The Rise of Transnational Salvadoran Youth Gangs
By Kelly Richter, University of Chicago
On March 15, 2005, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the arrest of 103 key members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, otherwise know as MS-13. The crackdown targeted the top MS-13 networks nationwide: Los Angeles, the Washington DC area, New York City, Long Island, Newark, Baltimore and Miami. These arrests indicate a future of ensuing mass deportations of MS-13 members from the country as part of “Operation Community Shield,” a new, multi-agency initiative launched this January.
Salvadoran gangs, of which the notorious MS-13 is the largest, have established a significant presence in the US over the past two decades. The gangs originated in Los Angeles during the early 1980’s amongst Salvadoran youth fleeing civil war. They have since developed a pan-Latino membership and expanded into East Coast cities and American suburbia over the past decade, with a national membership that numbers tens of thousands in over 30 states.
Over the past decade, the phenomenon has taken on transnational dimensions. Salvadoran American gang affiliates deported from the US are arriving on the violent streets of urban El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and most recently in rural Central America, the Mexican borderlands, Canada and other Latin American countries. Gang membership in Central America has grown rapidly – current estimates suggest up to 30,000 members in El Salvador with 20,000 more in Honduras and Guatemala. While the problem of Salvadoran youth gangs has been long-standing, the recent rapid proliferation and the intense US federal response to the phenomenon this year are without precedence.
Early this year, the FBI listed dismantling MS-13 as a top priority of its organized crime unit and began coordinating “Operation Community Shield.” The Pentagon’s South Command has declared transnational gangs like MS-13 a top threat to Central American stability. This past March furthermore, the Homeland Security Department began coordinating intelligence and training with Central American law enforcement to directly combat the gangs, with plans to exchange federal agents across borders.
Context: US Intervention in El Salvador
The current Salvadoran-American gang phenomenon is, in part, traceable to the long and tainted history of US intervention in Central America. During the Cold War, Central America served as a nexus for the projection of American fears over the rise of the “Left,” especially after the Sandinistas rose to power in Nicaragua in 1979 and President Reagan, a zealous anti-communist, came into office in 1981. Prior to and during the 1980’s, the United States openly and covertly bankrolled and trained repressive anti-communist military regimes and insurgency movements in the region. While tales of the Iran Contra scandal in Nicaragua have become urban lore, much less is remembered about US intervention in El Salvador.
El Salvador, roughly the size of Massachusetts with a population of 6.5 million, was the largest hemispheric recipient of US military aide during the Cold War – including over four billion dollars during the 1980’s. With a legacy of stark socio-economic inequality, repressive right-wing rule and democratic struggle, El Salvador reached a breaking point in the late 1970’s. Government repression came to a violent apex in systemic efforts to eradicate leftists and alleged sympathizers. Official military efforts and paramilitary “death squad” operations claimed some 30,000 victims by the mid-1980’s. The violence fostered the coalescence of leftist groups and the military mobilization of the Marxist Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN) guerilla insurgency, which led the country into a full-scale civil war.
During the official war, which lasted twelve years and claimed an estimated 100,000 lives, military human rights abuses were widespread, including torture, forced “disappearance,” and child soldiering. The FMLN also engaged in abuses, though to a significantly lesser degree. In light of the violations (including murders of US citizens), the Carter administration wavered on aid to the military junta but ultimately restored funding. When Reagan came to power, funding of the Salvadoran military dramatically increased, often against congressional opposition, and the US continued to extensively fund the Salvadoran military until the 1992 ceasefire.
The early 1980’s saw a massive influx of Salvadoran refugees and illegal immigrants entering the US to escape death squads, the military, the FMLN, economic desolation, and other trappings of guerilla war. However, the United States refused to acknowledge the extent and often, existence, of a humanitarian crisis. Salvadorans were categorically denied amnesty in favor of refugees from communist countries. While these policies were successfully challenged in the early 1990’s, the status of Salvadorans in the US has remained precarious.
The wartime cultures of violence and impunity in El Salvador have not fully subsided and new waves of undocumented immigrants continue to arrive in the US. Since the end of the war, the country has maintained one of the highest murder rates in the world, a problem only compounded by a recent surge in American-style gang activity. Of the roughly two million Salvadorans in the US today – nearly 20% of the total global Salvadoran population – many remain undocumented. The threat of deportation has bred a perceived inability to contact law enforcement authorities in US immigrant communities, creating an optimal atmosphere for criminal gang culture to proliferate.
The Rise of the Los Angeles Maras
Youth gangs have grown remarkably in prominence, organization and geographic scope amongst all ethnic demographics in the United States over the past two decades. The federally funded National Youth Gang Center reported 772,500 youth in 24,500 gangs in 2000, an eight-fold increase from twenty years prior. Amongst the masses, Salvadoran gangs have gained notoriety for their immigrant composition and unusual violence which has included for example, the use of machetes in killings.
