This article was downloaded by: [School of Oriental and African Studies] On: 03 April 2012, At: 03:01 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Global Crime Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fglc20 Central American maras: from youth street gangs to transnational protection rackets José Miguel Cruz a a Department of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA Available online: 20 Nov 2010 To cite this article: José Miguel Cruz (2010): Central American maras: from youth street gangs to transnational protection rackets, Global Crime, 11:4, 379-398 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2010.519518 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. 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Global Crime Vol. 11, No. 4, November 2010, 379–398 Central American maras: from youth street gangs to transnational protection rackets Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 José Miguel Cruz ∗ Department of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA Most of the empirical research on Central American street gangs, called maras, has been published only in Spanish. Reviewing that literature, the American scholarship on gangs, and my own research on Central American gangs from the mid-1990s, this article depicts the processes through which the maras (Mara Salvatrucha and the Eighteenth Street Gang) evolved from youth street gangs in the late 1980s to protection rackets with features of transnational organisations. Intense migratory flows between El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the United States, and the hard-line suppression policies against youth gangs in institutionally weak Central American countries created the conditions that prompted networking and organisation among Central American street gangs. This article highlights the changes in the dynamics of violence and the transformations in the gangs’ social spaces to illustrate the evolution of the maras. Keywords: street gangs; maras; youth violence; protection rackets; Central America 1. Introduction There has been important discussion in the literature as to whether street gangs develop into organised crime groups.1 The recent development of turf-based youth gangs into powerful crime syndicates in Central America, South Africa, Brazil, and the United States seems to endorse the view that street gangs may evolve into complex criminal groups in different contexts.2 Hence, the most important questions regarding the research on gangs are not whether they can evolve into more sophisticated crime groups, but, rather, why and how some youth street gangs end up as racketeering networks, sometimes with transnational links. *Email: [email protected] 1. Irving A. Spergel, The Youth Gang Problem. A Community Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Scott H. Decker, Tim Bynum, and Deborah Weisel, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: Gangs as Organized Crime Groups’, Justice Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1998): 395–425. Gregory P. Orvis, ‘Treating Youth Gangs Like Organized Crime Groups: An Innovative Strategy for Prosecuting Youth Gangs’, in Gangs: A Criminal Justice Approach, eds. J. Mitchell Miller and Jeffrey Rush (Cincinnati: Anderson, 1996). 2. Ana Arana, ‘How the Street Gangs Took Central America’, Foreign Affairs 84, no. 3 (2005): 98–110; John Hagedorn, A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008). ISSN 1744-0572 print/ISSN 1744-0580 online © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2010.519518 http://www.informaworld.com Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 380 J.M. Cruz From very different perspectives, contemporary authors, such as John Hagedorn and John Sullivan,3 have focused their attention on the processes of gang strengthening across time. Hagedorn, on the one hand, stressed the role of local conditions, such as prisons, urban spaces, drug markets, and ethnic identities, in the persistence and growth of some gangs, a process he calls ‘gang institutionalization’. On the other hand, Sullivan pointed to the contribution of communication technologies in the evolution of gangs. Both authors saw institutionalisation and evolution of gangs as related to globalisation; but whereas Hagedorn saw gangs reacting to socioeconomic transformations prompted by globalisation, Sullivan conceived gangs as taking advantage of the information revolution to wage ‘netwar’. In examining how Central American gangs, locally known as maras, evolved from youth street gangs to transnational groups with apparent features of protection racket gangs, I highlight the interaction between local conditions (marginalisation and law enforcement strategies) and transnational processes (migration and diffusion of Southern California gang identities). Instead of talking about globalisation, which may be a very broad and nebulous concept, I concentrate on the role of migration as a mechanism of exchange of norms and identities that facilitate the constitution of transnational networks. I argue that more important than the role of communication technologies, we have to examine the interplay between transnational norms and identities, and local factors. Street gangs in Central America used those assets provided by migration to survive and cope with local conditions. In the process, they ended up strengthened and transformed into loose networks with the capacity of ruling regional protection rackets. This article is based on a review of several empirical studies conducted in Central America4 regarding the phenomenon of maras, but it draws considerable empirical information from three different research projects in which I was involved. First, the Maras y pandillas Central American Project;5 second, the Children and Youth in Organized Armed 3. See Hagedorn, ‘A World of Gangs’; John P. Sullivan, ‘Third Generation Street Gangs: Turf, Cartels and Netwarriors’, Transnational Organized Crime 3, no. 2 (1997): 95–108. 4. Nielan Barnes, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Transnational Youth Gangs in Central America, Mexico and the United States’ (paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, NY, August 10, 2007); José Miguel Cruz, ed., Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica. Las respuestas de la sociedad civil organizada, vol. IV (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2006); José Miguel Cruz and Nelson Portillo Peña, Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador. Más allá de la vida loca (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1998); ERIC et al., Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica (Managua: UCA Publicaciones, 2001); IDESO, ERIC, IDIES, IUDOP, Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica. Pandillas y capital social, vol. II (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2004); María Santacruz and Alberto Concha-Eastman, Barrio adentro. La solidaridad violenta de las pandillas (San Salvador: IUDOP-UCA/OPS-OMS, 2001); Marcela Smutt and Lissette Miranda, El fenómeno de las pandillas en El Salvador (San Salvador: UNICEF/FLACSO Programa El Salvador, 1998). 5. This project was sponsored by the Swedish Church and CORDAID and its findings are condensed in the Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica book series published in Spanish, cited above. Research under this project was conducted in four different stages. In the first stage, ethnographic work was carried out with imprisoned gang members; the second stage consisted in the completion of surveys within the communities where gangs dwell; in the third and fourth stages, researchers conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with policy-makers, law enforcement officials, gang members, and grassroots organisations who work in gang prevention programmes. Global Crime 381 Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 Violence (COAV) project;6 and third, the ‘Transnational Youth Gangs in Central America, Mexico, and the United States’ research project.7 The basic argument interwoven into this article is that current Central American maras are the result of the cultural flows attached to the region’s intensive migration, combined with organisational processes that took place in response to the zero tolerance and mano dura (hard-hand) crackdowns and policies in Central America. This argument draws on relevant literature oriented by my experience researching the issue of gangs in Central America and is contrasted with some of the relevant findings in gang research in the English literature.8 2. Central American maras, street gangs, and organised crime To understand the evolution of Central American maras, three definitions are in order: street gangs, organised crime, and maras. First, when referring to a street gang, I will follow Klein and Maxson’s proposed definition, namely, ‘any durable, street oriented youth group whose involvement in illegal activity is part of its group identity’.9 This concept is broad enough to accommodate all the fundamental characteristics – durability, street-oriented, youth, illegal activity, and collective identity – of the groups inhabiting any contemporary city and who used to dwell in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala during the 1980s and 1990s. Second, instead of following the definitions of organised crime that have populated the gang literature thus far, and which have concentrated in the entrepreneurial and organisational features of some drug-trafficking American gangs,10 I will stick to Charles Tilly’s 6. This was sponsored by Save the Children Sweden, the Ford Foundation, World Vision, and Casa Alianza. The general coordinator of this project was Luke Dowdney in Rio de Janeiro, and the research in El Salvador was carried out by Marlon Carranza. More than 20 in-depth interviews with active gang members were conducted under this research project. See Marlon Carranza, ‘Detention or Death: Where the “Pandillero” Kids of El Salvador are heading’, in Neither War Nor Peace. International Comparations of Children and Youth in Organised Armed Violence, ed. Luke Dowdney (Río de Janeiro: Viveiros de Castro Editora Ltda., 2005). 