Wola Podcast

A special episode as part of WOLA’s 2025 Human Rights Awards Month President Nayib Bukele’s government has jailed nearly 2 percent of El Salvador’s entire population—the highest incarceration rate in the world. Still, because violence has dropped sharply, political figures across Latin America speak about emulating Bukele’s “security model.” But behind the videos of mega-prisons and tweets about plunging homicide rates lies a darker, less sustainable reality. In this WOLA Podcast episode, Adam Isacson speaks with Beatriz Magaloni (personal site / Stanford site), a political scientist at Stanford University and co-author (with Alberto Díaz-Cayeros) of a Foreign Affairs article published September 11, 2025: “Does the Bukele Model Have a Future?” Their conversation reveals what Magaloni calls “a system of state terror and resource extraction,” and explores why El Salvador’s experiment in mass incarceration may ultimately collapse under its own weight. In fieldwork conducted since last year, Dr. Magaloni intervie