Gangs and Globalization:
I. Introduction to the Processes of Globalization and Urbanization
Introduction
Gangs organize and operate in marginalized urban spaces. Globalization has dramatically altered the characteristics and processes of urbanization and the study of gang formation must incorporate this shift into its theoretical framework. Urban centers have been shaped by globalization. By studying the changes these urban centers have undergone from pre-industrialization to post-industrialization, one may also understand the transformation gangs have undergone. This paper addresses how “the restructuring of cities, due to globalization and de-industrialization,” created a social space conducive to the formation and proliferation of gangs and gang activity.
Theoretical Framework for Globalization
Globalization is a process of global integration that is fueled by the expansionist thrust of capitalism. Capitalism in the modern global economy is characterized by “an increased interconnectedness or interdependence [due to] a rise in transactional flows and an intensification of such processes so that the world is becoming” increasingly interconnected. Production centers and agglomerated centers of production are characteristic of the processes of globalized capitalistic expansion. In this way, urban centers have become “centers for the servicing, managing and financing of international trade investment and headquarter operations” and “in this sense they are strategic “production” [centers] for today’s leading economic sectors.” Gangs form and operate in these urban centers, and therefore operate in an environment shaped by globalization.
The Downgrading of the Manufacturing Sector
Globalization has dramatically altered the structure of the world’s labor market. The global economy relies on a block of highly educated labor and in urbanized areas high-skilled labor has replaced manufacturing as the mainstay of the economy. Off shoring and the precipitous drop in the cost of manufactured goods due to global supply of cheap and un-unionized labor has led to the downgrading of the manufacturing sector. Due to the retreat of the manufacturing sector and the rise of high-tech markets, globalization has been characterized by a polarization of labor and wages. The result of this restructuring of the urban economy and labor market has been to create a “hour-glass shaped class structure which consists of a large number of high-end, high-skilled jobs on one end of the hour-glass, and low-end, low skilled service jobs on the other.”
Because of the new stratification of the labor market, globalization has widened the divide between high and low skilled labor, and by extension, the divide between the middle and lower classes. The “polarization of the occupational and class structures caused by the creation and production of the global economy” has created “high end work in the producer service industries on the one hand and low-end work in consumer services on the other.” The devaluing of low skilled labor has been a problematic, and in the case of gang proliferation, a dangerous, side effect of globalization. There is a large sector of the population that has become “increasingly excluded from the major processes that fuel economic growth in the new global economy.”
The end of Fordism and manufacturing marked the disappearance of what had traditionally been a bridge between low—skilled labor and middle class mobility. Unskilled urban dwellers that traditionally would have occupied manufacturing positions are now forced to work low wage jobs with little or no hope of upward mobility. Social theorists argue that it within the void left by the manufacturing labor market that gangs have proliferated. The global informal marketplace has created an alternative labor market to employ unskilled urban youth across the globe.
Marginalization and the Proliferation of the Informal Economy
The Global Drug Trade:
Globalization is not simply an expansion of capitalism and a facilitation of exchanges, it is also a force that shapes and divides the world’s labor market. Because of globalization’s influence over the world’s labor markets, it is “important politically and theoretically to recover the connections between global dynamics, places, and the growing inequality evident in major parts of the world.”
Gangs and gang life exist within the global space of expansionist capitalism, and occupy the marginalized spaces created by the scarcity of middle class manufacturing labor markets. The vacuums in the labor market left by globalization are filled by an informal economy, and gangs have risen to fill the void. The lack of meaningful employment has led unskilled urban dwellers to “increasingly seeking meaning and identity in their lives outside of the sphere of regular work.” The seemingly unbridgeable divide between skilled and unskilled labor markets have lead many urban youth to seek social integration and employment in the informal economy. The informal economy offers social status and upward mobility that the formal sector, with its dead-end minimum wage jobs, does not. Just as globalization has rapidly proliferated in urban centers, so too has “the criminal underground economy…partly supported by the resources of the city and the effective demand by its expanding high income professional class for drugs.”
