ANTH 037E. Carceral States in Central America

Central America returned to global attention in 2022 through El Salvador’s war on gangs, marked by mass arrests and mega-prisons detaining U.S. deportees, consolidating a transnational security model across the Americas. Building on this conjunction, this course offers a regionally focused anthropological examination of carceral states in Central America through feminist and abolitionist frameworks. We examine how carceral systems-including prisons, policing, legal regimes, and immigration enforcement- are shaped by colonial and imperial legacies, military dictatorships, and transnational security formations linking the U.S. and Central America. Topics include the War on Terror, War on Drugs, and War on Gangs; migration control; grassroots organizing; masculinities and reproductive injustices; and the entanglement of carcerality with extractive capitalism targeting Black and Indigenous communities.
Social sciences.
1 credit
Fall 2026. Grimaldi.
Catalog chapter: Sociology and Anthropology
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/sociology-anthropology

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