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.