7. This project was sponsored by the Ford and Kellog foundations. It was carried out by a network of research institutions in Central America, Mexico, and the United States, and coordinated by ITAM in Mexico. Information about the project can be found at: http://www.wola.org/media/ Gangs/executive_summary_gangs_study.pdf. 8. This article focuses on the gangs in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and leaves out Nicaraguan gangs because the latter have not evolved to join MS-13 or Eighteenth Street Gang. Therefore, the important research conducted on Nicaraguan gangs by Dennis Rodgers and José Luis Rocha is not reviewed here. See Dennis Rodgers, ‘Living in the Shadow of Death: Gangs, Violence, and Social Order in Nicaragua, 1996–2002’, Journal of Latin American Studies 38 no. 2 (2006): 267– 92; José Luis Rocha, Lanzando piedras, fumando piedras. Evolución de las pandillas en Nicaragua 1997–2006 (Managua: UCA Publicaciones, 2007). For a comparative study between Nicaraguan gangs and northern maras, see José Miguel Cruz, ‘Government Responses and the Dark Side of Suppression of Gangs in Central America’, in The Maras and Security Challenges in Central America and the U.S., eds. Thomas C. Bruneau, Lucía Dammert, and Jeanne Giraldo (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming); see also Oliver Jutersonke, Robert Muggah, and Dennis Rodgers, ‘Gangs, Urban Violence, and Security Interventions in Central America’, Security Dialogue 40, no. 4–5 (2009): 373–97. 9. Malcolm W. Klein and Cheryl L. Maxson, Street Gang. Patterns and Policies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4. 10. Martín Sánchez-Jankowski, Islands in the Street (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991); Carl S. Taylor, ‘Gang Imperialism’, in Gangs in America, ed. C. Ronald Huff (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1990); Orvis, ‘Treating Youth Gangs Like Organized Crime Groups’. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 382 J.M. Cruz notion that ‘protection rackets represent organized crime at its smoothest’. In this sense, organised crime would be understood as any group with the capability to develop an illegal system in which the members of the group demand money from someone to provide protection against any threat or to avoid any harm perpetrated by the same members of the group. This notion also draws from the works of Thomas Schelling and Diego Gambetta who stress the monopolistic nature of the activity and put the threat of violence as key means in the economic activity of the gang.11 Finally, I will conceptualise Central American maras as a vast network of groups of people associated with the identity franchises of two street gangs that had their origins in the city of Los Angeles in the United States, but whose development no longer depends upon the American dynamics: the Mara Salvatrucha Thirteen (MS-13) and the Eighteenth Street Gang (also known as Barrio 18). These gangs, who now dwell in northern Central America, make up two separate transnational networks that have undergone a clear process of institutionalisation throughout the last few years that, in some places, is enabling them to become organised protection rackets.12 According to some estimates, by the late 2000s there were approximately 67,000 mara members in Central America, with 36,000 living in Honduras, 17,000 in El Salvador, and 14,000 in Guatemala.13 These groups also have thousands of members living in the United States, particularly in Southern California and the Washington, D.C. area, where the Central American migrants concentrate. Research institutions and law enforcement agencies agree that these gangs are responsible for a substantial share of the criminal violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. For example, police figures indicate that around 55% of the nearly 1600 homicides committed in El Salvador between January and June 2008 were related to street gangs.14 In Guatemala, maras carried out 14% of the 5885 murders committed during 2006; and in Honduras, authorities maintain that gangs are responsible for 45% of the homicides. Although these figures must be taken cautiously, every observer of the Central American violence agrees that gangs are important actors of violence in the region. As maintained by an USAID report, maras conduct international business including the trafficking of illegal substances, kidnapping, robbery, assassinations, and other illicit profit generating activities.15 But the most distinctive feature of contemporary maras is their formation of protection racket rings whose leaders operate from prisons. According to the director of the Salvadoran National Civilian Police, 70% of the extortions committed in El Salvador are carried out by maras. Gangs extort money from local convenience stores, transport unions, and informal vendors at the streets.16 An investigation conducted by the Guatemalan police in a suburban town of Guatemala 11. Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia. The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Thomas C. Schelling, Choice and Consequence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 12. Despite all the media hype, there is no consistent evidence that the maras have successfully gained a strong foothold in Mexico. In fact, the ‘Transnational Youth Gangs in Central America, Mexico, and the United States’ research project conducted in 2006–2007 concluded that no Central American gangs were found in the cities included in the study. See Barnes, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Transnational Youth Gangs’. 13. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime- UNODC, Crime and Development in Central America. Caught in the Crossfire (New York: United Nations Publications, 2007); USAID, Central America and Mexico Gang Assessment (Washington, DC: USAID Bureau for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, 2006), 45. 14. Salvador Martínez, ‘Vuelven a nueve los homicidios por día,’ La Prensa Gráfica, July 4 2008. 15. USAID, ‘Central America and Mexico Gang Assessment’. 16. Oscar Iraheta, ‘El setenta por ciento de las extorsiones son cometidas por maras’, El Diario de Hoy 19 August 2009. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 Global Crime 383 City revealed that maras collect nearly 4 million dollars every year from ‘taxes’ imposed on small business and transport unions that operate in the communities.17 A survey conducted by Demoscopía in a sample of poor neighbourhoods in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras showed that around 20% of small business pay ‘protection taxes’ to maras; in addition, in Guatemala, 28% of residents of poor communities have to pay taxes to gangs; 34% in El Salvador; and 31% in Honduras. Furthermore, according to former gang members interviewed in the same study, a single Salvadoran gang member weekly collects around US$1250, whereas a Guatemalan gang member collects US$975, and a Honduran gang member makes US$935 every week.18 Central American gangs have varied widely throughout the years; their formation into a network with features of protection rackets is part of a dynamic process and this article is also an attempt to capture the stages through which gangs expanded, formalised, and transnationalised, underscoring the variables contributing to this process according to local empirical research. Here, I argue that although marginalisation is important to understand the emergence of street gangs in Southern California and Central America, migration across the region and law enforcement policies in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras are more important to comprehend their rise as loose transnational networks and powerful local protection rackets. 3. Migration and the transnational networking of gangs Many authors place the origins of the Central American gangs as a direct outcome of the migration of Central Americans, especially from El Salvador, since the early 1980s.19 The phenomenon is far more complex than that. Migration has definitely played a fundamental role in the expansion and development of the Central American gang problem, but it is important to point out that this factor does not explain how they really started. Gangs appeared in Central American countries long before refugees began returning following the Central American civil wars and before American immigration policies led to the deportation of numerous gang members back to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.20 In fact, 17. Policía Nacional Civil de Guatemala, Situación de maras en Guatemala (San Salvador: OCAVI, 2007). http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_424.pdf. 18. Demoscopía, Maras y pandillas. Comunidad y policía en Centroamérica. Hallazgos de un estudio integral (Guatemala: Agencia Sueca de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo, 2007). 