The Children of War: Street Gangs in El Salvador
DeCesare, Donna
For many young Salvadorans, gangs seem to offer it allstreet protection, refuge from home, an alternative family and financial security. dgar Bolafios, also known as Shy Boy, trudges to the...
...The "cause" eventually strained her parents' fragile marriage past the breaking point...
...Nearly all have experienced some kind of deep trauma...
...The criminal violence of vigilantes acting against youth gang members is seldom vigorously investigated in El Salvador...
...We've all done a lot of negative things...
...Members of Senator Tom Hayden's staff and individual activists from the old Central America network provide encouragement and some basic material assistance...
...My homeboys tried to kill him once because of what he did to me," she says referring to her stepfather's advances...
...4 Several Salvadoran newspapers have published poll results in which nearly half of respondents support the "social cleansing" activities of the death squads that target those perceived as criminals...
...A vocal minority in the United States became outraged and a national network of churches and religious organizations united to form the sanctuary movement-an underground railroad that brought political refugees to safety in the United States in defiance of U.S...
...They are neglected, feared or shunned by their fragmented communities and their own overworked and often troubled parents...
...Throughout the 1980s, the main U.S...
...Why don't you reporters ever write about the really big guys...
...deportees and marginal youth are the principal perpetrators of violent crime...
...immigration lawyers to argue pro bono political asylum cases for refugees fleeing the repressive regimes that Washington supported...
...Disloyalty or disrespect toward someone from the same gang is a serious infraction...
...At the same time, slick television advertising and the aggressive marketing of American youth culture have whetted the consumer desires of a generation that will largely be unable to satisfy those desires or even their most basic needs through work...
...Youth Gangs in Today's El Salvador 1. Statistics from the Pan American Health Organization's Health Situation Analysis Program 1997 and the World Bank publication, Crime and Violence as Development Issues in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1997 as cited in "Assessing Personal Security in Latin America," Latin America Special Report (London: Latin American Newsletters, April 1997...
...They killed my son because he was in love with a girl from the Eighteenth Street gang," Ana recalls tearfully...
...He is at a turning point, struggling urgently with questions about who he is, the meaning of family and loyalty, and the kind of future he wants for his children...
...Clearly, poverty is not the only thing drawing Salvadoran youths into gangs...
...The crowd of homeboys "If you're from the FMLN you're hardcore...
...Three not so muscular youths in tight muscle shirts wave their tattooed arms wildly, throwing gang hand signs and flirting to grab her attention...
...2. With a population of 5.8 million people and a per capita homicide rate of 150 per 100,000, there are approximately 8,700 murders in El Salvador each year...
...Twice as many respondents considered drug addiction their biggest problem as compared with the next highest-ranked problem, unemployment...
...You fight for your country, your program, whatever...
...No one came to help us...
...Such reporting feeds the vengeful thinking that escalates violence while fostering public perceptions that U.S...
...They complain immigrant that their own kids threaten to report them children- to the Department of Child Welfare or the unacknowledged INS if they use corporal war trauma punishment-the disciplinary norm in El Sal- exacerbate the vador...
...It took a nervous breakdown and hospitalization at age 18 to change Mirna's course...
...for burial in El Salvador, Edgar had a tombstone with the name Shy Boy tattooed on his back...
...She's been through a lot, but the girl is solid:' he says, knocking on the steel grillwork protecting her front door...
...I felt, 'Why do I always have to be later on, later on,' she says, gesturing her parents' presumed dismissal of her with her hands...
...He had no right to touch me," she shouts...
...The boys were raised by their peasant grandparents until their mother Ana, who had fled El Salvador in 1983 because of her husband's guerrilla involvement and the consequent army threats on her life, could send for them to join her in Los Angeles...
...I hated him and I hated my mother for believing him and not me"' she says heatedly...
...But industrial jobs began drying up or moving south of the border long before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) officially acknowledged and enshrined the shift...
...Wagging her fingers and waving her arms, she adds in threatening tones, "I am a married woman and my husband is very, very angry...
...The path to attainment is seldom straight...
...3 Since then, the numbers of murders by death squads has been less dramatic...
...streets and prisons according to the INS.o 1 And these figures do not reflect the many more expulsions that occur as "voluntary departures" rather than formal deportations...
...If somebody disrespects our neighborhood, we throw down, we fight...
