Inside the Carceral State: Policing in El Salvador

International social scientist Elizabeth G. Kennedy and Patrick McNamara, Professor of Latin American History and Human Rights at the University of Minnesota, set the stage for this year’s series on Just Policing with an in-depth exploration on how the complex landscape of policing in El Salvador resonates on a global scale. As of Jan 2024, El Salvador has the highest rate of incarceration in the world—more than three times higher than the United States, which had maintained the highest incarceration rate for most of the past three decades. Kennedy and McNamara will discuss how rampant gang violence led to the suspension of constitutional rights in El Salvador under a "state of emergency," and how El Salvador has since become a model for other leaders internationally—including in the United States—who face similar threats of violence and instability caused by political corruption and organized crime.

The Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, Jun 11, 2023; via Secretaria de Prensa de la Presidencia.

The 2024-25 (In)Justice Series on Just Policing presented by the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota critically examines how policing intersects with broader societal issues across the globe and explores efforts to reform, transform, or abolish policing. Presented in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing.

About the Presenters:

Elizabeth G. Kennedy, PhD, is a Fulbright Scholar to El Salvador and the Latin American Public Opinion Project’s Honduras expert. From 2023 to 2024, she was a DePaul Migration Collaborative practitioner in residence. Since 2021, she has directed the Central America Monitor’s research with regional partners in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Over the past 13 years, Kennedy has developed, implemented, and widely disseminated collaborative human rights research with intersectional analyses of impunity, inequality, violence, and related topics in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Qualitatively, she has interviewed over 1,700 Central American migrants and 250 officials and service providers. Quantitatively, she has compiled innovative and substantial databases to triangulate the information collected in interviews. Kennedy has authored or co-authored peer-reviewed articles in high-impact academic journals, policy reports, book chapters, media articles, and internal reports, including Central America Monitor regional and country reports and Deported to Danger: United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse (Human Rights Watch 2020). She has further disseminated this research through frequent presentations to legal, medical, and social service providers; government officials; immigration courts; and print, radio, and television outlets in various countries.

Patrick McNamara is an associate professor of Latin American History and Human Rights at the University of Minnesota. After publishing on nineteenth and twentieth-century Mexican political history, he began studying human rights issues surrounding cartel violence in Mexico and gang violence in El Salvador. He began providing country conditions reports for asylum applicants from Mexico and El Salvador in the United States Immigration Court in 2015. He is currently writing a book that examines forms of violence in El Salvador that have led large numbers of people to flee the country, titled Credible Fear: A History of Violence in El Salvador, 2010–2022.

Related Links

• Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) 
• Deported to Danger: United States Deportation Policies Expose Salvadorans to Death and Abuse by Elizabeth Kennedy 
• Sawyer Seminar on Just Policing: Transnational Perspectives on the Definition and Possibility of Justice in Law Enforcement
• IAS Institute for Advanced Study