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).