...Cruz's survey of over 1,000 gang members from the Mara Salvatrucha and Eighteenth Street gangs in San Salvador offers evidence that most gang members are seeking respect and friendship as well as an identity and a replacement family...
...Ulises...
...The group's mentor, Magdaleno Rose Avila, former executive director of the Los Angeles-based Cesar Chavez Foundation, stresses the Chavez legacy of nonviolence and the importance of Homies Unidos in giving gang members a place to belong and make peace with their old "enemies...
...Other group members have equally charged stories...
...Despite the glimmer of light offered by reintegration or violence-prevention programs like Homies Unidos, the "big picture" in El Salvador is grim...
...He also blames crime rings, increased drug trafficking, an abundance of arms left over from the war, and disgruntled former soldiers and guerrillas who have become bandits...
...Like other territorial gangs, it has many Mexican, Chicano and even a few black members from the neighborhoods it controls...
...wears a t-shirt from the Los Angeles gang funeral of her murdered half-brother...
...At first nearly all members of Mara Salvatrucha were Salvadoran...
...deportees from rival gangs...
...About 30 youths belong to BGLS, a subgroup or clique of the infamous Mara Salvatrucha, or MS, gang of Los Angeles...
...Shy Boy is among the gang elders who begin persuading both parties that justice has been served and the incident must now be forgotten...
...In 1997 alone nearly 1,500 Salvadorans with criminal records were deported from U.S...
...Gradually the woman calms down as her husband wordlessly indicates his acceptance...
...It is estimated that about 75,000 lost their lives in the 12-year-long Salvadoran civil warapproximately 6,250 per year...
...They are waiting, but they are serious and one of the cops agrees with them...
...It's not right, I know," he says somewhat ruefully...
...Since then, Salvadorans have faced the task of rebuilding their traumatized country and broken families with diminished interest and support from the U.S...
...The Children of War...
...4. The Washington Post, May 27, 1995...
...One working single father illegally reentered the United States in order to support and raise his three-year-old American son...
...If you're from the FMLN you're hard core...
...Salvadoran gang members once aped the "look" seen in popular Hollywood "gangsta" movies like "Colors" or "American Me" with homegrown versions of cholo-Chicano slang for gang members-style...
...As she tells it, Mirna's childhood home life had all the intensity of a political movement...
...A local Mara Salvatrucha gang member makes a sign of respect for the memory of his dead homeboy sationalistic and riddled with rumor and irresponsible speculation...
...and onlookers cheer and shout like spectators at a cock fight as Spike pummels the other youth with his fists...
...When we first met in 1993, many among this unlikely collection of homeboys and homegirls were only too ready to kill or die for their gangs...
...dgar Bolafios, also known as Shy Boy, trudges to the edge of a soccer field with his friend Scrappy a few steps behind...
...You're going to love Mima," Alex says, laughing heartily as we screech to a halt outside the home of the group's newest member...
...See The New York Times, August 10, 1997...
...You ask yourself, 'Why should I work sweating like a slave all day to sell coca colas, and have these vagabonds constantly begging for money to pay for their drugs and shiftless life?' " He shakes his head sadly and continues, "The war here did terrible things to people...
...On the legacy of war and the transition to peace, see Horacio Castellanos Moya, Incertidumbres: Cultura y transici6n en El Salvador (San Salvador: Ediciones Tendencias, 1993...
...6. UNICEF, The State of the World's Children 1997 (New York: UNICEF and Oxford University Press, 1997...
...Shortly after Jos6's body was brought from L.A...
...But when her mother was absent, the man made sexual advances to 12-year-old Mirna and threatened to hurt her if she revealed that he was fondling her...
...1992 was a fateful year for El Salvador...
...Created under the 1992 Peace Accords, the National Civilian Police replaced the security forces associated with the repressive military regimes of the preceeding years and are supposed to provide democratic and nonpartisan law enforcement...
...On the intellectual legacy of the Jesuits and the U.S...
...I have respect from the homeboys, but I don't tell other people what to do...
...It was not long before Hugo and Jos6 joined the Mara Salvatrucha gang...
...support for counterinsurgency units involved in massacres, see Mark Danner, El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1994...
...3. A total of 12 civilians and four policemen were arrested for the 1994 slayings...
...Ana Bolafios remembers events differently...
...I guess it's a miracle that we're still alive...
...They are searching for the "original" Shy Boy...
