Global Gangs in El Salvador:

Maras and the Politics of Violence

José Miguel Cruz1

Paper presented at the Global Gangs Workshop,

Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding,
Geneva, May 14-15, 2009

Where does Mara Salvatrucha come from? How did the U.S.-born Eighteenth Street Gang
become a powerhouse of the Salvadoran streets? The Mara Salvatrucha, also known as the MS-
13, and the Eighteenth Street Gang, branded also as Barrio 18, are the two major youth gangs in
El Salvador. According to different sources (Aguilar and Miranda 2006; USAID 2006), between
2002 and 2006, both gangs comprised more than 87 percent of gang membership in El Salvador.
These gangs are known not only because of their control of the Salvadoran neighborhoods and
most of the prisons nowadays, but also because groups of street gangs using those same names
are found in every country of the North American hemisphere from Canada to Honduras, and
even some cliques have been reported in distant countries such as Australia, Germany and
Bolivia. Yet, the common answer to the question as to why MS-13 and the Eighteenth Street
Gang are the major gangs in this Central American country is usually narrowed to the backward-
and-forward migration of Salvadorans to the United States. The evidence, however, points to a
more intricate response.
Migration and deportation policies in the United States have indeed played an important
role in boosting the phenomenon of street gangs in El Salvador, but it is an overstatement and a
naivety to say that the dominance of MS-13 and Barrio 18 in Central America and their
seemingly growing transnational character is essentially the result of the circular Salvadoran
migration to the U.S. Should we accept this argument alone, we would find difficult to explain

1
I am grateful to María Santacruz and Bessy Morán for the support provided in the development of this paper.
why the Eighteenth Street Gang, a gang originally formed by Chicanos and Mexican immigrants,
have not put down roots in Mexican soil as they have done in El Salvador; or why the Belizean
Crips and Bloods have not developed in the same way as the Salvadoran gangs. Gangs are the
outcome of different factors. Marginalization, migration, street cross-culturalization, and —what
I shall call— the politics of violence, being the key ones to explain the rise and predominance of
the youth gangs in El Salvador, also locally known as maras.
This article draws substantial theoretical insight from the work of Vigil (2002) on
multiple marginalization, Hagedorn (2008) on gang institutionalization, and Decker on the
dynamics of gang violence (Decker 1996; Decker, Bynum, and Weisel 1998; Decker and Van
Winkle 1996); and is based on the research program on gangs developed by the University of
Central America in San Salvador (Aguilar 2007; Carranza 2005; Cruz and Portillo Peña 1998;
ERIC et al. 2001; Santacruz and Concha-Eastman 2001) and other institutions (Smutt and
Miranda 1998). It argues that contemporary street Salvadoran gangs emerged as a result of social
conditions in El Salvador, then they were shaped by the intensive exchange of young people,
cultural goods and policies between the U.S. and El Salvador, and were finally strengthened by
the need to deal with the mano dura (firm hand) policies, and extralegal violent actors stemming
from state institutions and civil society.
The paper is divided in three sections. The first part addresses the factors that lie behind
the emergence of gangs as a major social issue in El Salvador; then, it reviews the path of gangs
strengthening and the process through which they became street powerhouses not only in El
Salvador but also in the region. Finally, the paper analyzes the link between gangs and violence
in a country considered one of the most violent nations in the western hemisphere (UNODC
2007).