The civil war placed intense stress on Salvadoran youth, many of whom witnessed the torture and murder of their families, or who were recruited by the army as child soldiers. In the name of protection, many parents sent their children alone or with distant relatives to the US. Some academics and psychologists have suggested that the civil war and immigration trauma hardened some youth, fostering violent instincts replicated on American streets. On the whole however, the phenomenon has defied traditional American scholarly explanations of youth social organization and criminal deviance. Sociology aside, the historical trends of the proliferation of Salvadoran youth gang culture in the US are clear and troubling.
The earliest and most extensive case of Salvadoran youth gang culture in the US took shape in East Los Angeles, the largest Salvadoran immigrant settlement center in the country. In 1993, the year after the civil war ended, there were some 500,000 Salvadoran immigrants living in LA, compared to barely several thousand a decade prior. In 1989, 60% of the LA Salvadoran population was illegal. Today, LA has the second largest urban Salvadoran population in the world, outnumbered only by San Salvador.
Many of the Salvadoran immigrant youths who arrived on the harsh LA streets in the early 1980’s lacked strong family networks and access to mainstream opportunities; they were drawn into the South Central’s pervasive gang culture. Some joined Mexican American gangs but experienced discrimination because of their recent immigration and Salvadoran heritage. Some opted to form their own gangs, often to rival pre-existing ones.
Mara Salvatrucha was the one of the first major gangs to emerge around 1984. MS-13 soon grew into the largest and most notorious Salvadoran gang in the city; as early as 1990 it had 500 members. Alongside MS-13 came a proliferation of smaller Salvadoran crews. Some groups organized around socializing and graffiti tagging, others around violent contestation for control of local turf or localized trade in drugs, arms, and other illicit goods. As Salvadorans began to associate more closely with other Latinos further, many youth began to join the Mexican American Calle 18 gang, which became the avowed foe of MS-13, fostering a surge in violent gang conflict.
By the 1990s, despite intense LAPD focus on the gangs (which included rampant harassment of Salvadoran youth and interdepartmental scandal) and the city’s unsuccessful attempt to use injunctions to prevent Salvadoran youth from gathering on the streets, the gangs grew increasingly popular and criminally sophisticated. MS-13 had begun trafficking civil war arms and drugs into the US and stolen American cars to Central America. Arrests and imprisonment of gang members, rather than deterring gang activity, produced an increasingly hardcore loyalty of gang youth.
Salvadoran Gangs Come to Suburbia
About ten years ago, INS and police targeting of LA’s Salvadoran gangs stimulated the migration of members to the East Coast. According to law enforcement authorities, many of the gang members who migrated sought to establish drug rings in untapped US markets, suggesting an organizational approach to relocation. Numerous gang members affiliated with LA’s MS-13 and Calle 18 began to arrive in the Washington, DC, area during the mid-1990’s.
Salvadoran immigrants had established themselves in the DC area in the early 1980’s, forming the second largest Salvadoran population center in the US. While some settled in low-income downtown areas, many clustered in suburban neighborhoods and apartment complexes in Northern Virginia and Maryland. Although there have been more employment prospects in DC than in LA, Salvadoran employment has kept largely contained to marginal service sector jobs.
Local Salvadoran youth gangs began to appear in the DC area during the mid-1980’s. Some suburban crews formed as social groups but morphed into full-fledged gangs rivaling and fighting one another, even dabbling in the drug trade.
While DC’s first gangs were very small, the local phenomenon exploded with the arrival of LA affiliated crews. Members of MS-13 and Calle 18 began heavy organized recruitment efforts of local youth in suburban areas, and began targeting public middle schools for new members, particularly new immigrant youth. Recruitment turned DC’s Salvadoran gangs into a largely suburban phenomenon. By 2003, MS-13 had an estimated membership of 3,000 in Northern Virginia alone.
Sensational accounts of Salvadoran gang activity have pervaded local media in the DC area, with particular emphasis on violence over the past several years. MS-13 has been involved in 11 murders in the area over the past two years, as well as machete attacks and gang rape. In 2001, a fourteen year old MS-13 member who stabbed a man to death at a Virginia strip mall became the youngest person charged as an adult for murder in Fairfax County.
As DC region Salvadoran gangs grow, local non-Salvadoran Latino youth have increasingly been joining the gangs, further thwarting long-standing police crackdown efforts that have included extensive FBI and the INS collaboration.
Beyond the DC suburbs, MS-13 spread from Miami to Long Island in the later 1990’s. In Long Island, where MS-13 first arrived in 1996, there are now 3,000 members; these affiliates rival primarily African American gangs and sell crack cocaine and stolen goods.
Most recently, Salvadoran gangs have established themselves in cities as diverse as Boston and Omaha, in over 30 states. In North Carolina, for example, there have been 18 MS-13 linked killings over the past two years. With widespread youth Internet use, many of the new sprouting chapters of MS-13 and Calle 18 are merely copycat affiliates not integrated into higher levels of transnational leadership.