19. Arana, ‘How the Street Gangs Took Central America’; Max G. Manwaring, ‘Gangs and Coups D’Streets in the New World Disorder: Protean Insurgents in Post-modern War’, Global Crime 7(2006): 505–43; Steven C. Boraz and Thomas C. Bruneau, ‘Are the Maras Overwhelming Governments in Central America?’ Military Review 86, no. 6 (2006): 36–40. 20. There is a lot of misinformation regarding the origins of the term maras to label the Central American gangs. The most common legend, usually quoted when explaining the origins of Mara Salvatrucha 13, is that mara stands for marabunta, a Spanish term that denotes a group of destructive ants that devour everything they find. According to this, Salvadoran gangs, especially MS-13, would have adopted the nickname mara to refer to their aggressive character and their destructive purposes. Although some current gang members have embraced this explanation as a way to gain notoriety in the media, the truth is that the use of the term mara is more common in Salvadoran jargon, and it was part of the Salvadoran slang long before Mara Salvatrucha emerged in the 1980s. In the Salvadoran vernacular, the term commonly refers to any group of people and is widely used as synonymous with ‘folks’. When Salvadoran gangs started hanging out together in Los Angeles as a distinctive group from other Hispanic gangs, they adopted the term ‘mara’ in a process of semantic narrowing to underline their own cultural roots. See José Miguel Cruz, ‘Maras o pandillas juveniles: los mitos sobre su formación e integración’, in El Salvador: sociología general. Realidad nacional de fin de siglo y principio de milenio, ed. Oscar Martinez-Peñate (San Salvador: Nuevo Enfoque, 1999). Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 384 J.M. Cruz the first studies in Guatemala and El Salvador on Central American gangs, already called maras by this point, appeared before the impact of migration began to be reported.21 These studies show that even though street gangs were already considered to be causing a serious problem with violence in some of the region’s cities, none of the early hypotheses blamed the impact of migration or the deportation of young people from the United States. However, migration did contribute to the reconfiguration of gangs by facilitating the flow of identities, norms, and symbols associated with gang membership;22 something that can be called gang-social remittances following Peggy Levitt’s concept of social remittances.23 Migration flows between Central America and the United States bridged different gang phenomena that originally appeared and developed separately. How did this process take place? Central America in the early 1980s was plagued with civil wars and military conflicts. This political instability pushed many Central Americans, especially Salvadorans, to emigrate, first as political refugees to the United States and later as economic refugees.24 Thousands of young Salvadoran immigrants grew up in Californian streets, especially in Los Angeles.25 There they associated with other Latin Americans, mostly Chicano and Mexican immigrants, who had formed their own gangs long ago.26 Living in a cultural and economic disadvantage and often neglected by their parents in a particularly hostile environment, many young migrants found identity and peer support in the gangs.27 First, they joined Mexican and Chicano gangs; one of those gangs was the Eighteenth Street Gang.28 Later, as an outcome of the growing Salvadoran population, they began to form a separate gang with their own identity; this is the context in which the Mara Salvatrucha gang began, made up primarily of young Salvadoran immigrants, who were later joined by people from other Central American countries.29 Meanwhile, in Central America, particularly in Guatemala and El Salvador, the conditions created by social exclusion, galloping urbanisation, the socio-political disarray caused by military conflicts, and problematic family dynamics led to the emergence of street 21. Sandra Argueta et al., ‘Diagnóstico de los grupos llamados ‘maras’ en San Salvador. Factores psicosociales en los jóvenes que los integran’, Revista de Psicología de El Salvador 11, no. 43 (1992): 53–84; Deborah Levenson, ‘On Their Own: A Preliminary Study of Youth Gangs in Guatemala City’ (Guatemala: AVANCSO, 1988). 22. Gabrielle Banks. ‘The Tattooed Generation Salvadoran Children Bring Home American Gang Culture’, Dissent 47, no. 1 (2000): 22–8. 23. Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 24. William Deane Stanley, ‘Economic Migrants or Refugees from Violence? A Time Series Analysis of Salvadoran Migration to the United States’, Latin American Research Review 22, no. 1 (1987): 132–54. 25. Carlos B. Cordova, The Salvadoran Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005); Donna De Cesare. ‘The Children of War: Street Gangs in El Salvador’, NACLA Report 32, no. 1 (1998): 21–30. 26. James Diego Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity on Southern California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). 27. Ibid. 28. Herbert C. Covey, Street Gangs Throughout the World (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 2003). 29. My interview with Alex Sánchez, director of Homies Unidos (Los Angeles Chapter), Miami, FL, 18 February 2008. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 Global Crime 385 gangs.30 This phenomenon, however, was characterised by the presence of a large number of different gangs that controlled specific, well-defined neighbourhoods and streets in the city. During the 1980s, street gangs in Guatemala and El Salvador were small groups of youth whose collective identities were, in many cases, determined by the turf they controlled. For example, in Guatemala, some of the gangs called themselves Los Sacaojos, Los Capitol, Los Five, etc.31 In El Salvador, gangs were even more fragmented, that is, there was a wider range of groups: Mara Morazán, Mara Gallo, Mara Quiñónez, Mara AC/DC, Mara No-se-dice, Mau-Mau, etc.32 When the political strife concluded in Central America in the early 1990s, immigrants in the United States, mostly Salvadorans, began making their way back home while the US government started a policy of mass deportations. In the 14 months after the peace treaty, over 375,000 Salvadorans voluntarily returned from the United States.33 In addition, more than 150,000 Central Americans were forced to return to their home countries in a 3-year period during the mid-1990s.34 These processes generated an influx of young people; some of them were bringing gang experience and a particular culture of being gang members.35 Most of the returnees were young males who had grown up in a completely different culture. They barely spoke Spanish, had weak family ties in the country of their birth, and, in some cases, had no reference group because their family and friends remained in the United States.36 The following statement from a Salvadoran young male who joined an existing gang in El Salvador after being deported illustrates such feelings: ‘We’re family. We’re always there. When I first came here, the next day I met the homies. I saw the opportunity they gave us, because being there is like being in the gang. Nothing changes. We are from nine different gangs here (in this focus group), we’re from different cliques, and most of us don’t have any family left here (in El Salvador); and even if we had family here, they wouldn’t support us.’37 He meant that many of their first and most significant contacts with Central American society took place through the local gangs. These contacts facilitated, at first, the transmission of the symbols for being a gang member: their dress code, the use of tattoos, and means 30. Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes de Honduras and Save the Children-UK (2002); Misael Castro and Marlon Carranza, ‘Un acercamiento a la violencia juvenil en Honduras’, in Maras y pandillas en Honduras, ed. Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación y Comunicación-ERIC (Tegucigalpa: Editorial Guaymuras, 2005); Cruz, ‘Maras o pandillas juveniles’; Smutt and Miranda, ‘El fenómeno de las pandillas en El Salvador’. 31. Juan Merino, ‘Las maras en Guatemala’, in Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica, vol. 1, ed. IDESO ERIC, IDIES, IUDOP (Managua: UCA Publicaciones, 2001). 32. Argueta, et al. ‘Diagnóstico de los grupos llamados “maras” en San Salvador’; Smutt and Miranda, ‘El fenómeno de las pandillas en El Salvador’. 33. Tracy Wilkinson. ‘Returning to Reclaim a Dream – More Salvadorans are going home to a land transformed by war – and peace. They seek a quality of life they could not find in the United States’ Los Angeles Times, 19 May, 1993. 34. Geoff Thale and Elsa Falkenburger, Youth Gangs in Central America. Issues on Human Rights, Effective Policing, and Prevention (Washington, DC: Washington Office on Latin America, 2006). 35. Cruz and Portillo Peña, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador’. 36. Donna De Cesare, ‘From Civil War to Gang War: The Tragedy of Edgar Bolaños’, in Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives, eds. Louis Kontos, David Brotherton, and Luis Barrios (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 37. Focus group with Eighteenth Street Gang members conducted by Maria Santacruz and José Miguel Cruz in San Salvador, 2000. See María Santacruz and José Miguel Cruz, ‘Las maras en El Salvador’, in Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica, vol. I, ed. IDESO ERIC, IDIES, IUDOP (Managua: UCA Publicaciones, 2001), 92. Translated by me. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 386 J.M. Cruz of communication, which resembled the Hispanic gang profile in Southern California.38 But more importantly, they transmitted American gang identities and, with them, a sense of belonging to gangs that have been originated in the United States. One of the first manifestations of this reworking process can be found in the expression used in Guatemala for maras that got their names from the gangs of Los Angeles – mara clones – called this way ‘because they are copies of similar foreign groups, the product of the impact of outside cultures, primarily from the United States’.39 By the early 1990s, one could find the Mara Salvatrucha and the Eighteenth Street Gang among the existing variety of gangs in San Salvador40 and White Fence and Latin Kings among Guatemalan groups.41 However, this situation did not last long. Influenced by the growing influx of returnees and the aura of admiration surrounding young people who had returned from California, the majority of the existing gangs in El Salvador and Guatemala first, and in Honduras later, began to adopt the ways and aesthetics of returning gang members – deportees or not. Over a span of 5 years, the gang identities from the United States spread out throughout the region, not through violence or turf wars, but rather through straightforward imitation and the gradual adaptation of identities.42 Two Honduran gang members interviewed as part of the research project Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica illustrate this point: ‘The first mara I belonged to was the Latin Kings. It was formed by two dudes who came from the U.S.A. One from Los Angeles the other from Miami. They were all tattooed (...). They had an awesome Van, always riding a pretty chick in there. I saw them and dreamt being like them, because they looked gutsy and nobody messed with them.’ (Honduran MS-13 gang member). ‘The dudes who started MS-13 here were Lana and Toby. They came using huge trousers.... They always had a gun in their pockets but you wouldn’t notice. We always learned from them ... since they were coming from the U.S.’ (Honduran Eighteenth Street Gang member).43 Local gang members, already active and organised into their own groups, began at first to imitate the styles of the returnees and later ended up changing the names of their groups to one of the two gangs most accessible of the US model – Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or the Eighteenth Street Gang.44 As part of this process, small gang groups formed clusters that shared the same name and then gradually adopted a system of behaviour, norms, and 38. James Diego Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity on Southern California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988). 39. Merino, ‘Las maras en Guatemala’, p. 176. 40. Argueta, et al. ‘Diagnóstico de los grupos llamados “maras” en San Salvador’. 41. Caroline Moser and Cathy McIlwaine, Violence in a Post-Conflict Context. Urban Poor Perceptions from Guatemala, Conflict Prevention and Post-Conflict Reconstruction (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2001). 42. Castro and Carranza, ‘Un acercamiento’. 43. Ibid., 101 & 114. Translated by me. 44. It is not entirely clear why these gangs – MS-13 and Eighteenth Street Gang – prevailed in Central America, whereas others, such as the Latin Kings or White Fence, did not. There are no systematic data about gang memberships during the first wave of returnees to Central America. One plausible reason is that most of the returnees and deported gang members coming from the Southern California were affiliated to those gangs. Since the spread of gang membership was driven more by imitation than by imposition or violence, there are reasons to believe that many local gang members adopted the identities of the most popular ‘brands’ among the returnees; whereas the other identities faded away as MS-13 and Eighteenth Street Gang grew stronger. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 Global Crime 387 values that made them part of the same organisation. In this way, the old turf gangs turned into cliques – called clikas in Spanish – that made up a federation of gangs recognised as a single barrio – either Eighteenth Street Gang or MS-13. These cliques were turf-based as each of them controlled a specific neighbourhood, with relative independence from the rest of cliques.45 However, the young returnees responsible for importing the US Hispanic gang culture model played an important role not only in the process of transplanting youth identities, but also in the process of configuring these federations into informal local-city networks. They were the ones who established contacts among the different groups that made up the gang, which permitted the flow of information and norms from abroad, and also among the local cliques. They acted as informal gang brokers in the Central American countries. By 1996, according to a survey conducted with active gang members in the San Salvador Metropolitan Area (SSMA), 85% of young people in gangs belonged to the Mara Salvatrucha or the Eighteenth Street Gang; only 15% of gang members belonged to other gangs.46 A similar survey conducted in Honduras showed that MS-13 and the Eighteenth Street Gang controlled 85% of the gang members in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula.47 However, in terms of numbers, the share of gang members repatriated from the United States was rather low. The survey in San Salvador revealed that 17% of active gang members in the SSMA had been in the United States and that only 11% had belonged to gangs while in the United States. The vast majority of mara members had joined in different Salvadoran cities. On a subsequent survey conducted in 2001, data showed that the percentage of gang members in San Salvador who have joined in the United States had increased only to 12%.48 This process repeated itself in more or less the same fashion in Guatemala and Honduras, which were also impacted by the migration of their citizens to the United States. Just as in El Salvador, by the late 1990s, both Guatemala and Honduras had moved towards the model of two large gang confederations, although some small native gang groups persisted.49 Although it is impossible to understand the formation of Central American maras as networks with disregard for the migration flows between the United States and Central American countries, it is important to acknowledge that the proliferation of youth gangs in Central America had already started before the bulk of returning migration took place. As Maxson and colleagues have pointed out in the case of American street gangs,50 local factors have larger influence in the formation and expansion of local cliques than migration. In the end, two phenomena that arose in relative independence and with their own dynamics of causality ended up coming together and forming part of a single regional system of networks that now covers northern Central America and several American cities. 45. Santacruz and Cruz, ‘Las maras en El Salvador’; Smutt and Miranda, ‘El fenómeno de las pandillas en El Salvador’. 46. Cruz and Portillo Peña, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador’. 47. Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes de Honduras and Save the Children-UK (2002). 48. Santacruz and Concha-Eastman, ‘Barrio adentro. La solidaridad violenta de las pandillas’. 49. Castro and Carranza, ‘Un acercamiento’; Merino, ‘Las maras en Guatemala’. 50. Klein and Maxson, ‘Street Gang. Patterns and Policies’; Cheryl L. Maxson, Gang Members on the Move (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 1998). 388 J.M. Cruz Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 3.1. The importance of symbols and identities Social remittances, the flow of symbolic materials, identities, and norms that accompanied the migration of youth throughout the region, were more important than the actual number of returned gang members to Central America. According to Decker, Hispanic gangs in the United States tend to be multigenerational, more expressive, more violent, more turf-oriented, and less entrepreneurial than other ethnic gangs.51 This gang culture was originally transferred to youth groups in Central America and shaped the behaviour of the young people who made up the maras. In very practical terms, it meant the transfer of symbols and language codes that include the use of graffiti, tattoos, and hand signals. It is around these elements that the young people from different backgrounds, places, and countries were able to recognise each other as part of the same gang franchise, independent of where they dwelled or whether they had met or not. This is particularly important for understanding why the phenomenon has successfully reproduced itself with similar characteristics across an extensive region from the United States to Central America. The expansion of these gangs did not hinge on a centralised process where Central American cliques and gang wannabes asked the gang leadership in the United States for membership. Rather, it was an informal process whereby many extant small cliques adopted a specific franchise as their own collective gang identity and imitated the norms and symbols representative of that franchise. When a teenager wanted to join the gang, the candidate just had to hang out with the members of the clique he wanted to join and go through an initiation rite that imitated the rites followed by the original gangs in the United States.52 Maras did not expand because of a premeditated and centralised process, but through a social imitation process based on migration and networking. The use of tattoos illustrates the importance of the imitation of symbols in the expansion of these gangs. One of the things that young people joining any Central American gang used to do – especially before the mano dura crackdowns – was to get tattooed, often on the most visible parts of their body, including the face.53 This practice has never been part of the formal initiation rite, but the use of tattoos became so generalised and so entrenched in gang life that nearly every gang member had a tattoo. Following the same pattern depicted by Horowitz54 regarding Chicano gangs, tattoos became one of the prime tools for showing allegiance to a specific gang franchise, while at the same time set the conditions for being imitated by other groups. These demonstrations of identity and belonging could be taken everywhere; it accompanied the youngster in his travels and established the dynamics of his relationships with people he met along the way. 51. Scott H. Decker, ‘Youth Gangs and Violent Behavior’, in The Cambridge Book of Violent Behavior and Aggression, eds. Daniel J. Flannery, Alexander T. Vazsonyi, and Irwin D. Waldman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Spergel, ‘The Youth Gang Problem. A Community Approach’. 