GANG WARFARE: Violence and Poverty

On August 28^th federal agents and local police stormed into Chelsea, Somerville, and East Boston in search of suspected members of the infamous Salvadorian gang, the Mara Salvatrucha. The raid was in response to an escalating rise in violent crime in the area, which has mainly been attributed to gang related activity.

The presence of Federal Agents and men in uniform arresting Hispanic young men soon triggered a city wide reaction. Panic soon engulfed the city, leading many undocumented workers to go into hiding and sending documented workers scrambling home to get their papers. Law Enforcement teams insist they were searching for specific targets, and not interested in creating a situation of mass deportation. Customs spokesman Michael Gilhooly stated that “we don’t do random operations…we are targeting specific individuals who are a threat to public safety.”

However, advocacy groups have argued that many non-gang members have been swept up in the raid due to minor law infringements, including one young man being charged with deportation for a minor alcohol-related felony three years ago.

Although the Mara Salvatrucha is viewed by Americans as a Central American epidemic that has spread to its cities, the Mara Salvatrucha was actually born out of Los Angeles, when Salvadorian refugees were confronted with American gang culture. Threatened by both Mexican and Black gangs, the Salvadorian immigrants banded together for protection. Now, as convicted felons are being deported back to their countries of origins through tougher U.S. immigration policies, the Mara Salvatrucha have created strong holds across Central America, notably in El Salvador, where post-war instability and poverty proved created a fertile environment for the gang to win new recruits and establish itself. Ernesto Miranda, AKA Smokey, a co-founder of the Mara Salvatrucha in Los Angeles was a former soldier in El Salvador’s civil war and is now in El Salvador studying law and working to keep kids out of gangs. He explains that the Mara Salvatrucha’s brutality stemmed from their training as soldiers during the Civil War. “In [El Salvador], we were taught to kill our own people, no matter if they were from your own blood. If your father was the enemy, you had to kill him” Miranda explains, “so the training we got during the war in our country served to make us one of the most violent gangs in the United States.” The Mara Salvatrucha now operates without borders throughout Central America and the United States and is involved in a large range of criminal activities, such as drug dealing and carjacking.

“The cycle seems without end,” Mandalit del Barco, a reporter for NPR, says, “children of Central America’s bloody wars immigrated to the U.S., where they became violent gang members, then deported back to Central America to begin another generation.” And the extreme poverty, unemployment and lack of resources in Central America are leading more and more young children into the gangs.

The complicated nature of gangs and how they correlate to U.S. immigration and border culture is fascinating and chilling. As someone who has worked with homeless and at risk youth in Honduras, a strong hold of the Mara Salvatrucha, I can see the pitfalls to both victimizing the gang members and demonizing them. The legacy of the Mara Salvatrucha is one of self-perpetuating violence. It is a violence caused by war, by migration, by the global economy and the conditions of dire poverty it has created in many Central American cities, by unemployment, and by weak family support. The violence feeds into itself and creates more violence. There are a myriad of reason as to why young, often pre-adolescent, boys and girls are drawn into this gang and the savage brutality of the gang is not to be understated. I met with former Salvatrucha members in Honduras at Proyecto Victoria and although some of the boys could not have been more than fifteen, it was clear they had a violent past and carried with them many ghosts. By the time I had met them they had already turned their loves over to Jesus and repentance, the tattoos that covered their bodies and faces attested to their dark past. Some of the boys had killed over a half a dozen other gang members before reaching the age of ten, and reminded me of child soldiers, just like the founders of the Mara Salvatrucha were also child soldiers in the Civil War. They had learned to kill and torture before they could fully understand the moral implications of their actions.

However, it is important to understand is that there are varying degrees of involvement in gangs. About 70% of the children, ages seven to eighteen, at the Casa Alianza Covenant House in Honduras where I volunteered for four years bore some mark of gang involvement, oftentimes small, handmade tattoos bearing three points, or MS, or another gang sign. However, there was not one child at the orphanage who had been involved in major violent criminal activity (homelessness, glue addiction to stave off hunger, and petty crimes being the worse offenses for the majority of the children. Some of the girls had worked as child prostitutes to survive.) But the children themselves were being quickly killed off, often by off-duty police officers who banded together at night to rid the streets of the gang problem. So, although there are many Mara Salvatrucha members who have committed heinous crimes and deserve to be brought to justice, there are many innocent victims who are dragged into the fray. Many of the children I worked with committed no crime other than being born into abysmally poor households. Their marginal status in society forced them to band together with other homeless children to survive, but they were not murderers, despite their pen and ink tattoos they had given each other when they were eleven and twelve years old. They were just kids, desperate to find belonging and family. My work with Casa Alianza made me worried and afraid for the children I worked with when the new clampdown on gangs began in Central America- like the Mano Dura policies and new laws that would classify any person with a tattoo as a gang member.

There have been serious repercussions to Central America’s misguided gang prevention policy, namely that many innocents are pulled into the category of “criminal” or “violent” simply because they look or dress a certain way, or because they are young and homeless. It seems that the United States’ gang prevention has sadly gone down the same path. Although the raids in Boston have seen to be more targeted, the reaction of the Hispanics in town points to a population that is terrified of law enforcement, whether they have broken the law or not.

I strongly believe that if the Central American and United States governments were to focus on alleviating poverty, on providing employment, on providing basic health services and housing, it would do more to stop the gang wars than any amount of arrests or executions. As long as these dire economic conditions and lack of opportunity exist, there will always be new recruits for the Mara Salvatrucha.