The Emergence of Salvadoran Maras

Youth gangs are not a recent phenomenon in Salvadoran streets. There are reports that gangs
roamed urban centers in the 1960s following the processes of increasing urbanization and
industrialization that El Salvador experienced starting in the 1950s (Savenije and van der Borgh
2006; Smutt and Miranda 1998). Yet, youth gangs started to draw some public notice in the late
1980s, in the middle of the twelve-year-long civil war that devastated the country. In March
1990, months after one of the most intense guerrilla offensives for the control of San Salvador,

2
the capital of the nation, newspapers reported that youth gangs were collaborating with rebel
forces in some outlying areas of the cities.2 Those gangs, which were also known as maras3,
were essentially comprised of young males coming from poor neighborhoods and dysfunctional
families (Argueta et al. 1992).
In the late 1980s, a myriad of youth gangs populated not only San Salvador outskirts and
peripheral areas of the big cities, but also downtown and blue-collar neighborhoods that were
experiencing a decline of city services as a result of the ongoing civil war. Those gangs were
characterized by turf-based groups or cliques who controlled specific, well-defined
neighborhoods and streets. All of them were known as maras, and in some cases, their name
denoted the specific area where they dwelled: Mara Morazán, Mara Rosa, Mara Fosa, Mara
Quiñónez, Mara Santa Anita, Mara Máquina, Mau-Mau, etc. (Argueta et al. 1992; Smutt and
Miranda 1998). Among those gangs it was already possible to find groups called Mara
Salvatrucha, MS, Locos 13, Mara 18; or groups that borrowed their names from American mass
culture: Mara AC/DC, Mara Batman, Mara Ozzy Osbourne, etc. As reported by Argueta et al.
(1992) and Smutt and Miranda (1998), these groups engaged in some criminal activities, but
spent most of their time hanging out together, and consuming “soft” drugs.
This pattern of many turf-based youth gangs started to change after the end of the civil
war in 1992, when many Salvadoran refugees living in the United States started to go back to El
Salvador, some of them voluntarily, but also many others involuntarily through forced
deportation. Although deportations were not a rare practice before the 1990s,4 the bulk of forced
returns took place after the U.S. passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1995. The Act established that any alien who was serving a
longer-than-a-year sentence would be subject to removal from the U.S. after completing the full

2
See: La Prensa Gráfica, “Denuncian el grave daño causado por “mara gallo”, 2 March, 1990, page 56.
3
There is a lot of misinformation regarding the origins of the term maras to label the Salvadoran youth gangs. The
most common myth, 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 myth, 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 early 1980s. In the Salvadoran
vernacular, the term commonly refers to any group of people and is widely used as synonymous with “people”.
When Salvadoran gangs started hanging out together in Los Angeles as a distinctive group from other Hispanic
gangs in the early 1980s (Vigil 2002), in a process of semantic narrowing, they adopted the term “mara” to
underline their own cultural roots (Cruz and Portillo 1998).
4
See: San Francisco Chronicle, “U.S. Ousting More Gang Members”, 12 April, 1989, page A-15.

3
prison term (Thale and Falkenburger 2006). This would prove to have significant consequences
for the later development of Salvadoran gangs.
The influx of young gang members back to El Salvador did not mean the formation of
new gangs or the development of a territorial war between the newcomers and the street gangs
already rooted in Salvadoran cities. Instead, the arrival of young Salvadorans who had joined
street gangs in the U.S., mainly in the Los Angeles city area, and who had served prison along
with other gang members in the U.S., meant the diffusion of the cultural styles of the U.S. pattern
of gang membership. These cultural styles not only comprised the names of gang organizations,
such as MS-13 and Eighteenth Street Gang, but also consisted of the use of tattoos, the utilization
of hand signs to communicate, and, more importantly for the increase of violence and criminal
behavior, they included the norms, values, and knowledge about how to behave, about who is the
enemy, and about who is friend (Cruz 2007a; Santacruz and Concha-Eastman 2001). Those
norms and cultural values were rapidly assimilated and transformed in Salvadoran streets, but
they facilitated communication and mutual understanding between the local gangs and the
newcomers, who kept landing in El Salvador.5
The youth gangs, which at first were comprised of several small territorial groups,
became two large groups of cliques, the MS-13 and the Eighteenth Street Gang. A study
conducted in 1996 with gang members in the metropolitan area of San Salvador, the country’s
capital, showed that 84 percent of gangs were affiliated to either MS-13 or 18th Street Gang; only
16 percent of gang members belonged to other gangs.
Yet, it would be a mistake to ascribe the expansion of gang memberships and the
emergence of the “gang problem” in the 1990s to the constant influx of deportees and returnees
of the post-war years. The majority of gang members joined the cliques and barrios on
Salvadoran soil and had never been outside the country. The same study conducted in 1996
showed that only one in every ten gang members had joined the gang organization in the United
States, predominantly in Los Angeles (Cruz and Portillo 1998); all the rest had “jumped in” in
Salvadoran streets. These percentages barely changed since then. In a similar study conducted by
Santacruz and Concha-Eastman in 2001, only 12 percent of gang members said they had been in

