The first prison university in Central America: 40 inmates in El Salvador about to graduate with degrees in Business Administration

At the La Esperanza Penitentiary Center, popularly known as Mariona in El Salvador, there is a higher education project run by a university that offers an opportunity to persons deprived of liberty, or inmates convicted of common crimes, to pursue a university degree while serving their sentences. (Infobae Centroamérica/Emerson Del Cid) The La Esperanza Penitentiary Complex, historically known as the Mariona prison, is preparing for the graduation of its first university cohort in May: nearly 40 persons deprived of liberty are about to complete a bachelor's degree in Business Administration. Infobae gained exclusive access to direct interviews and an in-person visit to the university's facilities, where it learned first-hand about the technical operations and the daily routine of the inmates seeking to reintegrate into society. The academic program formally operates as an extension of the Christian University of the Assemblies of God (UCAD), coordinated under the Zero Leisure Plan of the General Directorate of Penitentiary Centers and with the support of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Embassy of Qatar. Current enrollment reaches 318 inmates pursuing the regular degree program, along with dozens of participants in technical and language diploma courses. Launching a faculty inside the country's most emblematic prison facility required a radical change in internal governance. For decades, Mariona was under the operational control of gang structures dedicated to extortion and illicit trafficking. The technical and institutional condition for opening the university classrooms was to categorically separate the criminal profiles. The prison director, Juan José Ramírez Montano, explained the foundations of this penitentiary policy: "What we have left here are inmates convicted of common crimes. And we began to give them, so to speak, a second chance." Entry into the academic circuit is neither massive nor automatic. Those aspiring to a place must meet the official requirements of the Ministry of Education: a high school diploma, a birth certificate, and the national AVANZO exam. In parallel, a multidisciplinary team made up of psychologists, criminologists, physicians, and social workers evaluates the background and discipline of each applicant. From the university administration's perspective, the project was designed with a broad professional profile that allows graduates to enter both the corporate sector and state initiatives or their own ventures upon release. The degree program consists of 48 subjects distributed across ten academic cycles over five years, and includes a final stage of technical pre-specialization in logistics and distribution with a customs focus. Edwin Bátres, institutional director of the Esperanza Project at UCAD, detailed the employment-oriented approach designed for the inmates: "Administration allows us to work in accounting, production, it allows us to work in the marketing area, to work in human resources." On the pedagogical front, the project demands constant adaptation from the teachers who enter the facility Monday through Saturday to teach classes. With no internet connection due to legal requirements, the educational process relies on local software platforms, printed bibliography, and direct interaction in the classroom. The teaching staff emphasizes that the inmates' interest frequently exceeds the ordinary university standard. Engineer Félix Benjamín Alfaro, the professor in charge of the Management Information Systems course, highlighted the receptiveness he observes among the 24 inmates in his group: "In classes at UCAD, you have to keep asking them questions; here, no, they ask questions, they want to acquire that additional knowledge." This academic model also includes a component of giving back to the prison community itself. As part of their social hours of community outreach, the business administration students serve as instructors and literacy facilitators for more than 3,000 inmates who are learning reading, writing, and basic arithmetic operations for construction trades. With the expansion of the project to the Apanteos women's prison and the projection of new degree programs, the Mariona model seeks to establish itself as a regional penitentiary reference where discipline and professional training definitively replace criminal structures.