Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America by Ioan Grillo

Author:Ioan Grillo [Grillo, Ioan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781620403808
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 28

To understand the battle tearing apart Honduras you have to trek over the border into El Salvador to see how gangs developed there. And to understand the gangs in Salvador, you have to follow the path of Salvadoran refugees who fled the nation’s civil war to the ghettos of Los Angeles. Back during these war years, Salvadoran immigrants in a few L.A. neighborhoods formed cliques, made pacts, and started feuds that would have an impact on the whole of Central America during the decades to come.

My history of Salvadoran gangsters owes much to Juan Martinez, a young anthropologist who has spent years documenting the MS13. Practicing immersive anthropology, Juan spent a year living with Maras in a San Salvador ghetto. He is also from a prolific family, with two brothers, Carlos and Oscar, covering gangs and other issues for the extraordinary online news site El Faro. Together with cutting-edge reporters such as José Luis Sanz and Roberto Valencia, El Faro is an authority on the Mara issue, breaking story after story. American journalists such as Samuel Logan have also done important research into the gang’s bloody origins.

Salvadorans began fleeing for the United States in the 1970s, as the opposition decried fraudulent elections, police fired on protests, and death squads hunted dissidents. The disturbances escalated into war in 1980. That year, a right-wing gunman shot dead Bishop Oscar Romero, who had preached against repression; he was giving communion when the assassin fired down the aisle, and his blood soaked the holy bread. Leftists then formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front to coordinate a guerrilla uprising.

As the insurgents ambushed soldiers, the military waged a scorched earth campaign—trying to take the sea away from the fish. Refugees abandoned the countryside for growing slums of San Salvador or trekked north to California. Many young people fled as both the army and guerrillas recruited child soldiers into their ranks. If you were dragged into the war, you had a good chance of dying, being crippled, or being psychologically traumatized.

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