Gangland

THE MERE MENTION of maras—gangs that formed in the U.S. and then spread throughout Central America—conjures up overcrowded prisons filled with ominous-looking, elaborately tattooed Central American youth flashing gang signs. While this reality does exist, it’s part of what German scholar Sonja Wolf calls a folkloric attempt to demonize disenfranchised sectors of society rather than invest in comprehensive social programs.

Her new academic book, Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador, offers a far deeper analysis of public policy. It’s a must-read for any aid worker or missionary hoping to build peace and prosperity in a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world—81 homicides per 100,000 people, eight times the U.N.’s marker for an epidemic. It also raises important questions about how much violence can actually be attributed to gangs when crime data is patchy and politicized.

The book, an updated version of Wolf’s 2008 doctoral dissertation in international politics, examines two decades of attempts to “pacify” El Salvador’s gangs, a subculture that diversified and expanded after El Salvador’s 1992 U.N.-sponsored peace accords. During the 12 years prior, a civil war claimed some 75,000 lives and prompted 1 million Salvadorans to seek refuge in the U.S. Some of these young refugees joined large U.S. gangs such as 18th Street or created their own, such as MS-13, then brought their gang affiliation back to El Salvador during mass deportations in the early 1990s.

Wolf’s book is more of an ethnography of nongovernmental organizations than of gangs themselves. She says a proliferation of NGOs focused on post-war reconstruction may have actually weakened Salvadoran civil society. These entities, which often rely on international donations, created a newer, more progressive professional niche for locals. At the same time, the NGOs’ big donor dependency and need to appease government authorities often watered down their roles as human rights watchdogs.

Wolf contends that these conditions, combined with poorly trained and financed media, fueled sensational accounts of gang-related violence and furthered public outcry over citizen security. This paved the way for ARENA, the right-wing party that ruled El Salvador from 1989 to 2009, to introduce a suppressive 2003 anti-gang plan called Mano Dura. It heightened the military’s policing role and called for the arrest of anyone deemed to look like a gang member. It did not curb the country’s crime rate, but did lead to more overcrowded prisons, extrajudicial killings, and widespread extortion.

Wolf looks at three diverse NGOs to make her case. The Foundation for Applied Legal Studies attempted, sometimes succeeding, to give gang members better legal representation and develop an understanding of the socioeconomic circumstances that led them to crime. But it struggled to hold the ruling government accountable for its actions.

The Don Bosco Industrial Park, a cooperative-style training ground for poor Salvadorans, assumed its faith-based vocational programs could easily inspire any individual to change his or her life through entrepreneurship. However, it failed to recognize the complex psychological underpinnings of gang culture in a society so full of corruption and misery.

That culture was not lost on Homies Unidos, the country’s only NGO to be run by and for gang members, ones who pledged to “calm down” while maintaining that gangs offered belonging and structure.

Wolf’s incredibly meticulous and long-lensed investigation has special significance for this writer. As cited in the book, I spent the summer of 1997 volunteering at Homies Unidos as part of research for an anthropology master’s thesis on postwar Salvadoran youth subcultures.

Homies Unidos sought to provide psychological intervention to confront the constant stress of violence, migration, and day-to-day economic survival. But like many NGOs, its short-time sponsor Save the Children was preoccupied with easier-to-quantify vocational, health, and public relations workshops that would attract funding and political credibility.

These problems were exacerbated in 2012, when the U.S. government prohibited collaboration with gangs by designating them criminal organizations, a policy now upheld by the government of El Salvador. Wolf notes that Homies Unidos’ San Salvador branch disbanded in 2012, broke and with its director imprisoned for homicide.

Wolf witnessed years of these kinds of conundrums. She makes it clear that gangs are the byproduct of a long legacy of social exclusion, political posturing, and a preference for repressive forms of security.