...From the back of the crowd the humiliated youth winces in pain moaning, "I had no idea she was married to a homeboy...
...Now Dickies and Ben Davis pants and Pendleton shirts are being marketed in the shopping malls of San Salvador...
...The emergence of youth gangs in El Salvador with ties to gangs in Los Angeles is in many ways a story of changing U.S...
...Mirna Solorzano, a 22-year old single mother of three, strikes me as steadfast from the first handshake...
...5. The Washington Post, May 27, 1995...
...But just as many tense or clutch their children tighter, not daring to look at the tattooed faces they hurry past...
...By age 14 she was running away from home and attempting suicide...
...The amputee or wheel-chair-bound kids are usually victims of shootings or grenades used in clashes between rival gangs...
...Apart from Shy Boy, all of the mostly 15- and 16-yearold "gangstas" in this enclave have never lived outside El Salvador...
...As he continues his honor roll of MS dead, he mentions a homeboy I first met in Los Angeles...
...immigration policy...
...prisons that her eldest son Hugo seemed destined to live...
...That is why we are so united...
...Polanco says in hushed tones...
...6. UNICEF estimates that one out of every ten Salvadorans owns a television and 48% own radios...
...and "FY 1998 Total Removals by Top Twenty Nationalities," Monthly Removals Report, U.S...
...U For further information on Homies Unidos or to make a taxexempt contribution: VISPAL #2285, P.O...
...Chino was executed in the spring of 1995, just before The Washington Post reported a spate of death squadstyle killings in El Salvador that left more than 30 youths dead in less than two months...
...Los Angeles police estimate that Eighteenth Street, the largest Latino gang in L.A., may have as many as 20,000 members...
...Mirna's mother began an affair with a family friend who years later became her stepfather...
...Shy Boy, who will soon turn 19, is the oldest member of the group...
...He put his hands all over me...
...prison system...
...Avila says he is as frustrated as the average Salvadoran citizen over police inability to contain crime...
...1 This means that violence-if defined by the annual homicide rate, the most commonly cited measure of crime and violence in general-is greater in El Salvador now than during the 1980s, when civil war grabbed international headlines and hundreds of thousands of peasant refugees escaping mayhem and economic collapse sought sanctuary in the crowded slums of Los Angeles...
...An Inside Look at the 18th Street's Menace," Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1996...
...And since there is no budget for salaries, it is staffed by volunteers...
...Clearly, poverty is not the only thing drawing Salvadoran youths into gangs...
...These youths are part of a new Mara Salvatrucha gang in El Salvador formed by young men who were deported from the United States...
...Finding neither drugs nor weapons, they let the boys go with an angry El Salvador's warning to go home and stay out of trouble...
...Two blocks over, a foot patrol of the National Civilian Police stop and briskly frisk Shy Boy, Flash and Scrappy...
...a guerrilla fighter, was hiding...
...Edgar is beginning to realize that his brother Jos6's fate was neither his fault nor his responsibility to avenge...
...gang members are only one factor in the violent crime wave...
...2 VoL XXXII, No 1 JULY/AUG 1998 Shy Boy lists the names of homeboys killed in shoot outs with rival gangs...
...Since the beginning of this century, gangs have been part of the proving ground of manhood for a significant portion of working-class men in Los Angeles...
...policy towards El Salvador, see Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit U.S...
...Avila believes that in the future, this system will yield more complete and accurate crime data than is currently available...
...He remembers the bravery of his grandmother, who withstood the blows of soldiers for refusing to tell them where his father, Donna DeCesare is a freelance writer and photographer based in New York City She lived in El Salvador during the 1980s and has been documenting the lives of Salvadoran gang members in Los Angeles and El Salvador since 1993...
...The crowd listens as the adversaries face off, howling accusations and counter accusations...
...Their meetings may seem disorganized or contentious, but it is clear that the group's eclectic range of activities-English classes, engraving artwork on mirrors, running workshops on HIV, hosting poetry slams and learning computer graphics skills-have enhanced the self-esteem of individual members...
...But that is exactly what Professor Cruz has done...
...I was waiting for the bus...
...They found them together in a parked car...
...Homies Unidos is unique among the handful of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working with gang members in El Salvador...
...Spike embraces the punished homeboy, they do their gang handshake and everyone relaxes...
...immigration law...
...Ozzy owed a lot of people a lot of money when he died," one youth told me...
