Gellman on What Salvadoran Life is Like Under Current Regime: WBUR
Marlboro Institute Associate Professor and Emerson Prison Initiative Director Mneesha Gellman spoke about the status of El Salvador’s political scene to WBUR.
Gellman began by noting the U.S.’s influence on El Salvador:
But the way that the U.S. has engaged El Salvador has continued to perpetuate social inequality, economic inequality, and really been willing to rubber stamp what political scientists think of as procedural democracy. Putting votes in the ballot box and calling that democracy, rather than looking at the everyday experience of people to access their civil liberties and the larger platform of the rights.
During the last several years El Salvador’s murder rate has decreased due to mass incarcerations, with about 2% of the country’s population being in prison. but those mass incarcerations have also targeted non-gang related people. She relayed the story of a woman who was initially happy about the gangs no longer forcing her to pay money.
A month later, she shows up at that same person’s door and says, do you have a contact with anyone at a human rights organization? Because my grandson was just arrested. I know he’s not gang involved, and I don’t know what to do. So those kinds of stories of people who initially feel this buoyed sense of security, it then devolves because they become directly impacted in some way by these arbitrary arrests.
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