The informal and criminal economy has “been estimated by the UN as grossing more than four hundred billion US$ annually, which would make it the largest market in the world.” Research on gangs “describe[s] drug-dealing gangs as the main street-level employer of youth in the poorest areas of cities,” effectively replacing the manufacturing sector as the employer of choice for unskilled laborers. The participation of gangs, and particularly gangs working trans-nationally, in the sale and distribution of illicit drugs connects them with global economy. Gang involvement in drug trafficking is rampant and “a 1999 survey of 1,385 police agencies …found that 43% of all drug sales in reporting agencies involved gang members.”
The informal economy rivals the formal economy in size, and, like its legal counterpart, operates on a global scale with centers of production and consumption. The drug trafficking sector mimics the formal economy in its organization. Similar to the formal economy, drugs are cheaply produced in third world countries like Afghanistan and Bolivia, and then transported, packaged and distributed in urban centers with high levels of skilled workers and capital (See Map above).
Gang Proliferation, Drug Trafficking, and the Onset of Globalization:
Gang participation in the global drug trade was relatively low before the onset of intense globalization that occurred in the 1980s. The boom in global trade in the 1980s coincided with a boom in crack-cocaine sales, and marked the beginning of the “crack epidemic” in urban centers across the United States. Crack-cocaine, a cheaper derivative of cocaine, became widely used in urban U.S. ghettos in the 1980s, and the drug was predominantly sold and distributed by gangs. The crack epidemic was, for most gangs, their first foray into a profitable and global drug market. Gang participation in the global drug trade further distanced them from their pre-industrial and pre-globalization predecessors. The “participation of gangs in the drug economy [was] relatively unheard of in the industrial era” and “the addition of the economic function to the gang creates a new gang form in the post-industrial economy: the drug gang.”
Distinctions between pre-and-post industrial gangs:
The processes of globalization and its impact on the economy and labor market have shaped the way that modern gangs operate. Post-industrial and post-Fordist gangs differ from their predecessors in size, scope and organizational capacities. The industrial era gangs were smaller than contemporary gangs, and their demographic was younger and more transient as the majority of members were expected to mature out of the gang. Industrial gangs were also localized in urban areas, whereas contemporary gangs, while concentrated in cities, also have footholds across rural and suburban geographies.
In addition, modern gangs are markedly more violent, more involved in drug trafficking, more durable, and more connected to the global criminal economy. The connection between gangs and an international informal economy makes them key players in an illegal and globalized capitalistic system. The drug trade, as explained earlier, is global in scope just like other markets, and gang involvement in the trade makes them important participants in a complex and profitable global market.
The introduction of technologies like the Internet has also dramatically altered gang activity, and has made it so “even small, resource poor organizations and individuals can become participants in global networks.” The Internet has allowed gang culture, distinguishable and markedly different from gang activity, to proliferate and globalize in a way never before seen in the industrial age.
II. The Globalized Gang: Hyper Locality and Globalization in Modern Gangs
Transnational gangs, and in particular MS-13, are at once hyper-local and global in scope. Before exploring the spatial space occupied by gangs, it is important to define what is meant when speaking of gangs. Malcolm Klein offers the following definition of gangs and specifies what and whom the label “gang” encompasses:
“Any identifiable group who: a. are generally perceived as a distinct aggregation by others in their neighborhood, b. recognize themselves as a denotable group, c. involved in enough delinquent acts to draw a nearly unanimous negative reaction from surrounding community and law enforcement.”
In attempting to understand the inner workings of gang activity and gang participation, it is important to explore the reasons why individuals join gangs. To this end, “it is notable that “surges in gang activity often accompany population shifts, regardless of whether migrants are foreign-born of native.” This has been true not only in post-industrial gangs, but also for 19th century Irish and Italian street gangs, and for African American gangs that formed in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies as southern blacks migrated west. Gangs form in transitory and marginalized communities whose members search for a sense of collective identity and belonging. The connection between migration and gang proliferation is important to consider when studying contemporary gangs. Globalization has been characterized by an upsurge in migration and transient populations, and the current gang epidemic is best understood as being directly related to large numbers of unassimilated and marginalized immigrants and migrants, not just within the United States, but globally. MS-13, as will be further explored, has increased its ranks by tapping into the large numbers of unassimilated, or under-assimilated, immigrants that transverse Central and North America.
