Migration and the Americas When the State Becomes the Threat: Acting Politically Amid Rising Authoritarianism in Central America
- Date in the past
- Tuesday, 19 May 2026, 18:15
- Heidelberg Center for American Studies, HCA Atrium, Curt und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais, Hauptstraße 120, 69117 Heidelberg
- Dr Julienne Weegles, University of Amsterdam (Netherlands), Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation
A volatile mix of police brutality, criminal violence, political corruption, carceral expansion and authoritarian control has amalgamated with Central America’s legacies of civil war. Ostensibly seeking to provide security, politicians left and right are resorting to ever more punitive forms of law and border enforcement, and have amplified police and judicial capacities to incarcerate and retain their respective “internal enemies”. The circulation of US security policies and the impact of the Trump administration compounds and exacerbates their impact. In the process, particularly young people’s lives appear increasingly affected by unchecked securitization and what might be understood as a hemispheric authoritarian turn. Zooming in on El Salvador and Nicaragua, this talk explores how young people on the move deal with the subjection of their bodies and communities to the insecurity generated by “penal excess”, and how they organize (or not) against arbitrary detention and state-sanctioned violence.
Address
Heidelberg Center for American Studies
HCA Atrium
Curt und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais
Hauptstraße 120
69117 HeidelbergOrganizer
Event Type
Series of events
Talk
Contact
In spite of various differences between the countries, in both cases rising authoritarianism has led to the expansion of security forces and carceral capacity, purges of the judicial apparatus, and a clear politicization of the institutions of crime control as they have come to fall under the direct control of the presidency. Anchored in anti-carceral activism and a critical understanding of the state, Dr Weegels draws on collaborative ethnographic research projects with Salvadoran and Nicaraguan justice-seeking initiatives, eliciting the ways in which young people creatively organize to protect their bodies and communities in the face of penal excess. Finally, the talk discusses opportunities as well as severe limitations for anti-carceral organizing within the present hemispheric panorama.