They may also take neighbourhood women and girls there to be sexually abused. El 13 de mayo de 2006, Ernesto Smokey Miranda, un exsoldado de alto rango y uno de los fundadores de la Mara Salvatrucha, fue asesinado en su casa en El Salvador unas horas después de negarse a asistir a una fiesta para una miembro de la banda que acababa de ser liberada de la prisión. The story Luisa tells rings true for the Salvadorans who are listening. We come from disintegrated families and extreme poverty”, an unnamed MS-13 spokesperson told the Salvadoran news site El Faro. El Salvador: El violento paisaje de las maras La violencia desgarra a El Salvador, ante la indiferencia de sus élites y de la mirada internacional. Together, these three organisations count around 65,000 members, according to police records. Former President Mauricio Funes made efforts to improve conditions for jailed mareros in exchange for a gang ceasefire. And it’s for the army and police, who wait until after dark to conduct their house-by-house searches for criminal suspects. We can’t clean up everybody’s mess, he means. Another had shot her brother, who was a former government soldier and thus an enemy in the gang’s eyes. Salvadorans living in “red zones” have to spend hard-earned money on private transport or after-school programs so that their kids don’t come into contact with gangs. Stay on top of El Salvador latest developments on the ground with Al Jazeera’s fact-based news, exclusive video footage, photos and updated maps. Gang-related murder is a topic of everyday conversation among families at home, children at school and patrons in bars. Nearly 20,000 Salvadorans were killed from 2014 to 2017. Having no jobs in El Salvador, and having been away for so long, the returnees are particularly exposed to rampant gang brutality. Girls can also be targeted at an early age, either to join the gang or to become sex slaves. It was here, in the early 1980s, where El Salvador’s two main gangs were formed: the Mara Salvatrucha (or MS-13) and Barrio 18. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. The largest maras in El Salvador are MS-13 and the two factions of Barrio 18 (the 18th Street gang), the Revolutionaries and the Southerners. Noticias Maras en El Salvador | El director de prisiones niega negociaciones de Bukele con las pandillas Tras la publicación en el diario El … Every Salvadoran knows someone who was shot dead by gang members or someone who pulled the trigger. Though MS-13 and the two Barrio 18 factions are mortal enemies, they forged an informal ceasefire in order to target army and police officers, as well as their families, creating a cycle of revenge. It can promote more programs to rehabilitate jailed gang members and care for victims, especially the most vulnerable such as abused women. Also, to prevent them from using sign language, he has asked that they be held without access to sunlight. Óscar, the security official pictured above, uses a common Spanish expression, pagar los platos rotos. But many more people – some 500,000 all told – depend on the gangs for their livelihood. La Mara Salvatrucha, las dos alas de la pandilla Dieciocho, la revolucionaria y la sureña, y la Mao Mao. Having suffered gang violence, Sessions said, will no longer be enough to claim asylum in the U.S. If asked their age, for instance, they reply, “I’m 17 + 1”. En octubre de 2008, sobre la autopista a Comalapa, autoridades salvadoreñas decomisaron a miembros de la MS-13, un cohete antitanque del tipo LAW y varios fusiles de alto calibre. Police officers always wear a gorro navarone, or face-covering balaclava, scared that gang members will come after them and their families. Nayib Bukele, de todo el Triángulo Mara Norte (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador), es el primer mandatario que vino a darle a las maras tratamiento de criminales.Sin medidas complacientes. Las pandillas Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) y Barrio 18, entre otras, tienen unos 70.000 miembros en El Salvador, más de 17.000 de ellos encarcelados, y se dedican a la extorsión, el … The culprit in most of these murders is the maras, the country’s powerful, pervasive criminal gangs. It’s common for teenagers, especially boys, living in areas controlled by the maras to be harassed by security forces who consider them gang suspects. It was founded in Los Angeles in the 1980s by immigrants from El Salvador and later spread throughout the United States, Central America, and Había comenzado a estudiar Derecho y a trabajar para mantener a los niños fuera de las pandillas. Anyone who doesn’t pay up might come to regret it later. The large majority of gang members are among the poorest people in Salvadoran society, living on less than $250 a month. In a 2017 survey, 40 per cent of Salvadorans said they approved of torture as a crime-fighting technique and 34.6 per cent said the same of extrajudicial killing. Street gangs or maras, as they are known in the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA), comprising El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, have mutated from youth groups defending their neighbourhoods’ turf in the 1980s to highly organised, hierarchical organisations that coerce, threaten and kill to produce a menial subsistence for their members in the 21st century. The President also made known that he was willing to use the nation's resources to defend members of the public force who were sued for the excessive use of force. El accionar de estos grupos mantiene también alertas a las autoridades de Estados Unidos. The “maras” (gangs) Salvatrucha and 18 have modified their strategy in order to survive police raids and maintain control over the neighbourhoods where they … Media reports about MS-13 and other maras depict the members bearing archetypal tattoos and speaking in trademark slang. Nevertheless, the government continues to rely almost solely on security crackdowns to tackle gangs. Unos más, otros menos. Both the press agencies operating in El Salvador and the prison authorities themselves have released chilling images where dozens of half-naked men emerge lined up, sitting in narrow rows, each one's chest touching the other's back, and where - a novelty for the Salvadoran press - men with the letters MS and the number 18 tattooed on their bodies were gathered equally. MS-13 members