52. The formal initiation rite consisted in an endurance test. The gang wannabe must endure a 13second (MS-13) or an 18-second (Eighteenth Street Gang) beating by five or six members of the clique. In recent years, as gangs became more organized, the initiation rite also included a ‘mission’, this is, the murder of a rival gang member. See Cruz and Portillo, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador’; and Aguilar and Carranza. 53. The photographic works of Isabel Muñoz and the late film-maker Christian Poveda, who was allegedly murdered by Salvadoran gangs, provide an unparalleled showcase of these practices. See Isabel Muñoz, Las maras. Cultura de la violencia (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior, 2007). 54. Ruth Horowitz, Honor and the American Dream: Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983). Global Crime 389 Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 4. The institutionalisation of mara networks Central American maras have been extremely adaptive. In some sense, this is the result of a very intense migration phenomenon that has been taking place increasingly in the region, but it is also the result of the severity in which the anti-gang crackdowns were carried out in some countries. John Hagedorn55 maintained that to understand why some gangs have institutionalised in some cities, we have to take into account the role of law enforcement agencies in the shaping of gangs’ organisation and identities. In another line of theory, Scott Decker and colleagues have argued that the presence of perceived or real threats prompt many youth gangs to strengthen their internal structures and become more cohesive to survive.56 In the case of Central America, in addition to the diffusion of Southern California identities, the additional significant factor in the institutionalisation of street gangs is the enactment of mano dura policies. These policies were carried out in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. For many years, the maras in Central American countries did not recognise any structure beyond being part of a federation of clikas, which formed one grand mara. This applies both to the MS-13 and the Eighteenth Street Gang. According to studies conducted in the mid-1990s,57 it was impossible to identify formal leadership inside each clika and the members themselves denied that any internal or external structure existed. This incipient organisation kept the cliques acting with relative autonomy in their own neighbourhood or street. However, the cohesion, identity, and sense of belonging to a single body had to be maintained somehow and this was done through the informal contacts that many gang members from different cliques had between themselves and through meetings of several clikas in other regions of the country. At these meetings, the members of the different clikas would discuss matters relevant to the entire gang, such as the relationship with civilians or the responses to acts of aggression by the police or by another gang.58 In addition, the dynamics of violence helped to advance cohesion across the gang cliques. This fact was enabled by the waving of identities. Gang warfare between Barrio 18 and MS-13 shaped the Central American gang phenomenon. Different cliques and neighbourhood gangs were drawn into war, and gang violence increased social cohesion among the cliques that happened to share the same franchise, even when their gang members barely know each other.59 This specific warfare between MS-13 and Eighteenth Street Gang – that was also imported from Southern California – contributed to the growth of these franchises and may explain the disappearance of other gang identities. This dynamic in gang organisation remained relatively intact throughout the 1990s in Central America. By the beginning of the new century, evidence began to appear that, with the penetration of cocaine and crack in Central American streets,60 gangs were organizing much more: they were increasing their drug-trafficking operations and were showing 55. Hagedorn, ‘A World of Gangs’. 56. Scott H. Decker and Barrik Van Winkle, Life in the Gang. Family, Friends, and Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Decker, et al., ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. 57. Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes de Honduras and Save the Children-UK (2002); Cruz and Portillo Peña, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador’. 58. Carranza, ‘Detention or Death’; Santacruz and Cruz, ‘Las maras en El Salvador’. 59. Santacruz and Concha-Eastman, ‘Barrio adentro. La solidaridad violenta de las pandillas’. 60. Rodgers, ‘Living in the Shadow of Death’. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 390 J.M. Cruz signs of establishing specific roles among gang members.61 However, the qualitative leap in terms of gang organisation, both in the Mara Salvatrucha and in the Eighteenth Street Gang occurred in response to the mano dura policies that were implemented in Central American countries between 2001 and 2006.62 These plans dictated the criminalisation of youth by banning any ‘youth street group’; the expansion of police power by providing them with discretionary faculties; and the limitation of civil rights to any gang member.63 The fundamental linchpin of these plans was a large-scale persecution and suppression of gangs. The massive imprisonment of gang members as part of these programmes led to substantial transformations in gang structures and dynamics. According to the Salvadoran police, as reported by Cruz and Carranza64 from July 2003, when the mano dura programme started, to July 2005, the police had arrested 30,934 youngsters accused of being gang members, but most of them (84%) were later released without charges. A significant number of arrests were carried out against the same individuals; meaning the clean-ups led to situations where the same gang member was imprisoned and then released up to four or five times in a 1-year period. Despite this, an important number of MS-13 and Eighteenth affiliates remained in prisons and were indicted. Hence, these raids led to severe prison overcrowding. By October 2007, 34.5% of the 17,200 inmates in Salvadoran prisons were gang members. They represented around 35% of the estimated gang membership in El Salvador at that time (16,800 gang members). Sixty-four per cent of imprisoned gang members belonged to MS-13, whereas 35% to Eighteenth Street Gang.65 In Guatemala, between June 2003 and June 2004, authorities detained 10,527 gang members on charges of drug possession and an additional 11,708 were detained for petty crimes in the ‘preventive’ centres of the department of Guatemala.66 These arrests represented 49% of all the incarcerations made only in the province of Guatemala. However, the courts formally indicted only 1% of the people arrested for drug possession. In most of the cases, the judge did not find sufficient evidence or determined that it was collected illegally. Even so, at the beginning of the police crackdowns, judges consented to those illegal detentions to give some time to the police to collect evidence, often through unlawful procedures.67 By 2006, 60% of detained gang members belonged to Eighteenth Street Gang, whereas the rest to MS-13.68 In Honduras, police campaigns aimed at incarcerating gang members resulted in a much smaller number of gang members in prison. Approximately 5300 persons were arrested between August 2003 and April 2007, accused 61. Ibid; Carranza, ‘Detention or Death’; Elin Cecilie Ranum, ‘Guatemalan Youth Gangs: Caught Between Institutional Weakness and the Persistence of Illegality’, in Government Responses and the Dark Side of Suppression of Gangs in Central America, eds. Thomas C. Bruneau, Lucía Dammert, and Jeanne Giraldo (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming). 62. Mo Hume, ‘Mano Dura: El Salvador responds to gangs’, Development in Practice 17, no. 6 (2007): 739–51; Thale and Falkenburger, ‘Youth Gangs in Central America’. 63. Mark Ungar, ‘Policing Youth in Latin America’, in Youth Violence in Latin America. Gangs and Juvenile Justice in Perspective, eds. Gareth Jones and Dennis Rodgers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 64. José Miguel Cruz and Marlon Carranza, ‘Pandillas y políticas públicas. El caso de El Salvador’, in Juventudes, violencia y exclusión. Desafíos para las políticas públicas, ed. Javier Moro (Guatemala: MagnaTerra Editores, S.A., 2006). 