Low-intensity warfare, high-intensity death
Low-intensity warfare, high-intensity death
Loretta van der Horst takes a look behind El Salvador’s new Iron Fist approach.
‘He’s got a long list of offences,’ says the officer at the reception of a police station in El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador. He holds up a paper and starts reading: ‘Deprivation of freedom, aggravated assault, reception of illicit goods, unlawful association.’ The officer is talking about the heavily tattooed prisoner staring down at us from the elevated parking lot serving as a temporary holding cell for recently arrested gang members.
His name is Juan Carlos, he says. About 10 prisoners lie next to him, all handcuffed to the railing. A plastic canvas protects them from the sun and the rain. Chipwood panels cover the iron bars they’re leaning against. When we approach them, the smell of sweat and urine penetrates our nostrils. We speak to them briefly as several of them tell us about their arrests, mostly for stolen cars, they say, as the police cut short our talk with them. The officers don’t know what the prisoners are telling us, as these gang members, or maras, speak to us in fluent English. Many of them grew up in the US.
Iron fist
We’ve arrived in El Salvador to see for ourselves the human effects of the violence that is rapidly making the country the deadliest place in the world. After a one-year dip in the murder rate following a truce negotiated between criminal gangs and the government of Mauricio Funes in 2012, the killings have spiked again this year, with a projected murder rate of 91 per every 100,000 inhabitants for 2015. This means nearly 6,000 people will be killed this year. According to police statistics, as of 2 August, 859 people had already been murdered.
Much of El Salvador’s violence is attributed to gang members. The prisoners we met are members of the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS13, a transnational criminal gang which originated on the streets of Los Angeles along with its main rival, the Barrio 18 gang. Its founders were refugees from El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, which killed over 75,000 people. Under the Clinton and Bush administrations in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Central American gang members were deported back en masse to weak post-war nations unable to accommodate them.
More:
http://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2015/10/20/low-intensity-warfare-high-intensity-death/#sthash.dF9q08Hc.dpuf