Hyper Locality and the Globalized Gang
“Globalization and street gangs exist in a paradox: Gangs are a global phenomenon not because the groups themselves have become transnational organizations (although a few have), but because the recent hyper-mobility of gang members and their culture. At the same time that globalization isolates neighborhoods heavily populated with gangs, it also helps spread gang activity and culture.” Gang World Andrew V. Papachristos
Gang life and structure is at once hyper-local and global in its nature. One on hand, gang activity is hyper-local, and due to gang turf battles many gang members live out their entire existence within a three to five mile radius. This is due principally to the inherent danger gang members face if they choose to venture outside of their turf and into unfriendly territory- territory dominated by another gang. So, in this regard, gang members are tied to an extremely limited geographic space in their day-to-day activities.
Gang members, on the other hand, are from all over the world, and the demographics of rank and file gang members reflect a globalized population. As will be explored in the case study on the Mara SalvaTrucha, gang members can only be studied in a transnational framework, as they are a primarily migrant and immigrant population with roots in Central, South and North America.
Gang culture, on the other hand, is fully globalized due to copycat gangs and the Internet. The exportation of these criminal identities has allowed gang culture to spread to all corners of the globe.
III. Case Study: MS-13
The Mara Salvatrucha operates trans-nationally across North, Central and South America in countries like the United States, El Salvador Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mexico. Beyond the Mara Salvatrucha’s strongholds in cities across the Americas, the gang’s involvement in illicit drug dealing and human trafficking connects it to an ever wider web of illegal activity, one that spans the globe and encompasses opium growers in Afghanistan and cocaine producers in Bolivia.
Although the gang is often envisioned as a Central American phenomenon that has been exported to U.S. cities, the Mara Salvatrucha (also know as “MS-13”) originated in Los Angeles, California and was born out of transnational political and social processes. To understand MS-13 and its current status as a transnational gang, one must begin with the gang’s violent origins- the Salvadoran Civil War.
The Salvadoran Civil War
For most of the twentieth century a group of fourteen families owned all of the land in El Salvador. The inequitable distribution of land, combined with the Salvadorian economy’s reliance on agricultural exports and a large class of peasants, created a situation of extreme social discontent. In 1932 there was a bloody uprising known to Salvadorans as “La Matanza” in where twenty-five thousand peasants and farmers were murdered by the ruling government.
In 1980 a civil war erupted between right-wing militant government and leftist guerilla rebels that left over seventy thousand people dead. The civil war pitted the U.S.-backed government against leftist guerillas who had formed a coalition known as the Farabundo Matri National Liberation Front (“FMLN”). The Civil War was infamously violent and human rights abuses were rampant on both side of the struggle. Thousands of civilians were killed, tortured and disappeared, and child soldiers were common foot soldiers in the battle.
Massive amounts of aid was given to the Salvadoran military by the US in the fight against communism. The U.S. government was intimately involved in the Salvadoran Civil War, which would become its largest counter-insurgency war against left-wing guerrillas since the Vietnam War. In their zeal to stamp out communism, the United States government trained and financed an army that kidnapped and disappeared more than 30,000 people, and carried out large-scale massacres of thousands of women, children and elderly Salvadorans.
Migration and the Formation of MS-13: Searching for Identity in the Ghetto
Refugees
The Salvadoran Civil War displaced nearly one million people, about half of whom entered the United States as refugees (The Salvadoran Americans
By Carlos B. Cordova, page 16). Many of the received refugees were former guerilla recruits and child soldiers. When confronted with local U.S. gang like the Bloods, Crips and Calle-18 (A Mexican-American gang), Salvadoran immigrants banded together for protection. Because of their training in the Civil War, MS-13 proved to be an extremely violent gang and quickly became notorious, feared and respected in Los Angeles. The experiences Mara Salvatrucha gang members shared as former child soldiers made the Mara Salvatrucha’s execution killings, kidnappings and torture more grisly than what had previously been seen in U.S. cities. Ernesto Miranda, AKA Smokey, a co-founder of the Mara Salvatrucha in Los Angeles, was a former soldier in El Salvador’s civil war. Miranda has left the gang life and now works 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.”
