Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-26

Liquid bukelism: exporting the prison-State

I Forty thousand places

In January 2023 a prison with a declared capacity of 40,000 people opens in Tecoluca. It is the largest prison in the hemisphere. Eight wings, cells of 100 inmates, 19 hectares.

What matters is not the size: it is that it was photographed before it was filled. The facility circulated as an image months before it worked as a facility.

“This is not a prison with a press office. It is a press office shaped like a prison.”

II Anatomy of the device

Foucault described the modern prison as a machine of asymmetrical visibility: the guard sees without being seen, the inmate is seen without seeing.

What has been exported since 2023 inverts that axis. The inmate is seen by everyone —photographed in formation, numbered, broadcast—, and the apparatus that decides is the one that stays opaque.

It is not a panopticon. It is a shop window: the confinement works outwards, as a message, not inwards, as correction.

III Table of the model

Component	Declared function	Actual function
mass capacity	to house	to demonstrate scale
regime with no visits	security	to guarantee opacity
aerial image	transparency	to produce the brand
state of exception	temporary	extended 30+ times

The fourth row is the one that travels. What is replicable is not the building —it costs hundreds of millions— but the legal figure that suspends the deadline.

IV Why “liquid”

The adjective is not decoration. A solid model is exported as a blueprint: you need the land, the budget, the works.

This one is exported as a procedure: poll, decree, extension, image. That fits in a document and adapts to any penal code. Hence versions appearing with not a single new cell built — it is enough to relabel the existing ones and change the regime.

The liquid takes the shape of the container. The container, here, is whatever local fear is available.

V Civic ritualsafe

01

Look up how many people are in prison in your country today with no final conviction.
02

Look up the figure from ten years ago.
03

Divide one by the other.

Public data, no application, no paperwork. That quotient says more about where your penal system is heading than any security speech, because pre-trial detention is the door through which the model enters with no need for a new law.

VI Risks

The honest objection: in 2015 El Salvador had 106 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest rate in the world with no declared war. Today it is a fraction of that. Denying that fall to sustain the critique is lying, and whoever lies loses the argument.

The right question is not whether it fell. It is what was traded for that fall, and whether the price can ever stop being paid. A state of exception extended thirty times is no longer an instrument: it is the effective constitution.

And none of the replicas under way arrived with the hard part of the manual: how you dismantle it.