The Shawshank delusion (part two)

No discussion of Ecuador’s proposed 15,000-person prison can continue for more than seven minutes before somebody invokes El Salvador. The process is now almost automatic. Mention organized crime, prison gangs, or extortion in Latin America and, within moments, the BTL Expat Think Tank begins chanting “Bukele” in the comments section like medieval monks who have recently discovered a new savior. (Of course El Salvador means ‘the Savior’ in Spanish.)

“Why don’t they simply copy El Salvador?” demanded GringoKnowsBest beneath last week’s column, shortly before ExpatExpert explained that the solution required “political will,” military discipline, and “zero tolerance,” all phrases that sound extremely impressive while remaining conveniently difficult to define operationally. Meanwhile, GrandadGoneGringo announced that the entire matter could probably be resolved by “bringing back chain gangs,” although thankfully he did not specify whether this would occur before or after almuerzo at the Thinktank café.

The truth is that El Salvador’s prison crackdown has been both more successful and more complicated than either its admirers or its critics usually admit.

There is little doubt that ordinary Salvadorans feel safer than they once did. For years, gangs such as MS-13 and Barrio 18 exercised astonishing control over neighborhoods, buses, shops, and daily life. Extortion became almost a parallel tax system. Bus drivers were murdered for refusing payments. Shopkeepers lived in fear of missed collections. Entire districts operated under invisible criminal administration.

It is difficult for outsiders to fully grasp how exhausting this becomes psychologically. A society cannot function normally if large numbers of citizens believe that opening a small business may eventually require payments to men on motorcycles carrying WhatsApp messages and pistols.

Then came Nayib Bukele, and the giant prison known as CECOT, which looks less like a traditional penitentiary than the set of a dystopian science-fiction film.

In the images released to news agencies rows of prisoners with shaved heads, wearing nothing but what appear to be shared institutional boxer shorts, packed into enormous cell blocks under intense guard supervision. Thousands of them. The symbolism is entirely deliberate–the state is communicating power, control, and inevitability, and it is doing so in a visual language that travels extremely well on social media.

And to a remarkable extent, it appears to have worked.

Homicide rates in El Salvador fell dramatically. Protection rackets reportedly declined and  entire neighborhoods that once avoided travel after dark suddenly became usable again.

Public support for Bukele remains extremely high because many citizens judge governments not through constitutional theory but through lived experience. If your nephew no longer risks being shot on the bus home from work, philosophical debates about penal policy may feel somewhat secondary.

This is the part that foreign commentators most frequently overlook. Security is not an abstract concept to ordinary people. It is the ability to run a bakery without paying gang taxes. It is the ability to let a teenager walk to school. It is the ability to keep a small shop open after sunset without wondering whether armed men will arrive demanding “protection.”

Yet the Bukele model also raises difficult questions that cannot simply be dismissed as liberal hand-wringing from overseas universities.

The first concerns scale. A prison system built around overwhelming force requires enormous and sustained state capacity: disciplined staffing, military-style organization, intelligence operations, constant surveillance, and an unusual degree of political control. Maintaining that level of intensity for years or decades is much harder than launching it with fanfare in the first place.

The second issue is corruption, and Orginal Sin did not immediately vanish from human nature merely because tattooed prisoners were photographed kneeling shirtless in rows like Buddhist monks. Even well-run prison systems struggle with smuggling, bribery, contraband, and compromised staff.

What El Salvador appears to have done is attempt to overwhelm corruption through fear, surveillance, and centralized authority. In effect, prison staff are not merely supervising inmates. They themselves are continuously on camera too.

This may work and it may even work very well for some time. But systems of this kind depend heavily on institutional discipline and political continuity. One weak administration, one period of economic crisis, one horrific scandal or riot, or one relaxation of pressure can alter the equation remarkably quickly.

There is also a deeper issue that online discussions rarely address. A 15,000-person prison requires thousands of employees: guards, medical workers, drivers, kitchen staff, maintenance crews, accountants, administrators, IT techs, plumbers, electricians, intelligence personnel, and classification officers. Human beings with mortgages, children, personal debts, and vulnerabilities. amd perhaps even with relatives as inmates.

The BTL Expat Think Tank often seems to imagine prison corruption as a purely moral failure that can be solved through stricter discipline and adherence to the Ten Commandments.

In reality, corruption frequently reflects mathematics. If organized crime possesses millions of dollars and a prison guard earns modest wages while worrying about his daughter’s school fees, temptation becomes part of the infrastructure rather than an exception to it. This is one reason authoritarian prison systems frequently rely on fear as much as salary. Employees must fear the state more than they fear or desire cooperation with criminal organizations. Whether such fear remains sustainable over long periods remains to be seen.

The final question concerns what happens after the photographs stop making headlines. El Salvador’s prisons currently project overwhelming control and yet Latin American history contains many examples of institutions that appeared strong until suddenly they were not. Prisons are not static monuments, but living systems requiring constant management, money, political attention, and trustworthy personnel.

None of this means Ecuador should ignore the El Salvador example. On the contary. Ecuador can probably learn useful lessons from El Salvador’s emphasis on communication control, centralized authority, and preventing prison gangs from operating internal mini-governments. The public in Ecuador clearly wants stronger action against organized crime, and not without reason.

But there is a difference between admiring a result and understanding the machinery required to sustain it. The photographs from CECOT show thousands of prisoners kneeling silently under guard. What the photographs do not show is the more difficult challenge: the thousands of employees, officers, technicians, cooks, drivers, accountants, intelligence analysts, and administrators required to keep the entire machine functioning day after day without sliding back toward corruption again.

Building barriers with concrete and razor wire is comparatively easy. Running gigantic institutions without losing control of them is largely a problem of logistics, administration, politics, and human beings, which is less dramatic than attack dogs and floodlit cell blocks but probably more important.