A more recent and rapidly emerging case—attracting both worldwide admiration and alarm—is Nayib Bukele’s government’s prison policy in El Salvador. After a record-breaking spike in gang killings in late March 2022, Bukele persuaded the Legislative Assembly to declare a régimen de excepción (state of exception) on March 27, 2022—a constitutional measure originally limited to thirty days that has since been renewed monthly without interruption.15 By 2024, El Salvador held more than 110,000 inmates and had achieved an incarceration rate of approximately 1,659 per 100,000—the highest in the world, roughly triple the United States rate, and many multiples of any Latin American neighbor.16 The Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) outside Tecoluca, opened on February 1, 2023, with a stated capacity of forty thousand, has become the iconic image of the new policy: enormous, brutally austere, and largely sealed from outside access.

The visible result is undeniable. Crimes against persons have plummeted in El Salvador’s cities, ordinary Salvadorans report walking their streets again without fear, and many in the global commentariat—who have no skin in the game and no relatives behind those walls—have lauded “the Bukele model” as a template for criminal justice reform throughout the developing world. Christians ought to ponder this with greater care than the popular press has shown.

The seductive logic is older than Bukele. In 2001, the economists John Donohue and Steven Levitt published a much-discussed paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics arguing that the legalization of abortion in the United States after Roe v. Wade explained as much as half of the dramatic crime drop of the 1990s, the effect appearing roughly eighteen years after legalization—the precise lag at which the aborted cohort would have entered peak criminal age.17 That finding, popularized in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s 2005 bestseller Freakonomics, has survived several rounds of empirical critique with its central correlation more or less intact.18 But the policy implication that lurks behind it is monstrous: if eliminating future criminals is the operative goal, then aborting one hundred percent of pregnancies—wiping out the human race—would eliminate crime entirely. The example is reductio ad absurdum, but the moral structure of the reasoning is identical to the moral structure of “the Bukele model”: the ends do not justify the means.

Cristosal, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have documented that tens of thousands of innocent people have been swept up under quota-driven mass arrests, held in conditions Human Rights Watch summarized in the title of one 2025 report as “you have arrived in hell,” denied due process, denied effective defense, and, in some cases, tortured to death in custody.19 Indeed, Amnesty described the practice of Salvadoran prisons as the “systemic use of torture.” Cristosal summed it up thusly: “torture has become a state policy, with cruel and inhuman treatment regularly practiced.” The most credible domestic human rights organization in El Salvador, Cristosal was forced to close its offices in 2025 amid escalating government repression—a fact that should give the model’s foreign admirers pause. Mass trials of hundreds of defendants at a time, conducted before judges whose identities are concealed, have systematically violated the presumption of innocence. Furthermore, the accused wait extraordinarily long in confinement for trial, and if sentenced, often receive prison terms far longer than their crime would normally warrant. Should men be jailed for ten to fifteen years for stealing a piece of meat? The cruel arithmetic that some of Bukele’s defenders invoke—a few eggs broken to make the omelet—is the same arithmetic totalitarian regimes have always preferred. The “eggs” in this case are flesh-and-blood Salvadoran men, many of them poor, many of them tattooed in adolescence with no current gang affiliation, many of them husbands and fathers and sons. Many will never see their families again.

The biblical question is not whether Bukele’s policy reduces crime—it does, in the short term—but whether it conforms to any defensible Christian theology of justice. Retribution, properly understood, is proportionate to the offense and falls only on the guilty. Romans 13’s reference to the civil magistrate bearing the sword is, in the minds of most Christians, a description of his narrow function in restraining evildoers (as defined by God), not a blank check for the wholesale punishment of the innocent on the suspicion that some among them may be guilty. From my point of view, Bukele’s ruthless injustice policy confirms what I have argued elsewhere: that Romans 13:1-4, as commonly applied, treats the state itself as the entity that defines what is good and evil, ignoring what God’s word says (see note 12). The conditions of CECOT and the network of facilities that feed it are not a Christian conception of corrections; they are the latest expression of the state’s perennial willingness to crush human beings in the name of public order. As I have argued throughout this book, the state has been, across human history, the deadliest of all institutions to ordinary people, and Bukele’s experiment is no exception, however cosmetically impressive its short-run results may appear.

For the prison minister, Bukele’s El Salvador presents a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, the sheer concentration of inmates—many genuinely lost, frightened, separated from family, and forced to confront their mortality—constitutes an extraordinary mission field. On the other hand, the state has so completely sealed off external access to facilities like CECOT that genuine pastoral ministry from outside is virtually impossible. Visitors, lawyers, and even chaplains are routinely denied entry, and inmates are denied communication with the outside world. What ministry exists must come from within, conducted by inmates themselves under the shadow of guards who would rather suppress religious gathering than tolerate it. Far from making prison ministry easier, the Bukele regime appears in fact to have driven it further underground than at any point in modern Latin American history—an exacerbation of state failure dressed up as its remedy, and one more reminder that the criminal recidivism nurtured inside these mass-incarceration facilities is itself a state-manufactured crisis, sown for harvest in the years to come.