Deportation and the spread of the Mara Salvatrucha: unforeseen consequences of U.S. Immigration Policies
A negotiated settlement between the El Salvadoran government and the Farabundo Matri National Liberation Front ended the El Salvadorian Civil War in 1992, after twelve long years of war. As the region began to stabilize, the United States started sending Central American refugees back home. The U.S. immigration and Naturalization Service deported four to five thousand people per year back to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
The return of Salvadoran refugees to Central America marked the beginning of a United States immigration policy of deportations that inadvertently spread the scope of the Mara Salvatrucha. Beginning in “mid-1990s, U.S. immigration policy has dramatically boosted the proliferation of gangs throughout Latin America and Asia by deporting tens of thousands of immigrants with criminal records back to their home countries each year, including a growing number of gang members.” In 2003 nearly eighty thousand immigrants were deported back to their countries of origin after being arrested for having committing a crime. (Id.) Many of these immigrants who were deported had never lived outside of the United States and knew little of their countries of origin.
The deportation process untaken by the U.S. government was poorly planned and executed, and deportees were sent to countries they knew little or nothing of with no programs or support networks to assist them upon arrival. Many deportees fell into crime upon arriving in Central America , and El Salvadorian jails proved fertile ground for former gang members and disenfranchised youth to band together and organize local chapters of the Mara Salvatrucha in Central America.
Extreme poverty, unemployment and lack of resources in Central America led larger and larger numbers of youth to join the Mara Salvatrucha. “The cycle seems without end,” says Mandalit del Barco, a reporter for NPR, “children of Central America’s bloody wars immigrated to the U.S., where they became violent gang members, then [were] deported back to Central America to begin another generation.” 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 social exclusion it has created in many Central American and American cities.
The Organizational Structure of the Mara SalvaTrucha
MS-13 provides its members with street protection, refuge from home, an alternative family, and financial security. Members of the Mara Salvatrucha come from broken homes, which is a common social phenomenon these days due to the constant cycle of immigration and deportation occurring between the United States and Central America.
The members of MS-13 and other transnational gangs fall into the gap between national identities, straddling both worlds, and sometimes belonging in neither.
The Mara Salvatrucha, like other highly organized gangs, is able to persist and replicate itself despite changes in leadership and has an organization complex enough to sustain multiple roles for its members and is able to adapt to changing environments without dissolving. Most members are very young and children are recruited as young as eight and nine years old. Although there is a trend of leaders staying longer terms in the gang, with some members remaining in the gangs well into their forties, the influx of younger members keeps median low.
Like all social and economic organizations shaped by globalization, the Mara Salvatrucha is both globalized and hyper-local. For instance, “in the United States, [the gang] used the colors blue and white (color of the Salvadoran flag) to identify its territory” and “in El Salvador, gang members ‘mark the highly localized territory of their barrios with the insignia of Los Angeles’s telephone area code and street numbers.” There is a simultaneous pull towards expansion and hyper-locality within the gang culture.
Process for joining gang:
Allen Corporan of New York University describes a step-by-step description of the Mara Salvatrucha’s initiation process for new recruits:
1) First there is a preliminary initiation period where prospective gang members hang out with current, active, gang members, but are not yet integrated in the gang.
2) If the individual chooses, after the initiation period, that he or she would like to join the gang, they are “jumped in” for 13 seconds. In this stage, they are relentlessly beaten, kicked in the head and stomach, and punched by other gang members.
3) The recent recruit must then go on a mission to prove his or her dedication to the gang. Sometimes this step can be as simple as a robbery or act of vandalism, but sometimes it involves the murder of a rival gang member, rape, or the kidnapping and murder of a civilian.
4) After the new gang member has completed the task assigned to them, they are given a code-name to use in the gang,
5) Once an individual has been initiated into the gang, very hard to leave. Gang members often die young due to the violent nature of their activities, and vendettas placed upon them by other gangs. Another reason why members stay in the gang until they are die is because leaving the gang is often punishable by death.