65. Ministerio de Seguridad Pública y Justicia, Reporte de las pandillas en El Salvador (San Salvador: OCAVI, 2007). http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_423.pdf. 66. Ranum, ‘Guatemalan Youth Gangs’. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 Global Crime 391 of forming part of ‘illegal associations’, the legal term used for gangs or maras. Over 35% of the gang members captured ended up in prisons.69 Crackdowns in Central America were particularly harsh: police operations lacked internal oversight and abuses of human rights and illegal executions multiplied not only in El Salvador, but also in Honduras and Guatemala.70 In response, while being in prisons, gangs began to organise themselves in a more structured fashion. It was there that dozens of gang members from the same gang, but from different clikas coming from different places throughout the country established contact with each other, recognised the existence of a myriad of gang cells, and created a more structured organisation. This conversion was made possible, in part, by the decision of the authorities to separate gangs in detention centres according to their gang affiliation.71 These conditions enabled gangs to set up their networks inside jails and create country-wide structures that expanded outside jail walls, resembling much of what some gang members had witnessed while being in US jails and following the model of prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia or ‘Nuestra Familia’.72 National leaderships, then, were established within the prisons. The following exchange between me and a 14-year-old Eighteenth Street Gang member in El Salvador illustrates the point: Interviewer: Did ‘Tony’ pass orders in Chalate? Gang member #2: He read them the act, the rules of the barrio: no smoking (crack). Int: And this ‘Tony’ is... G2: There are only Eigthteens there... Int: Is he the leader? G2: The heart of the Eighteenth (gang) is there ... I mean, there are only Eighteens there... Int: Where? In Chalate? G2: Chalate controls the whole Eighteenth (gang)... Int: But that’s in ... Is that the prison? G2: The prison, yes ... as Mariona, but Chalate is even bigger... Int: Only Eighteens? G2: Only Eighteenths there. All the Eighteens end up there. In Mariona there are more Eighteens than MSs. Int: Is someone there who calls the shots or everybody runs the barrio? G2: There are bosses there, there are ten bosses. Ten people ‘throw the word’... Int: Are all of them in Chalate? Is anyone free now? G2: No. They are all homeboys. Actually, they are like 600 who have the word, they are from different neighbourhoods but they all are in the same barrio (gang) ... from 69. Renán David Galo Meza, Situación de maras o pandillas en Honduras (Tegucigalpa: Secretaría de Seguridad de Honduras, 2007). http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_425.pdf. 70. Amnesty International, Honduras: Zero Tolerance for...Impunity. Extrajudicial Executions of Children and Youths since 1998 (London: AI, 2003); International Human Rights Clinic, No Place to Hide: Gang, State, and Clandestine Violence in El Salvador (Cambridge, MA: Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School, 2007); Ranum, ‘Guatemalan Youth Gangs’; Thale and Falkenburger, ‘Youth Gangs in Central America’. 71. In 2001, both in El Salvador and Honduras, a prison policy was implemented that separated gang members by their gang identity to prevent problems with violence inside the jails. In practice, this led to the labelling of Mara Salvatrucha jails and Eighteenth jails. In Guatemala, this type of policy was implemented in 2006 after a series of prison riots. 72. George M. Camp and Camille Graham Camp, Prison Gangs. Their Extent, Nature, and Impact on Prisons (South Salem, NY: Criminal Justice Institute, 1985). Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 392 J.M. Cruz Campanera, Ciudad Delgado ... plenty of homeboys from different places, cities, all in there... Int: And how do they pass the rules out? Do they ...? G2: Those who visit them sneak the letters into the jail ... We send them güilas, we call those letters güilas ... : Greetings for all the raza! We let them know how’s the move outside, and because they’re all locked up they know quicker the mess we’re making outside ... they all know what we do ... so they send us a congrats card ... yes ... always the truth, pal... Int: But ... these guys are older? G2: Yes, they’ve been in the barrio for ten years... Int: How have they managed to survive? G2: They’ve been watchful ... Those locked-up guys have earned the whole Eighteenth barrio. They founded the Eighteenth (gang) ... dudes like ‘Topo’...73 The prisons became, therefore, the cradle for the expanded territorial organisation of the gangs. A large number of gang members who came from different areas throughout the country were put together in the jails. This practice enabled them to function as a sort of standing assembly where they could debate, make pacts, and decide on structures, strategies, and ways to operate. The mano dura policies, with its effect of increasing the number of imprisoned gang members, nourished this kind of assemblies and facilitated communication and links among gang members both nationwide as well as internationally, insofar as foreigners also served sentences inside the jails. This phenomenon matches similar findings in the US literature which indicates that while in prison, some gangs may grow stronger.74 The assault of the mano dura plans forced gangs to rethink their operations. For example, maras went from meeting out in the streets to meeting in safe houses and other private areas, out of the reach of police operations. They went from moving about as pedestrians in the streets to moving about in vehicles to avoid police checks. To make these changes, they needed resources and they got them in two ways: first, by establishing links to drug-trafficking cartels within the prisons,75 and second, by developing extortion rackets which imposed ‘security taxes’ on small- and medium-size business in the zones they controlled.76 Racketeering expanded their economic capacity and enabled them to sustain their own organisations with more diverse and abundant resources.77 The mano dura also contributed significantly to cohesion among the cliques across the franchises. As one Salvadoran national leader of the Eighteenth Street Gang put it in an illuminating interview to a local newspaper, 73. This interview was carried out as part of the project ‘Children and Youth in Organized Armed Violence’ in El Salvador. The interview was conducted by me, and the local project was led by Marlon Carranza. I am grateful to Marlon for letting me use this material for this article. The interview was held at the premises of the University of Central America in San Salvador on October 2003. The personal names have been changed to protect the identities of gang members; but the names of the prisons remain the same. ‘Chalate’ stands for the prison in the city of Chalatenango; whereas ‘Mariona’ stands for ‘La Esperanza’ prison in San Salvador. 74. See Sullivan, ‘Third Generation Street Gangs’; Decker, ‘Youth Gangs and Violent Behavior’; Hagedorn, ‘A World of Gangs’. 75. Cruz and Carranza, ‘Pandillas y políticas’. 76. My interview with Salvadoran police sub-commissioner Hugo Ramírez, September 23, 2005. 77. Demoscopía, Maras y pandillas. Global Crime 393 ‘Before this began (the Mano Dura Plan) it was different. We hadn’t gotten to seeing things collectively. The system has united us more because there is something there, we could call it solidarity. (...) And, like it or not, we cannot look at things individually, because they haven’t treated us individually, nor have they pursued or locked us up individually.’78 Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 5. The changing nature of gang violence The first studies done of gang members, in the late 1980s and into the late-1990s,79 essentially showed that the fundamental reasons why young people joined gangs in those years had to do with processes of identity search than with the intent of joining criminal organisations. In the early 2000s, Santacruz and Concha-Eastman80 found that although a large proportion of gang members were still motivated by values of solidarity, respect, and mutual support, it was already possible to notice somewhat of a change in motivation, shifting towards a more sustained use of instrumental violence for economic purposes. By 2005, there was no doubt that an important share of both, MS-13 and Eighteenth Street Gang, have become closer to resembling criminal organisations, whose objective was to maintain control of criminal economic apparatuses.81 Protection racket structures were in full force by 2006.82 The maintenance of these criminal economic systems involves control over certain territories, in the more traditional sense of gang activity, but it also involves the threat of use of violence to control and regulate criminal economic markets. It is difficult to comprehend the dynamics of the Central American maras, both in their early stages and at present, without paying attention to the fact that their life revolved around the use of violence. While in the 1990s, most of the violence was directed to rival gang members, by the late 2000s violence is being used against all people whose actions are perceived of as posing a threat to the extortion rackets.83 Therefore, a good share of the gang organisation at present appears to be oriented towards the objectives of maintaining and expanding extortion schemes in the Central American countries where they operate. The increasing flow of deportees, the exodus generated within the Central American region by persecution from the mano dura policies, and the growing technological ease of communications have led these criminal economic systems to operate not only in national circles, but also transnationally, although in uneven ways: not all the cliques have the same access to criminal networking and not all seem to have developed the same level of transnational ties.84 A survey conducted with a representative sample of 316 imprisoned gang members in El Salvador during 2006 revealed that 28% of them kept contacts with gang members in other countries; most 78. José Luis Sanz and César Castro, ‘La 18 quiere dejar la violencia’, La Prensa Gráfica (El Salvador), November 21, 2004, pp.1–7. 