation available well beyond the room it started in. El Salvador: A Carceral State of Terror is now available to watch on YouTube.
