Christopher Soto is a Salvadoran-American poet, activist and prison abolitionist. He is based in Los Angeles, but has remained tied to his parent’s home country.

Throughout his life, Christopher has taken many trips to El Salvador, but during his most recent visit to the Central American country in the summer of 2022, things were very different: the country’s president Nayib Bukele had declared a state of exception to address rising homicide rates attributed to criminal gangs. More than 65,000 people have been arrested since then, many of them arbitrarily.

On this episode of Latino USA, Christopher Soto takes us to El Salvador during a state of exception and we hear about the deep connections between the United States and El Salvador’s carceral culture, as well as the importance of poetry within the prison abolitionist movement.