...At the time, the Roman Catholic Church's Legal Aid Office, Tutela Legal, charged that the vigilante groups included active members of the newly formed civilian police force...
...11.Statistics from the UN Latin American Institute for the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Delinquents (llanud) as cited in "Institutions: Weak Court System Delays or Denies," Latin American Special Report (London: Latin American Newsletters, April 1997...
...A few of the Salvadoran "gangstas" I have met in L.A...
...All the homeboys have suffered something...
...He himself recently suffered permanent loss of feel- even ing and movement in three finColombia...
...But they continue-sometimes unnoticed except by grieving family members, sometimes acknowledged in the Salvadoran press or in human rights statistics...
...We protect the people here from enemy gangs and thieves who would rob them"' Shy Boy says proudly...
...He changes direction several times finally spotting what he is after-his brother Josd's grave...
...But the antiquated judicial system is rife with corruption...
...After the beating, the face of the accused is caked with blood and dust as he slowly staggers away...
...According to gang members in El Salvador and Los Angeles who knew Ozzy well, he had become helplessly addicted to cocaine by the time of his murder...
...Raised on violent television icons and American consumer dreams, many Salvadoran immigrant children disdain and fear the drudgery of their parents' lives...
...Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Washington, D.C., October 23, 1997...
...Although he may not be the leader, NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 22REPORT ON YOUTH it is clear from the way the others approach and quietly confer with him that his opinions are highly regarded...
...Overcoming alienation, finding forgiveness for oneself or for others-these are more complex emotional passages...
...On the FMLN, see Robert Armstrong and Janet Shenk, El Salvador: The Face of Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1982...
...If somebody disrespects our neighborhood we throw down, we fight...
...gers after a neighborhood drunk (not a gang member) severed the nerves in his right hand with a machete...
...Edgar reacted by taking his dead brother's gang name-Shy Boy...
...Box 025364, Miami, FL 33102-5364, Email: Chano@es.com.sv...
...Every case will be documented from the first complaint call, through to the investigation, arrest and conviction stages...
...After his deportation to El Salvador, Chino was executed with a bullet to the head and found with his thumbs tied behind his back...
...The carnage in El Salvador and neighboring Guatemala also motivated a generation of U.S...
...And many Salvadoran citizens do not care...
...In that same year, during the riots sparked by the brutal beating of Rodney King, nearly 1,000 Salvadoran youths were rounded up in Los Angeles by agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and deported to El Salvador...
...Fellowship born of shared suffering and a lust for vengeance are attractions of gang life and, to a degree, hallmarks of the adolescent's emotional world...
...Wiping her hands on her stained ruffled apron, she lowers her basket...
...She continues philosophically, "The way I see it, it's all the same thing...
...For months Mirna lived in fear with her secret until she bravely tried to tell her mother...
...8. On U.S...
...Still another is the son of VOL XXXII, No I JuLYIAuG 199827 0 Vot XXXII, No 1 JutWAUG 1998 27REPORT ON YOUTH a Salvadoran soldier from the elite Belloso battalion...
...They're not homicide rate doing anything right now":' the of 150 per cop remarks to no one in partic- ular...
...Immigrant parents often blame the uncontrollable behavior of Broken families, their children or the frightening violence of alcoholism and-in their wayward street the case of many lives on an American culture of permissive- Salvadoran ness...
...Department of Justice police training program, the city of Santa Ana began implementing a tracking system last year...
...Eighteenth Street gang crash pads became her refuge, and "gangstas" became her guerrilla fighters...
...Others like Shy Boy witnessed politically motivated executions of family or members of their community...
...Policy and El Salvador (New York: Times Books, 1984...
...The stories revealed little understanding of the power hierarchy in Salvadoran prisons, where U.S...
...Such "street justice" can uphold a gang members' rights within the group, but it can also be rough and brutal, as this episode reveals...
...Reform of the juvenile justice code and modest improvements in prison conditions followed a spate of violent prison uprisings in which inmates were hacked to death by other prisoners wielding knives...
...VOL XXXII, No I JULY/AUG 1998 21REPORT ON YOUTH Gang members are initiated in a ritual beating...
...Nearly 70% had experienced the murder of a close friend or family member and half had themselves been injured badly enough to require hospitalization...
...The '80s generation of Salvadoran refugees arrived in a post-industrial Los Angeles...
...9. "FY 1997 Year End Report," Monthly Removals Report, U.S...