Mara Salvatrucha’s Involvement in the Global Informal Economy:
As previously stated in the section regarding gang participation in the informal economy, there is a tremendous amount of money to be made drug trafficking and other illicit markets. The Mara Salvatrucha is engaged in a wide array of globalized criminal activity including “drug dealing, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, immigrant smuggling, prostitution rings, automobile theft, stolen documents and document falsification.” The crimes the Mara Salvatrucha engage in occur in a trans-national framework. For instance, stolen car sales between the United States and countries Central America are part of a prosperous and thriving illicit market. And, as mentioned previously, the drug trafficking market is highly globalized.
The Mara Salvatrucha also tap into the business of human trafficking and exploit the situations of immigrants desperate to enter the United States. The Mara Salvatrucha has become actively involved in human trafficking, and has a monopoly on smuggling immigrants across the U.S./Mexican border. When “MS-13 moved into Mexico, the gang started to kill immigrants who did not use gang-affiliated coyotes, and thus monopolized the market.” The gang’s involvement in border smuggling also allows them to smuggle deported gang members back into the United States.
Policy Approaches:
Government policies aimed at addressing the global pandemic of gang activity have been largely unsuccessful, and many have inadvertently perpetuated gang membership. Policies defined by zero tolerance, deportation and incarceration have had the unfortunate side effect if advancing and furthering gang activity.
Governments face substantial obstacles when trying to combat international gang activity. For one thing, gangs, unlike governments, are not defined or contained within a fixed geographic area. Combating global criminal networks also brings up the problems of state sovereignty and the difficulties inherent in coordinating a coordinated international response. Gangs are also fluid, ground level, highly adaptable formations and they “pit bureaucracies against networks.”
Gangs also “pit governments against market forces,” As mentioned in the section on drug trafficking, there are strong forces of market demand and supply that fuel and drive the informal economy.
The Honduran Response and “Mano Dura” Policies
The Honduran government has taken a hardline stance against gangs and their members. In 2003 the Honduran president, Ricardo Rodolfo Maduro, and the Honduran Congress passed legislation that took aim at the Mara Salvatrucha and its members. In a bold move, “Maduro and the Honduran Congress added the crime of ‘illicit association’ to Article 332 of the Honduran penal code, making it illegal to belong to a mara.” The hard-line policies of the Honduran government have ushered in a period of social cleansing and mass incarceration. These concerns have been voiced by a former Honduran Supreme Court Judge who argued that “in penal justice you punish someone for what they do, not who they are” and in the case of Mano Dura, “youth [is] being punished for who they are even if they haven’t really committed a crime.”
Beside the ethical thorniness of the Mano Dura policies, the policies have had limited and uneven success in curbing gang activity. While some crimes like kidnappings and robberies have decreased, other crimes, like murders, have risen by seventeen percent. Mano Dura policies have also resulted in mass incarcerations, leading to overcrowding in prisons. The “percentage of prisoners awaiting sentencing is …distressing: 78.5% of prisoners [in Honduras] have yet to go before a judge, compared to 18.8% in the U.S.”
The anti-gang policies adopted by the Honduran government have had limited success because they do not address the causes of membership. Gangs find their members in populations that suffer from social exclusion and a dearth of employment opportunities. Because of this, the gang problem will never be abated through penal measures alone.
III. Conclusion:
The Mara Salvatrucha and other global gangs are products of urbanization. Contemporary urban spaces and patterns of migration are shaped by globalization, and because of this gangs must be studied through a globalization-oriented framework. Policies aimed at abating gang violence must address the polarized societal conditions that globalization has helped to create. It is these processes of exclusion and polarization that lead young adults and children to join the gang in the first place. Policies focused on alleviating poverty and providing employment would, in the long run, prove more effective than penal measures. As long as social exclusion, dire economic conditions, and lack of opportunity exist, there will always be new recruits for the Mara Salvatrucha. The attraction for low-skilled and migrant populations to join the informal, criminal market, fueled by polarizing nature of globalization and capitalistic expansion, must be addressed when designing gang control policies.