79. Argueta, et al. ‘Diagnóstico de los grupos llamados “maras” en San Salvador’; Cruz and Portillo Peña, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador’; Levenson, ‘On Their Own’; Smutt and Miranda, ‘El fenómeno de las pandillas en El Salvador’. 80. Santacruz and Concha-Eastman, ‘Barrio adentro. La solidaridad violenta de las pandillas’. 81. Cruz and Carranza, ‘Pandillas y políticas’. 82. Demoscopía, ‘Maras y pandillas’. 83. María Santacruz and Elin Ranum, Segundos en el aire: mujeres pandilleras y sus prisiones (San Salvador: IUDOP-UCA, 2010). 84. Barnes, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Transnational Youth Gangs’; Gema Santamaría Balmaceda, ‘Maras y pandillas: límites de su trasnacionalidad’, Revista Mexicana de Política Exterior 81 (2007): 101–23. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 394 J.M. Cruz of them with peers in the United States, but also with people in Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. The survey also revealed that those contacts provided information (42%), facilitated the exchange of orders and rules from some leaders (23%), and supplied economic support and resources (17.6%).85 Research conducted by Ranum in Guatemala and Andino86 in Honduras has also found that some gang members have this kind of cross-national coordination and communication, but they concluded that not all cliques participate in the same way. A recent research conducted in El Salvador found that some neighbourhood cliques act in autonomous ways, but they have to pay royalties to the national leadership if they receive money from their activities.87 As the studies researching the transnational gang bonds are still scarce, it is hard to know how much of this is a structured programme of transnational gang action or if it is only a series of actions taken by some gang members or isolated cliques. However, it is clear that at present many of these actions are based on a local structure, usually found within Central American prisons, and that they are made possible as a result of an efficient flow of information and communication that transcends national boundaries. 6. The stages in the evolution of Central American maras It is possible to distinguish three stages in the way in which Central American maras have evolved. Each stage involves changes in the maras’ spatial and social relations, but they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The focus on the relationship between maras and social spaces provides the opportunity to examine both the institutional evolution of gangs and its local-to-transnational character. The first stage belongs to the era of gang formation, both in Central America and in Los Angeles, in which the mara is deeply entrenched in a specific urban neighbourhood or street. Maras entered a second stage when the gangs turned into networks that transcended such borders and, therefore, went beyond neighbourhood limits within the cities; the link to urban spaces, although still there, became more diffuse. The third stage, still current at the time of this writing, is characterised by the reworking of specific spaces – jails or detention centres – which have become nodes in intra-gang dynamics and communications. Like most of street gangs, the Central American maras began as groups linked to specific urban territories. Whether in Los Angeles or in Guatemala City, in San Salvador or in San Pedro Sula, gangs flourished as a fundamental part of popular barrios and shanty towns. In Los Angeles, these barrios were those that received Central American immigrants; in Central America, they were socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods. As part of these barrios, gangs shaped social relations in some sectors of the cities. The maras established their own turfs but they hardly had control or influence over large portion of the city because they were small groups whose influence was limited to the areas in which they gathered and operated. In these spaces, violence did occur; however, a gang’s violence would not normally extend outside these boundaries because once they were outside of their turf violence would lose its meaning. Migratory flows and the creation of gang networks changed this dynamic and led to a second stage in maras’ spatial relations. In this stage, characteristic elements appear that 85. The survey was conducted by the University of Central America as part of the project ‘Transnational Youth Gangs in Central America, Mexico, and the United States’. I am grateful to Jeannette Aguilar for sharing the database of the survey. 86. Ranum, ‘Guatemalan Youth Gangs’; Tomas Andino, ‘Las maras en la sombra. Ensayo de actualización del fenómeno pandillero en Honduras’ (San Salvador: Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas”, 2005). http://interamericanos.itam.mx/maras/docs/Diagnostico_Honduras.pdf. 87. Santacruz and Ranum, ‘Segundos en el aire’. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 Global Crime 395 will define Central American gangs as the recognised transnational groups that they are at present. With the adoption of identities originating in the streets of Southern California, the maras reconfigured living spaces in three ways. First, they expanded the urban limits of their domination. A mara not only controlled a street or a barrio, with the presence of various cliques belonging to the same gang, the gang now dominated a large number of barrios and, in some cases, a small city, town, or city suburb. In a way, gangs became omnipresent; it was possible to find the same gang dominating different sectors of a city or different cities at the same time. The second outcome of this reconfiguration of geographic space also occurred at the urban level, but belongs to the dynamics of violence: violence not only served to defend a specific turf, instead it now also served to strengthen identities. Central American research on gangs88 has found that with the growing number of cliques belonging to the same gang, the probability of contact between warring gangs multiplied beyond territorial ties; that is, a gang member roaming the city could run into another gang member belonging to a rival group anywhere. This fact meant that if they recognised each other as members of rival gangs they could cause violence in any location throughout the city. This involves a fundamental change in the dynamics of violence because it now becomes universal, meaning that it could occur anywhere, even beyond each gang’s turf or national boundaries. Aggression was no longer circumscribed to specific surroundings. Thus, the turf controlled by the gangs became diffuse, and because of this, it covered the entire space in which gang members moved, causing the conflict and insecurity that they represent to citizens to become omnipresent. Being a Salvatrucho or an Eighteen became more important than controlling a specific turf. By doing this, it reshaped gang warfare: Our enemies are the Panochos (Eighteenths) because of the panocho (eighteenth) number they say they control; the Twenty-ones because they hang out with them; the Wuarachas because they hang out with them; the Chinolas because they ‘clique’ with them and ... all the friends of the Eighteenths are our enemies ... because they want the world only for them. That’s why we kill each other ... let’s see who controls more territory (Vatos Locos MS-13 Honduran gang member).89 Finally, migratory flows led this expanding gang turf to swell beyond national borders. Gangs went from controlling streets and barrios in one country’s cities to controlling urban areas or zones in different countries, where they all conformed to the same way of recognizing their identity and using similar systems of norms, codes, and values. In this way, in Central America, identity representation systems underwent fundamental changes. It was no longer possible to say that identity cleavages depended upon the ethnic origin of the gang members, because with transnationalisation of identities it was now impossible to ensure that Mara Salvatrucha members were all native Salvadorans or that Eighteenth Street Gang members were all Chicanos or Latinos who had grown up in the United States. The gangs in Central America no longer constructed their identity in relation to their ethnic origin, as it was in Southern California, or in relation to control over a specific barrio, as 88. José Miguel Cruz, ‘Factors Associated with Juvenile Gangs in Central America’, in Street Gangs in Central America chap. 1, ed. José Miguel Cruz (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2007); Wim Savenije, Maras y barras. Pandillas y violencia juvenil en los barrios marginales de Centroamérica (San Salvador: FLACSO, 2009). 