Carceral Imperialism: Central American Gangs, Neoliberalism, and the Rise of the Salvadoran Carceral State

• In Event: Resisting Carcerality and Border Imperialism (Hybrid)

Abstract

Since President Nayib Bukele came into power in June 2019, El Salvador’s prison population has tripled to 100,000, and the country now has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. My paper thus asks how El Salvador came to have the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. I utilize an interdisciplinary sociohistorical and theoretical methodological approach to address the following questions: 1) how is carceral power produced transnationally? 2) who does it target? and 3) to what end? Drawing on the fields of Carceral Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and U.S.-Central American relations, my paper examines shifting global security systems in the wake of El Salvador's twelve-year civil war (1980-1992) alongside sociopolitical discourse, anti-gang laws, and human rights reports to showcase how and why hyper-policing and -incarceration has emerged as a central practice of neoliberal governance and statecraft-building in El Salvador over the last thirty years. To this end, I argue the interdependent transnational geopolitical and economic interests of El Salvador’s ruling elite and the U.S. security state undergird the country’s postwar carceral turn. While most of the social scientific literature on the prison industrial complex focuses on the U.S., my work sheds a critical light on how this phenomenon has migrated southward and manifested as an element of neoliberal statecraft in Central America, thus offering a vital sociohistorical and theoretical analysis of the imperial expansion of transborder carceral apparatuses in the western hemisphere since the end of the Cold War. Transnational in scope, my study examines enduring histories of colonialism, imperialism, and militarism alongside contemporary public and state anti-gang discourse to bring into focus how the enduring racial logics of bodily social control, punishment, and confinement traverse borders and shaped El Salvador’s modern ‘war’ on transnational gangs and the state’s subsequent carceral turn. More specifically, my study examines the sociopolitical proliferation of carceral state power, punitive anti-gang populism, and mass incarceration rates after the civil war to demonstrate how El Salvador’s ruling elite, with the assistance of the U.S. security state, militarized the national police, instituted draconian anti-gang laws, and hyper-incarcerated presumed gang members as means to reconstitute social, political, and economic power relations. In sum, my study underscores the necessity in our current historical and political moment to expand existing scholarship on the carceral state and its symbiotic relationship to late-stage U.S. imperialism, border militarization, racial capitalism, and the transborder expansion of carceral apparatuses in Latin America since the end of the Cold War.

Biographical Information

José Madrid is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University. His scholarly and pedagogical interests seek to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the symbiotic relationship between U.S. imperialism, policing, prison development, and racialized subjectivity in Central America’s Northern Triangle. His current research builds on the work of anti-colonial thinkers and contemporary scholars to better understand how the Salvadoran state and U.S. law enforcement agencies have responded to the transnational emergence of Central American youth gangs in the wake of El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. This work is not only a reflection of his training in Black Studies but, more importantly, is driven by the political imperative to attend to the myriad of ways in which racialized marginal subjects in Central America have historically been subjected to various forms of state violence under militarized authoritarian regimes.

Author

• Jose A. Madrid, Northwestern University