...According to the Pan American Health Organization, El Salvador's per capita homicide rate of 150 per 100,000 is the highest in the hemisphere, surpassing even Colombia...
...And they have been inspired by the example of Homies Unidos, a group with similar goals, which formed in El Salvador a year and a half ago...
...As Polanco looks around his working-class enclave, he says there is a feeling in the air that reminds him of the early war years when things began to fall apart...
...He's not looking for a local homeboy...
...Ozzy, though well-known, was not the MS gang chieftain the press claimed he was...
...During pre-dusk hours when school children in crumpled uniforms race home past the maquila factory workers wearily descending from buses, Shy Boy and his friends emerge alert and ready for business...
...And this, he says, will make police efforts more effective...
...and El Salvador were themselves child combatants on both sides of El Salvador's civil war...
...When someone interrupts to defend the accused, the gathering erupts in unruly shouting as all seek to air their views or seize the opportunity to vent unrelated grievances...
...And if he had gone to prison he'd be dead because the homeboys in jail, they were waiting for him...
...Nearly 1,500 Salvadorans with criminal records were deported from the United States in 1997...
...5 The press focus is on Eighteenth Street and Mara Salvatrucha-two Los Angeles gangs that have grown rapidly in El Salvador...
...Many worked low-wage jobs as gardeners, restaurant workers and nannies...
...Though it is primarily a Chicano gang, Salvadoran youths who live in the Pico Union district of L.A., a territory controlled by Eighteenth Street, would be more likely to join this gang...
...1 2 Bribes buy murderers instant freedom while innocent indigents languish in unsanitary and overcrowded cells for up to two years before their cases are heard and dismissed...
...deportees from both Eighteenth Street and Mara Salvatrucha at times band together as "fellow Americans" in a hostile environment...
...She laughs with them...
...It is true that many people stop to chat or joke with the youths as they saunter along...
...The figures for household ownership would be much higher...
...But there is another reason too...
...The same man attacked Scrappy, leaving him with several dangerously deep gashes to the head...
...One striking example is a story about the 1995 prison murder of a well-known MS gang member named Ozzy...
...This comer and the surrounding streets of this working-class enclave are Big Gangsta Locos territory...
...aid budget and today continue to outperform El Salvador's coffee exports as a source of foreign exchange...
...The boys clashed, first with their new stepfather and then with Chicano gang members in school...
...When asked about their future dreams, jobs topped the list followed by a stable family...
...But shortly after she brought Edgar to El Salvador, Hugo was deported...
...In 1997-98 she investigated youth identities and gang violence in Central America and Haiti with the support of the Alicia Patterson Foundation...
...He's been meeting with homeboys and homegirls from both MS and Eighteenth Street who want to start a self-help program...
...At one time a drug transshipment country with no internal market for cocaine beyond the small elite class, El Salvador now has crack houses in its slums...
...The reasons why this peasant insurgency failed to take power in El Salvador are numerous...
...You fight for your country, program, whatever...
...Of the 800,000 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 who comprise 14% of the total population of El Salvador, UNICEF estimates that only 40% attend school and 29% work...
...They scatter in clusters around their cul-de-sac...
...My parents were fighting to be free, for El Salvador to be free and all that, but it got to such an extreme that I hated the guerrillas they supported...
...Many among the criminal deportees belong to Eighteenth Street or Mara Salvatrucha...
...But it is not over...
...But I won't make the same mistake my parents made with me...
...Acquiring style is costly and requires some effort...
...My mom brought me back here to El Salvador because Jos6 told her some Eighteenth Street gang members were going to kill me in Los Angeles," Edgar says in a low voice...
...Prisons are currently filled to more than double their capacity and 77% of those incarcerated in El Salvador are unconvicted prisoners awaiting trial...
...Another is the middle-class daughter of a former guerrilla urban commando who was tortured in El Salvador's clandestine prisons...
...Defining who the criminals are is something he hopes will become easier with a new computerized system for tracking criminal cases...
...That is why we get along with people here...
...Smoking primos-joints of crack mixed with marijuana-is a common part of gang life, and homeboys often support their own drug habits by selling drugs...
...Spider motions the accused and his brother Spike to his side...
...And kids desperate for "real" Nike kicks will spend a family's whole remittance check, sell crack or steal to buy them...
...They are fearful and angered by the rising assault and homicide rates they read about as they sip their morning coffee...
