Imprisonment as State Repression: Recent Carceral Approaches to Gang Violence in Central America

Abstract

In some Central American states, gang violence dominates everyday life and causes high homicide rates that sometimes rival those of states actively at war. However, this pattern does not occur in all countries in that region; while gang violence has historically devastated El Salvador and Honduras, gang violence failed to institutionalize itself in a similar way in Nicaragua. Yet, all three states have, in recent years, elected to use carceral policies against their populations for varying reasons. Given the difference in political perspectives between Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and Honduran President Xiomara Castro and the similarities of the two states to Nicaragua, I sought to investigate the following conundrum: why have both Bukele and Castro chosen to use states of exception and emergency as responses to gang violence whereas Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has not used these strategies to address gang violence? Both El Salvador and Honduras have historically endured gang-related violence since the 1990s and have infrastructurally weak states, leading to both selecting short-sighted policies to respond to gang violence that fail to acknowledge societal inequalities and a lack of state-provided public goods as the root causes of gang violence. Despite its regional similarities to El Salvador and Honduras, Nicaragua has avoided issues with gang violence due to its history of a left-wing government and the legacy that its style of policing left behind. However, despite the lack of gang violence, state repression remains present in Nicaragua, albeit in a different way from El Salvador and Honduras, because of Nicaragua’s marginally stronger state infrastructure. Through the lens of state strength and mass incarceration literature, this thesis examines varying similarities and differences between the three states using John Stuart Mill’s methods of agreement and difference to determine the origins of these policies and contrasts.