will not utter the number “18”. The gang warned the rest of the family to depart. El presente informe para la discusión contiene un análisis preliminar del problema de la violencia juvenil y la proliferación de las maras y pandillas en el norte de Centroamérica y, específicamente en El Salvador, analizando las respuestas del Estado y de la sociedad civil. Gangs also claim to be providing a “community service” by protecting locals from other criminals and corrupt police. But many more people – some 500,000 all told – depend on the gangs for their livelihood. El Diario NY. In 2015, the government again launched a “war on gangs”. “The only living force that exists in our communities is the gangs”. The Covid-19 Pandemic and Deadly Conflict, The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: A Visual Explainer, Turkey’s PKK Conflict: A Visual Explainer, Finding a Path to Peace in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region, Myanmar’s Military Should Reverse Its Coup, Venezuela: What Lies Ahead after Election Clinches Maduro’s Clean Sweep, In Syria’s Idlib, Washington’s Chance to Reimagine Counter-terrorism. Soon MS-13 and Barrio 18 had expanded across El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The Salvadoran investigative media, El Faro, contrasted the information obtained through spokespersons for the MS-13 and the Sureños del Barrio 18 faction with that of a police commissioner and an official seeking to reconstruct the circumstances that led to the resurgence of violence in the country and the adoption of these measures in the prisons. To defy the gangs is to court death. The U.S. can help by either allowing Salvadorans with Temporary Protected Status to stay in the U.S., or by assisting the Salvadoran government with reintegrating deportees through the creation of job opportunities and improvement of public services. Reina*, 30, left her small community in central El Salvador with her sister and three children after the gangs moved in. That’s why it’s so hard to arrest high-ranking gang members, who are usually tipped off about police raids in advance. This may explain the effort by the mareros to recover their territories. The combination of quarantine and the "barrio decision" made by the maras led to a historic decrease in the number of fatalities recorded per day in El Salvador. In Gangs in the Global City. Extortion at places of business is the bigger problem. Maras like MS-13 were formed in the streets of Los Angeles 30 years ago by young men who had fled the 1980-1992 civil war. — Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 26, 2020, Estamos ejecutado la acción de mezclar y recluir en las mismas celdas a los diferentes grupos de las estructuras criminales que tanto daño están causando al país.En este Gobierno no habrá beneficios y privilegios para ningún miembro de estructura criminal. Most gang members were around fifteen years old when they first joined. It could easily have happened to them or to their neighbours. A mara (or marabunta) is a form of gang originating in the United States, which spread to Central American countries such as El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Five months into a historic ceasefire between El Salvador’s street gangs, El Faro profiles the complex history of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). A marero had thrown a homemade bomb into her neighbour’s house, killing four people. Las noticias de última hora de El Salvador y el mundo sobre deportes, política, economía, tecnología, opinión, editoriales, negocios, cultura, entretenimiento “You can’t work anywhere without permission from the local gang”, says Alex, 46, who worked in construction but decided to leave El Salvador when jobs dried up in his hometown. With U.S. help, the Salvadoran government should try to counter gangs with crime prevention as much as with law enforcement. Managua: UCA Publicaciones Sassen, Saskia. Pure intuition can lead one to think of four things that could happen: either the mareros will try to ignore each other - which is impossible, more so in such a degree of overcrowding - or lethal fights will break out in the cells, or the mareros will associate with each other, or an outbreak of COVID-19 inside the prisons will produce a mass death of the prisoners. Eric Lemus. Prison conditions for gang members worsened and the mano dura operations resumed. Illustrations for this commentary are by Molly Crabapple. Please tell us what you think about this story, Proper nutrition goes a long way to battling COVID-19 and other illnesses, Comcast RISE Investment Fund to offer $1 million grants to BIPOC-owned small businesses in Philly and Chester, Texas Rep. 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In private conversations, however, there are many voices among the authorities who are convinced that some form of dialogue is the only way to bring peace to the country. The Global City: One Setting for New Types of Gang Work and Political Culture. The government can enforce its Safe El Salvador plan, which focuses as much on crime prevention as on law enforcement. The casas locas are hangouts where gang members smoke, drink and perform ritual initiation of new recruits. Again, most shopkeepers pay. President Bukele's hope in doing all this and then confining the men in the same cell, crowded and mixed, is that by having the members of different maras together, they cannot plan murders that would then be communicated to members outside the prisons. The latter two scenarios can have serious medium- and long-term consequences for the country: gangs associating with each other can give rise to another force that is more difficult to control than those already plaguing El Salvador, and if there is an outbreak of COVID-19 in prisons, the gang members who survive it will be seen as heroes by the groups to which they belong. The gangs' decision was motivated by three concerns: first, the less the quarantine was enforced, the greater the presence of the army and police in the neighbourhoods; … El Faro's investigation sheds the following light: the increase in the number of murders appears to be a unilateral decision by MS-13, as the spokesperson for the faction Sueños del Barrio 18 declared that MS had cut off communication with the other gangs and they did not know what the reason for this change in policy was.