Exporting American Problems
In 1996, when federal law strengthened provisions for the deportation of undocumented criminals, major deportations of Salvadoran criminals had already been taking place for four years. The US has deported over 18,000 criminals to El Salvador since 1999 (5,500 in 2004 alone), and more to Honduras and Guatemala, on charges ranging from credit fraud to murder.
By 1994, US gang members deported to El Salvador had already established a significant presence in the capitol, San Salvador, enhancing the LA gang’s transnational criminal links as well as laying the groundwork for the replication of American style gangs. Deportees began to recruit local youth into fledgling crews of MS-13 and Calle 18, and some Salvadoran youth began to form indigenous crews in reaction to the Americanized gangs.
There are some now 30,000 gang members in El Salvador, compared to only several thousand in 1994. Most US deported gang youth face discrimination from Salvadoran schools and employers, and employment of any kind is scare, making a return to the gang lifestyle one of the most viable survival options. While gang violence in El Salvador and its neighbors has long been contained to urban inter-gang rivalries, it recently has spread elsewhere. Gang-related hijackings, drive-bys and dismemberments have captivated Central American media. It also has been reported that there is increased crack cocaine use, helping to fuel the surge in violence.
Lacking the initiative or resources to try to re-integrate gang youth into mainstream life, Central American authorities have begun to adopt heavy-handed approaches towards gangs. Following the lead of Honduras, El Salvador temporarily outlawed gang membership in 2003, leading to a policy of arrests on evidence as minimal as tattoos associated with gang membership. Early in 2004 El Salvador began a popular anti-gang policy “Super Mano Dura” (Super Firm Hand) that has accelerated arrests of gang members, drawing 1,000 heavily armed soldiers into the enforcement efforts alongside the national police.
Since August 2004, more than 4,000 gang members have been arrested in El Salvador. As a result of the anti-gang efforts, the national prison population has doubled over the past five years, resulting in dangerous overcrowding. In 2004, a prison riot between Calle 18 members and regular inmates resulted in 31 deaths. Given the precarious status of life for gang deportees on the Salvadoran streets, the US-based organization like Homies Unidos, a gang violence prevention organization, and other NGO’s have stepped up efforts to reduce the draw of gangs, in the absence of government action. The US embassy in El Salvador recently gave one such local organization $85,000 to pay for gang tattoo removal.
A Bleak Future
Recent US media reports have brought the Salvadoran gang phenomenon into public consciousness – a necessary step in a long process to resolve the problem – but reportage has largely been sensational, ignoring the deep historical roots of the phenomenon as an extension of failed US policies, fostering negative group stereotyping, and inciting popular fears. Many US media sources for example, recently attempted to corroborate Central American political claims of an organizational link between Al Queda and MS-13, claims that have since been widely denounced by US law enforcement as highly specious given disparities of sophistication between the elusive terrorist organization and the relatively rough youth gang.
In the recent waves of anti-Latino immigrant xenophobia, exemplified at the extreme by the vigilantes who have stationed themselves on the Southern border, American society would be well served to examine the roots of the current Salvadoran gang problem as a by-product of Reagan-era foreign policy. In order to find a genuine solution to the Salvadoran gang problem, US law enforcement must reconsider its polices of gang dumping. Central American countries lack the infrastructure to cope with the new additions and ensuing spread of violent American-style gang activity. Current hard-handed approaches in these nations fail to address local realities, namely cultures of impunity and unemployment. The right-wing shift in these countries over the gang issue is alarming in light of a legacy of human rights abuse. A re-evaluation of US support for such policies in the midst of bilateral law enforcement integration is of utmost urgency, lest Cold War failures in the region be repeated.
It is undeniable that many Salvadoran gangs are criminal and that their members should be brought to justice. However, this process must not involve the blanket law enforcement profiling and harassment now commonplace and widely documented. The majority of Salvadoran immigrant youth in the US are not violent gang members but rather youth who are persistently marginalized from opportunities to engage in mainstream American socio-economic life.
It is time for more constructive and proactive government approaches to the transnational gang problem. Rather than mere stop-gap law enforcement measures such as “Operation Community Shield,” attention must be refocused towards ameliorating US foreign and immigration policies, both of the Cold War era and more recently, that have fostered the rise and surge of popularity of the transnational gangs. So long as so many Salvadoran immigrant communities in the US remain on the fringe of society by a failure of justice, unrealistic immigration policies, a lack of engagement with mainstream America by virtue of citizenship status, and the perpetuation of stereotypical depictions of Salvadorans as criminals, gangs will remain an increasingly attractive option for Salvadoran youth. Deportation won’t just make a long history of US failures disappear.
Kelly Richter is a student at the University of Chicago and the managing editor of Diskord, a Campus Progress-supported publication there. An earlier version of this piece appeared in Diskord.
More resources on El Salvador and gang violence:
Homies Unidos: Gang Members Working Together for Peace and Justice
El Salvador: Effecting Change from Within
The Newsletter of the Pan American Health Organization: Gang Violence Requires a Preventive Approach
FiftyCrows: Social Change Photography
Illustration: Matt Bors