...Armed gangs have become its brutal enforcers...
...Their fledgling effort faces challenges, but they have found supporters...
...NACr A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 28REPORT ON YOUTH Shy Boy Scrappy Spider and Spike settle in with a bottle of vodka to watch El Salvador battle Jamaica for a soccer championship...
...As Alex rattles through his list of names I feel heartened...
...In the old days, Latino gang members fought with fists or knives and could "mature out" of their adolescent associations by landing union jobs that provided generations of Mexican and Chicano factory workers decent workingclass wages...
...Several members of Homies Unidos have recorded their own rap songs to get their anti-violence message across to other youth...
...Her father was a tradeunion leader who fled death squads in El Salvador on the underground railroad of the sanctuary movement...
...The boys laugh as mango juice escapes from their lips...
...He knows of at least four vigilante groups backed by small businesses in his neighborhood who are arming themselves to eradicate the local youth gangs...
...The gang's lure can also transcend class and political background-issues of their parents' generation...
...That's how gangstas are...
...he Salvadoran gangs have their own informal judicial system...
...During the April 1997 trial of three of these Black Shadow members, the mayor of San Miguel praised them and they were acquitted...
...My kids come first before any program...
...The reporting is often sen23REPORT ON YOUTH Sonia Diaz, who now lives in El Salvador...
...Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Washington, D.C., March 23, 1998...
...But that's street justice L.A.-style, and that's how we are here too...
...solidarity movement, church workers and journalists, who have redirected their triage human rights efforts to Bosnia and elsewhere...
...In L.A.'s housing projects or residential tracts where identical single-family dwellings line asphalt swathes stretching into oblivion, young people are growing up alone...
...I wanted to go out, have fun...
...The verdict is unspoken but understood...
...The fierce bond of loyalty and code of silence that saved their father is emulated by the surviving Bolafios sons...
...If she had been a woman from another neighborhood, maybe we'd laugh about it over a few beers," he shrugs...
...He is haunted by a three-year-old's memory of soldiers torturing and killing his uncles and other villagers in a soccer field a few miles from this one near his brother's tomb...
...They sternly demand identification papers, which none of the youths have...
...They have all come a long way from the suspicious angry youths I first encountered...
...Alex is right...
...Jos6 was killed, but the girl survived...
...As night falls, the homeboys begin to make their rounds, setting off in groups of twos or threes to check out who is on their turf...
...But the man who was sexually abusing her persuaded Mima's mother she was lying...
...It is also a story of modem economic dislocation-the disappearance of traditional economies and the rise of new crack cocaine markets...
...But it took $4 billion dollars in U.S...
...Within a few months, he left his grandmother's house and began hanging out in the gang crash pads of San Salvador where he lives today...
...But while the dollars sent to El Salvador bought school uniforms and books for eager school-bound children back "home," many of the latchkey kids being raised in the United States were cutting class...
...Shy Boy, aloof and elusive, takes in the scene...
...Within seconds, dust clouds explode as the sentence is meted out...
...The vato"-the Chicano slang equivalent of "young blood" and short for vato loco, the crazy young guy"molested the homeboy's wife," Shy Boy explains...
...The group has begun giving talks on violence prevention to youth in physical-rehabilitation programs in San Salvador hospitals...
...Rappers Snoop Doggie Dog, Control Machete and Doctor Dre blare from barrio radios...
...Miguel Cruz, who teaches at the Jesuit-run Central American University, seems an unlikely expert on the attractions of gang life...
...INS agents arrest two Salvadoran youths in Los Angeles...
...6 What is changing is perception-the fact, for example, that Salvadorans now experience their poverty and define themselves through the window of television...
...The reunion, which took six years, was difficult...
...The signing of the Salvadoran Peace Accords ended the war, but did not solve the economic inequities which inspired it...
...In the wake of factory closings, the crack economy has brought a do-ityourself code of entrepreneurship and vigilante justice to the streets...
...7 Even if most impoverished Salvadoran youths could aspire to a maquila factory job--the fastest growing sector of the Salvadoran economy-they would earn the Salvadoran minimum wage of $4 a day...
...We were really high so we didn't even know what was happening":' Shy Boy recalls...
...The rival Mara Salvatrucha gang is much smaller but is one of L.A.'s fastest-growing gangs...
...It is difficult to imagine this mild intellectual, who conducts political campaign surveys and public opinion polls, approaching gang members, much less training them...
