El Salvador Has a Problem: Gangs Started in the US Are Running the Country
by John Lawrence, March 12, 2019
Two gangs run El Salvbador: MS-13 and the 18th Street gang. Both gangs were spawned in the US, in Los Angeles to be precise and took root in El Salvador when gang members were deported having been caught as criminals. National Geographics reported: "El Salvador’s government says that criminal gangs command an estimated 60,000 active members, and their battle for supremacy has fractured this tiny country of 6.4 million people along an expanding web of invisible fault lines that run red. In 2017 the homicide rate was 61 per 100,000 people, making El Salvador the second deadliest of any country not at war, after Venezuela."
El Salvador is locked in the latest phase of a social conflict that exploded during the 1980-1992 civil war, in which leftist guerrillas rose up against a wealthy elite and the military state that had long dispossessed the rural underclass of land. With the stated aim of stopping communism in its backyard, the U.S. supported El Salvador’s right-wing dictatorships with billions of dollars of economic and military aid that prolonged the bloodshed. By the time the war ended, in a stalemate, 75,000 people were dead and more than a million were displaced, hundreds of thousands of whom fled to the U.S. From Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., Salvadoran refugees found employment and community, and they sent money home.
The same old story. The US wants to stop communism which in this case would have helped poor peasants so it "prolonged the bloodshed" which led directly to the creation of the gangs here in the US that then took root back in El Salvador. The US' hands are dirty in this whole situation and should take responsibility for the immigration crisis instead of building a wall to keep immigrants out.
The children who came with them, displaced youths craving identity in a foreign land, created MS-13 on the streets of Los Angeles and swelled the ranks of a rival, 18th Street—a Hispanic gang that formed around 18th Street in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles and absorbed wayward refugees from Central America. As gang wars, and the war on gangs, intensified, laws were enacted that made it easier to deport immigrants with criminal records. In the late 1990s the U.S. began exporting thousands of convicts back to Central America each year. In the vacuum of weak governance and poverty in their home country, gang members reproduced their social structures and tactics and multiplied exponentially.
The US created the crisis by meddling in El Salvador's civil war as it has done many times before in Central and South America. "At the margins of the mainstream discursive stalemate over immigration lies over a century of historical U.S. intervention that politicians and pundits on both sides of the aisle seem determined to silence. Since Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 declared the U.S.’s right to exercise an “international police power” in Latin America, the U.S. has cut deep wounds throughout the region, leaving scars that will last for generations to come. This history of intervention is inextricable from the contemporary Central American crisis of internal and international displacement and migration."
The liberal rhetoric of inclusion and common humanity is insufficient: we must also acknowledge the role that a century of U.S.-backed military coups, corporate plundering, and neoliberal sapping of resources has played in the poverty, instability, and violence that now drives people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras toward Mexico and the United States. For decades, U.S. policies of military intervention and economic neoliberalism have undermined democracy and stability in the region, creating vacuums of power in which drug cartels and paramilitary alliances have risen.
The US has made a mess out of Central and South America and is now ironically reaping the whirlwind: They all want to come here to escape the violence and poverty. Here are some more examples.
1) Brazil experienced several decades of right-wing authoritarian governments, especially after the US-backed 1964 Brazilian coup d'état against center-left social democrat João Goulart undertaken, according to then President John F. Kennedy, to "prevent Brazil from becoming another Cuba". Brazil's return to democracy saw several consecutive right-wing neoliberal governments following the Washington Consensus ending in endemic inequality and extreme poverty, one of the worst in the Continent.
2) After the democratic election of President Salvador Allende in 1970, an economic war ordered by President Richard Nixon. Then the CIA backed the 1973 Chilean coup d'état due to Allende’s democratic socialist leanings and installed the murderous military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
3) After several peasant and workers uprisings in the country against oligarchic and anti-democratic governments, often under the control of powerful American corporate interests like the United Fruit Company, efforts by democratically elected governments were often thwarted by US intervention. Civil war spread with US-endorsed far-right governments in El Salvador facing far-left guerrillas.
4) Peasants and workers (mostly of indigenous descent) revolts during the first half of the Guatemalan 20th century due to harsh conditions and abuse from landlords and the government-supported American United Fruit Company were brutally repressed. This led to the democratic election of left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz was overthrown during the US-backed 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état leading to right-wing US-endorsed authoritarian governments and nearly 40 years of civil war in the Central American country.
There are many more examples of US intervention in Central and South America always on the side of right wing dictatorships and corporations like United Fruit and against the interests of the common people. The US is ever eager to destroy regimes which claim to have the interests of the people at heart and to install regimes favorable to the US model of unbridled capitalism at any cost, the cost usually being born by people suffering from extreme inequality and poverty. The US has tried again and again to make little " USes" out of every country in what it considers its sphere of influence which includes in particular Central and South America but in general the whole world.
Today some 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. have temporary protected status (TPS), a designation that allows undocumented migrants deemed at risk because of armed conflict or environmental disasters in their home countries to stay in the U.S. In January 2018, President Donald Trump’s administration ordered an end to TPS for Salvadorans. It was set to expire in September 2019, but a U.S. district court halted that plan, allowing Salvadorans to continue to live and work in the U.S. until a final decision is made.