Pentecostal Dominance as a Theological Challenge

In virtually every Latin American prison where I encountered organized religious activity, Pentecostalism was the dominant—often the only—expression of Protestant Christianity. This reality presents a serious theological challenge for anyone committed to Reformed, confessional Christianity.

I witnessed this firsthand in Chile. A man called Pastor Juan Vásquez in Casablanca controlled the prison “church” with an authority that combined genuine organizational skill with a theology that was, to put it charitably, deficient. Vásquez held to typical degenerate Pentecostal ideas and bankrupt theology. He favored speaking in tongues and prophesying, and detested Jesus’ command to defend ourselves. He preferred the membership of an unrepentant homosexual cannibal pedophile murderer, Raúl Espinoza, to me, a Baptist Pastor, banning me from his “church.” He preached carnal Christianity and easy believism. And he exercised a degree of personal authority over his congregation that would have made a medieval pope uncomfortable. By the grace of God, nearly all of his members left him and joined themselves to the Historic Baptist ministry.

The theological problems with this approach are manifold. Cessationism—the view that the miraculous gifts of the Spirit (tongues, prophecy, healing) ceased with the apostolic age—is the historic position of Reformed Christianity and is grounded in a careful exegesis of 1 Corinthians 13:8-10, Hebrews 2:3-4, and the trajectory of the New Testament narrative.20 The fact that there is no explicit, plain teaching that those revelatory and miraculous gifts ceased does not mean that they still exist today any more than the Urim and Thummim could still be consulted if ever found, which likewise lack explicit, plain teaching that their use has ceased. The Chilean Pentecostal prison gospel is a heresy that contradicts the plain teaching of Scripture regarding election, prayer for unbelievers, holiness, ecclesiology, repentance, suffering, poverty, and the purposes of God (Luke 6:20; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10; 1 Timothy 6:6-10). And the concentration of spiritual authority in a single charismatic leader—effectively without accountability, without doctrinal standards, without the checks and balances provided by a properly constituted eldership—is a recipe for the very kind of spiritual manipulation and abuse that Paul warned Timothy against (2 Timothy 4:3-4).

Yet the prison Pentecostals are there. They are inside the walls, doing the work, reaching the lost, and regrettably cementing the lost in their eternal condemnation. They shackle (then shellack!) carnal men with legality and Bible platitudes with Arminian theology, dispensational Zionism, and undue authoritarianism. Reformed and confessional churches, with some noble exceptions, are not there. The challenge is not merely to critique Pentecostal theology from the safety of a seminary classroom but to provide a biblically sound alternative inside the prison itself—to demonstrate that the doctrines of grace are not merely intellectually superior but practically transformative, capable of sustaining a man through years of unjust suffering in a way that the Pentecostal Zionist gospel manifestly cannot.

Corruption and the Prison Economy

Latin American prisons operate according to an economic logic instantly recognizable to any student of institutional economics. The state provides minimal resources—insufficient food, inadequate medical care, negligible education, and psychological intervention—and the resulting vacuum is filled by informal markets in which everything has a price: a bed, a cell assignment, protection, food, drugs, communication with the outside world, and even access to religious services.

In my experience in Chile, the corruption was systemic and unapologetic. The economato—the prison’s formal, monopolized economy—charged inflated prices for basic necessities, with the profits distributed among prison concessions, likely with kickbacks to owners or administrators and to compliant inmates. Guards supplemented their meager salaries through bribery, extortion, and the facilitation of contraband. The warden wielded his authority over conduct scores—conducta—as a weapon of personal vindictiveness, granting or withholding privileges based on favoritism rather than merit.

Religious organizations function within this economy as a partial counterweight to state neglect. They provide food, clothing, toiletries, work materials (e.g., tools, leather, wood, etc.), Bibles, educational materials, and—most importantly—a social structure that offers inmates an alternative to the criminal economy. The evangelical cells and pavilions described above are not merely spiritual communities; they are economic units that provide their members with resources that the state does not supply and that the criminal networks supply only at the cost of complicity in violence and exploitation. In my prison experience, especially in Casablanca, Baptists made direct investments to help inmates that I managed from within.

This observation should inform the strategy of any church or ministry considering involvement in Latin American prisons. The ministry that enters these environments with Bibles alone—without food, without clothing, without medical supplies, without legal assistance—will find its message competing with organizations that address the whole person. This is not a call to abandon the primacy of the Gospel. It is a recognition that the Gospel is proclaimed most effectively when it is accompanied by tangible demonstrations of Christian love (James 2:15-16).