...government's role in the Salvadoran army's cover-up of their murders, see Teresa Whitfield, Paying the Price: Ignacio Ellacuria and the Murdered Jesuits of El Salvador (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994...
...I want to do something positive for my neighborhood, help the other homies get some courses, some skills, jobs...
...Snitching" to the cops or consorting with enemy gangs are the worst offenses and those so accused often pay with their lives...
...Add to this the cultural dislocation which has lead to a triumph of consumerism and advertising over politics, and the saga of El Salvador assumes an historical irony of tragic proportions...
...Mirna credits her therapist and social worker for the transformation that has sent her back to school and helped her begin to reconcile with her mother and to develop a new, mutually respectful relationship with her father...
...He is wondering if there is some way he can remove his tattoos-at least the ones on his face and arms...
...military aid, tens of thousands of lives and intense pressure and mobilization by solidarity activists in the United States to convince Washington to support a negotiated settlement to the war...
...We trained gang members to be investigators for our public opinion survey of the gangs," he explains, "because we realized that if a bunch of university professors and students could even get gang Kids desperate for "real" Nike kicks will spend a family's whole remittance check, sell crack or steal to buy them...
...The front-page news accounts of his gang funeral claimed that MS was on the verge of collapse because the group's leader had been killed by the Eighteenth Street gang...
...Luis Polanco owns the grocery shop at the top of the cul-de-sac where Shy Boy's clique gathers...
...Spider restores order, giving each homeboy from the Big Gangsta Locos a chance to speak...
...Newspaper reports mentioning youth are, with few exceptions, stories about crime or the menace of the maras, the Salvadoran term for gangs...
...Sensationalist news accounts blamed Eighteenth Street for Ozzy's death, nearly precipitating a bloody street vendetta between the rival gangs...
...As Shy Boy explains it, "only a homeboy can understand...
...On U.S...
...His search for identity parallels El Salvador's search for a shared definition of justice, respect and participation...
...That's all you are going to do," the woman demands of Spider incredulously...
...It is the only one which includes more than a few token U.S...
...After hearing her story, I realize just how resilient she is...
...A few months later Jos6, who had remained in L.A., was murdered in a drive-by shooting...
...home, an alternative family and financial rewards impossible to attain flipping hamburgers at McDonald's...
...It is also the only organization directed by youths who themselves are involved in gangs...
...Edgar Bolafios is the new El Salvador, caught between a peasant past and the dislocations of the present, caught between the generation of romanticized rebel fighters and that of vilified young "gangstas...
...But youth gang membership is growing at an alarming pace and NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24REPORT ON YOUTH some studies suggest that as many as 30,000 youths may belong to street gangs nationwide...
...Salvadoran police statistics place the homicide figure even higher than the PAHO-derived figure at roughly 11,000 per year...
...And in the end it was nothing but poor people killing other poor people...
...For many angry adolescents, gangs seem feelingS of rebellion to offer it all-street that accompany protection, refuge from problems or beatings at adolescence...
...She was going to political rallies from age five, when her family arrived in L.A...
...It began in the early 1980s when Salvadoran teenagers clashed with black and Chicano gangs at school...
...Several move towards a grocery store, displaying their crop of gold chains and other "hot" items for interested buyers...
...With the price of a pound of beans-the Salvadoran staple food-the same as it is in the United States, such wages barely ensure subsistence...
...Edgar was only 13 when, to his mother's dismay, he followed in his big brother's footsteps...
...and UNICEF, El Salvador Basic Data (UNICEF: San Salvador, 1994...
...More than 80% of the youth interviewed said that violence is a negative aspect of gang life that they desperately wish would end...
...The INS launched its Violent Gang Task Force in 1992, ushering in a new era of immigration and criminal justice policy by targeting large numbers of immigrants with criminal records for deportation to their countries of origin--even if they had lived most of their lives in the United States...
...Standing beneath a tree, children in tow, her spouse nods his silent agreement...
...and Martha Doggett, Death Foretold: The Jesuit Murders in El Salvador (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1993...
...Sensing my skepticism, Alex adds defensively, "This is serious...
...Note that INS statistics follow years from October through October...
...They allege that his death was not the work of Eighteenth Street, but of drug traffickers whowith the help of prison guards--smuggle cocaine to incarcerated addicts...
...The bullet meant for me got him instead...
...Finally she cracks a smile...