89. This gang member was interviewed by Marlon Carranza and Misael Castro; see Castro and Carranza, ‘Un acercamiento’, 160–161. Translated by me. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 396 J.M. Cruz it was in the early days in Central America, but rather in virtue of their opposition to and rivalry with the opposing gang. The third and most recent stage in gang spatial relations began when, as a consequence of the repressive anti-mara policies, gang members were routinely housed together in Central American jails, grouped by their own gang identities. The designation of prisons as being exclusively for MS-13 gang members or for Eighteenth Street Gang members signified a new reworking of mara turf domination. The gangs went on to control detention centres with a dual advantage over the control they exercise throughout urban streets: first, it is a space given to them by the authorities, which they do not have to fight for; second, in the jail, gang members from different places can be brought together around a single organisation, which provides national – and in some cases transnational – legitimacy to the leadership that emerges in these detention centres. This scenario turned Central American prisons into centres of life for gang networks and, therefore, into their central nodes. In some ways, this is turning street gangs into prison gangs with transnational ties and street presence. The centres of mara control moved from the streets to the jails and the quality of their operations consequently became more focused, more structured, and more organised.90 This does not mean that gangs abandoned the streets, but their relationship with the streets changed substantially. On the one hand, they no longer have to make their control evident through a physical presence; sufficient control can be exercised through symbolic messages, which can range from graffiti on a public wall to the execution of a neighbourhood resident who failed to honour the ‘protection fees’. But, on the other hand, gang members no longer relate directly to the people who live in the space they control. The transfer of living space to the jails and the territorial mobility involved in constantly fleeing from the police result in those who control the barrios not necessarily being the same young people all the time, but rather only those who are on duty at a particular time. This means that the gang members, youngsters previously known within the barrio and linked to its inhabitants, lose contact with the barrio, so that, as Vigil has envisaged,91 the community loses the opportunity to control and contain the violence produced by the gangs. This actually generates conditions more conducive to the development of a network that functions increasingly like business rings than a youth gang. This new configuration of space, with the jails as the principal nodes in Central America, means that relationships basically become established between the nodes or among the jails of the region and the streets in Southern California. In the maras’ early stages as a network, their nodes were rather diffuse, with barely a slight recognition that the detention centres in the United States served as places in which some decisions would be made and the luck of some gang members would be determined, but which had no influence on the direction and the actions of the different associated cliques in Central America. As the maras became more formal, organised structures in Central American penal centres, a dynamic was created in which different cliques were answerable to the gang leaderships in the jails and would establish regional communication among themselves through those jail nodes. This dynamic also allowed new types of criminal economic activity. In an institutional environment plagued with serious flaws and with an army of loyalist members roaming outside, prison gangs’ capabilities to maintain full communication with the streets 90. Galo Meza, ‘Situación de maras o pandillas en Honduras’; Ministerio de Seguridad Pública y Justicia, ‘Reporte de las pandillas en El Salvador’. 91. Vigil, ‘Barrio Gangs’. Global Crime 397 enabled them to create racketeering cartels and ensure their survival both at the streets and at prisons. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 7. Conclusion Central American gangs have undergone a significant change since they first appeared in the mid-1980s. The original beginnings of maras as street gangs do not bear a direct relationship to regional migration but to local conditions of marginality and widespread violence. However, maras as transnational networks and as protection rackets in Central America are the result – in part – of the intense human and cultural flows that circulate among Southern California and the countries of Central America. But, in contrast to most interpretations in the media and some scholars about the role played by migration, gang members were not seeking to expand their franchise and their drug distribution networks through relocation. Rather, migration is important because it contributed to maras expansion through the diffusion of Southern California gang identities. The key point is not the relocation of gang members trying to expand their drug business, as is usually taken for granted in the US literature; the fundamental feature of gang migration in the Central American case is that deportation and circular migration disseminated gang identities, which helped the reconfiguration of vast franchise networks and, therefore, led to identity-based gang warfare within Central American countries. Such gang warfare universalised the threats of physical violence, increased cohesion among gangs, and actually escalated the events of violence in societies where the criminal justice institutions have been historically weak. Then, as government enforcement agencies began their massive crackdowns on street gangs, the mara networks acquired an increasingly formal structure as more specific tasks were distributed among the members to cope with the assault. This warfare encouraged greater organisation and the search for resources, namely, guns, drugs, and, more importantly, money, that were not hard to find in institutionally weak Central American countries. This is how the incentive for cohesion and the identification of a clear objective around which to organise certain collective actions came to be involuntarily given from the outside: indiscriminate government repression ended up strengthening the mara networks rather than weakening them. The mass jailing turned detention centres into standing assemblies and provided the spaces for strategic decision-making. The persecution and harassment in the streets – frequently using extralegal operations – drove them to associate with drug cartels on those new spaces and to envisage new forms of retaliation and survival. What had been informal identity-based networks went on to become to a large extent rather formal prison-based criminal networks capable of developing city-wide protection rackets to generate resources. In the formation of Central American maras, a transnational process nourished local dynamics of marginalisation, illegality, and violence. The gangs were certainly helped by migration and deportation processes as the latter shaped the diffusion of mara-identities, but the main drivers were still local. Gangs reacted to local dynamics of violence as they participated in this universal war against each other and against the state. They also found opportunities as they networked and developed protection rings from the prisons. The Central American maras, the MS-13 and the Eighteenth, have gone from inhabiting the barrio to inhabiting the transit zone between northern Central America and southern United States. They have gone from living among and confronting urban dwellers to challenging the authorities and institutions of the region’s countries from behind prison walls. 398 J.M. Cruz They have gone from being part of everyday lives of the common citizen to controlling some of the local criminal economies from the lawless Central American jails. Downloaded by [School of Oriental and African Studies] at 03:01 03 April 2012 Acknowledgements An earlier version of this article was prepared for the project Redes Transnacionales en la Cuenca de los Huracanes at ITAM, Mexico. Funding for this article was partially provided by the Ford Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation. Portions of this article were presented at the workshop ‘Violence and Citizenship in Post-Authoritarian Latin America’, organised by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University, on 7 March 2008. I am grateful to Paul Almeida, Carol Atkinson, Susan Cruz, Scott Decker, Brian Faughnan, John Hagedorn, Cheryl Maxson, Natalia Saltalamacchia, María Santacruz, and the anonymous reviewers of Global Crime for comments on earlier versions of this article. All shortcomings and flaws are mine. Notes on contributor José Miguel Cruz is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Florida International University. He has been the director of the University Institute of Public Opinion at the University of Central America in San Salvador and worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the United Nations Development Program on the topic of Central American violence. His latest book, Street Gangs in Central America (UCA Editores, San Salvador, 2007), summarises an 8-year long research project on gangs in the Central American region.
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