Prison Gangs and Religious Disengagement

One of the most strategically significant functions of religion in Latin American prisons is its capacity to facilitate disengagement from criminal networks. In prison systems dominated by gangs and organized crime, affiliation with a religious community signals a credible commitment to leaving the criminal life—a signal that gangs themselves often respect, albeit grudgingly.

InSight Crime’s flagship 2017 investigation, “The Prison Dilemma: Latin America’s Incubators of Organized Crime” (updated 2023), a five-part series covering Venezuela, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, documents how Latin American prisons function as command centers for organized crime—how government mismanagement, neglect, and corruption have transformed jails into the principal breeding grounds for criminal networks across the region.21 While the InSight Crime investigation does not focus on religion specifically, it provides the institutional context within which the religion-as-exit-signal phenomenon operates. In Brazil, gang leaders often permit members to transfer to evangelical cells without the violent reprisals that typically accompany attempts to leave a gang. Andrew Johnson, who spent years embedded inside Pentecostal cells in Rio de Janeiro’s prisons, documents this exit-pathway dynamic with first-hand ethnographic detail.22 The logic is pragmatic rather than spiritual: a man who has found religion is unlikely to cooperate with law enforcement (since his new community provides an alternative social identity, and because many will conclude that the state is at least as Satan-inspired as the gangs are), and eliminating him would create unnecessary conflict with a large and politically connected religious constituency.

For the prison minister, this dynamic presents both opportunity and responsibility. The opportunity is that the Gospel offers men a genuine pathway out of gang life—not merely a strategic maneuver but a transformative encounter with the living God that reorients their identity, their loyalties, and their future. The responsibility is to ensure that this pathway is real—that the religious community to which these men attach themselves is not merely another power structure with a different vocabulary but a genuine expression of the body of Christ, committed to the truth of Scripture and the care of souls.

Conclusion

Latin America’s prisons are, in many respects, the front lines of spiritual warfare. The conditions are appalling. The corruption is systemic. The dominant theological framework is deficient. And the state, true to its nature, has failed comprehensively in its custodial responsibilities.

Yet the Gospel advances. In the APAC facilities of Minas Gerais, in the evangelical cells of São Paulo, in the pabellones evangélicos of Buenos Aires, and in countless individual conversions that no researcher will ever document, the Holy Spirit is doing what He has always done: calling sinners to repentance and faith, often in the very environments where human hope has been most thoroughly extinguished.

The task for the global church—and particularly for Reformed, confessional Christians—is to engage with this reality rather than ignore it. Latin American prisons need the doctrines of grace. They need the whole counsel of God, faithfully proclaimed. They need churches that will commit not merely to occasional visits but to sustained, long-term ministry that provides theological education, pastoral care, material support, and post-release integration. The harvest is plentiful. The laborers are few. And the fields are, in many cases, literally behind the walls.

I can say from personal experience that the nearly six years I spent in the Chilean system transformed my understanding of global Christianity in ways no amount of academic study could have. I saw men converted under conditions of extraordinary deprivation—men who had no Bible, no pastor, no seminary education, and yet who encountered the living God in the darkness of a cell or the pernicious drab of the inmates’ yard. I also saw men destroyed by false teaching, exploited by religious charlatans, and abandoned by a church that could not be bothered to cross the threshold of the prison gate. Both realities demand our attention. Both compel us to act. “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required” (Luke 12:48). The Reformed church, especially historic Baptists, has been given the fullness of biblical truth. That gift creates an obligation that extends to the farthest corners of Latin America’s penal system—and beyond.

References

Algranti, J. (2018). The making of an evangelical prison: Study on Neo-Pentecostalism and its leadership processes in the Argentine penitentiary system. Social Compass, 65(5), 549-565. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768618800417

Amnesty International. (2024, December 19). El Salvador: A thousand days into the state of emergency. “Security” at the expense of human rights. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/el-salvador-mil-dias-regimen-excepcion-modelo-seguridad-a-costa-derechos-humanos/

Barrios-Fernández, A., & García-Hombrados, J. (2025). Recidivism and neighborhood institutions: Evidence from the rise of the evangelical church in Chile. Journal of Labor Economics, 43(3), 725-762. https://doi.org/10.1086/730119

Cobin, J. M. (2003). Bible and Government: Public Policy from a Christian Perspective. Alertness Books.

Cobin, J. M. (2006). Christian Theology of Public Policy: Highlighting the American Experience. Alertness Books.

Cobin, J. M. (forthcoming, 2026/2027). Suffering Unjustly: Imprisonment, Wrecked Families, and Property or Wealth Destruction Affecting Christians in Modern Democratic Societies. Publisher TBD.

Dias, C. C. N. (2008). A igreja como refúgio e a Bíblia como esconderijo: religião e violência na prisão. Humanitas (USP).

Donohue, J. J., & Levitt, S. D. (2001). The impact of legalized abortion on crime. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(2), 379-420. https://doi.org/10.1162/00335530151144050