...Indeed it is no small miracle...
...A middle-aged woman with stem Indian features balances a basket of fruit on her head as she glides past the graffiti-sprayed walls...
...The vast majority are fatalistic about change and skeptical of politics...
...Edgar tells the same story I have heard from his mother Ana and his brother Hugo...
...Weaving through the streets of South Central L.A., Alex Sdnchez tells me he is taking me on a mission...
...By 1995 several Black Shadow vigilantes-police agents with ties to the old terror networks of the 1970s and 1980s-had been arrested for the 1994 extrajudicial killings of three Mara Salvatrucha members in the eastern city of San Miguel...
...foreign policy objective in El Salvador was to defeat the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a leftist guerrilla movement which threatened to topple the Salvadoran government...
...Squeezing her son Edwin's hand she adds, "I joined this group to help other young people involved with gangs...
...At one "hearing" a young woman in tight jeans and a midriff-blouse addresses the "court," glaring at the accused...
...Now in its second decade, MS has come of age through the U.S...
...We never steal from our own barrio...
...UNICEF, The State of the World's Children 1997...
...Perhaps, but you don't need a computer or a crystal ball to predict where Salvadoran demographics and economics are headed...
...Most callers who responded to a call-in poll conducted by YSU, one of El Salvador's most popular radio stations, supported The Black Shadow, and some even invited the group to come clean up their neighborhoods...
...The Salvadoran government's response to youth violence has been to suppress the gangs through repressive measures such as emergency crime legislation suspending rights of habeus corpus, the reinstatement of the death penalty, and the formation of special anti-gang police units trained by experts from the Los Angeles Police Department...
...She thought that bringing her youngest son to El Salvador to live with her mother would keep Edgar in school and safe from the life in and out of U.S...
...highest in the Shy Boy admits that many of hemisphere- the homeboys get into street fights when they are drunk or surpassing stoned...
...Every week La Prensa Grdfica and Diario De Hoy-the country's largest-circulating dailies-include several crime stories featuring photographs of defiant teenagers tattooed with gang symbols and waving gang hand signs...
...La Sombra Negra, or Black Shadow, a paramilitary-style death squad that targets gang members in El Salvador, claimed responsibility for his murder...
...7. Statistics from the Salvadoran General Household Survey of 1995, cited in "A Proposal Addressing the Issue of Youth at Social Risk: Youth and Violence Project," UNICEF, San Salvador (1997), Mimeograph...
...That's how gangstas are...
...Nearly half the country's population is under 18 and three quarters of Salvadoran children live in poverty...
...They need to see some of us doing it in order to believe they can too...
...He says he wants to get a job so he can have kids...
...Facing her, the young man accused of the misdeed begins moving forward, sweat pouring from his brow...
...Rodrigo Avila, director of the National Civilian Police, admits that deported U.S...
...9 During this period, the Salvadoran countryside was littered with the dismembered bodies of thousands of teachers, labor activists and other advocates of social change...
...8 How the remaining 31%, roughly 249,000 youths, occupy their time is unknown...
...And the resentful stares of a small group of men-among them an off-duty police officer and the owner of the local bus route--follow the youths as they progress down the lane...
...Across the street Shy Boy sits lost in thought...
...He understands his neighbors' resentment and frustration, though he doesn't condone their actions...
...Shy Boy no longer wants to die...
...With assistance from International Criminal Investigation and Training Program (ICITAP), a U.S...
...There are five he knew well...
...But we don't have leaders...
...In the months that followed, L.A.'s simmering anti-immigrant backlash took on dynamic new force, and public attitudes toward juvenile VotL XXXII, No 1 JULY/AUG 1998 25REPORT ON YOUTH offenders in the United States became more punitive...
...The remittance dollars they sent home to El Salvador during the war years surpassed the annual U.S...
...members to talk to us, the responses would have been much different...
...Broken families, alcoholism and -for many Salvadoran immigrant children-unacknowledged war trauma exacerbate the feelings of rebellion that accompany adolescence...
...People here think I'm the gang leader because I used to live in Los Angeles," he says almost wistfully...
...But when they get drunk 100,000 is the and stoned they are a plague on these streets...
...Several youths step up to block his path to her, as he denies the charges...
...The walls of this remote village in rural Sonsonate are marked with gang symbols, but Shy Boy passes the graffiti disinterestedly...
Vol. 32 • July 1998 • No. 1