5
However, as early as 1996, some gang members in El Salvador, who had joined the gang in the U.S. were
complaining that Salvadoran gangs using not only the same name but also the same clique name, would not follow
the same norms as observed in Southern California. They described local gangs as “más locos” (crazier) and to be
more “on the loose” than in the U.S. (Cruz and Portillo Peña 1998; Santacruz and Cruz 2001).

4
the United States; a recent study conducted only with imprisoned gang members revealed that
only 7.3 percent had been in the U.S. (Aguilar 2007). So, youth gangs in El Salvador were
essentially formed by local teenagers who had never been in the United States. As noted by a
former researcher of Salvadoran gangs: “the influence of U.S. urban and marginal cultures is not
essential to the existence of Salvadoran gangs, but it affects and shapes those gangs (Sisti quoted
in Cruz and Portillo 1996: 56).
Newcomers from the U.S. served as agents of cross-culturalization and social contact
across borders; they were the brokers of the transnational forces that engulfed the countries of
the Americas under the relentless push of globalization (Sassen 2007; Zilberg 2004) , but the
reasons why young people kept joining the gangs and why street organizations blew up into a
major social issue were largely endogenous and related to the dynamics of violence, as we will
see below.
A society historically shattered by poverty, social inequality, and political violence,
1990s post-war El Salvador was far from solving the structural problems that contributed to drive
it to civil war. By 1992, 65 percent of the population lived under the poverty line and the poorest
20 percent received only 3.2 percent of the national income (PNUD 2003). In addition, the long
civil war had left a fragmented and traumatized civil society, with tens of thousands internally
displaced inhabitants making their way into the major cities, and the flooding of the streets with
weapons, which included assault rifles, grenades, and semi-automatic pistols (UNODC 2007).
Youth gangs thrived in environments of economic marginalization, social exclusion, and
violence. Every research project on gangs conducted since the early 1990s, whether carried out
before the Immigration Act (Argueta et al. 1992), after it (Cruz and Portillo 1998; Santacruz and
Concha-Eastman 2001; Santacruz and Cruz 2001; Smutt and Miranda 1998; Carranza 2005), or
after the mano dura law in the mid 2000s (Aguilar 2007; Aguilar and Miranda 2006;
Demoscopía 2007), point to poverty, the existence of poor quality formal education, the lack of
career education, and the ubiquity of violence as the factors that remain behind the local
emergence of youth gangs. On the issue of poverty, for example, some studies underscored the
experience of becoming a poor. More important than the lack of resources, these studies found
that young people who had to drop out of school for economic reasons or who had to move to
poorer neighborhoods, tended to join the gangs in higher numbers than those who had been out
of school or lived in extreme poverty all their life (Cruz, Carranza, and Santacruz 2004; Smutt

5
and Miranda 1998). Smutt and Miranda underlined the importance of the processes of rapid and
unplanned urban growth, pointing out that such processes created hundreds of neighborhoods
and slums lacking the most basic services. Youngsters found easier to spend their time on the
streets than at their own homes. In addition, many of these potential gang members came from
families in which the use of violence against their own members was very common. Teens
abandoned their homes not only because of the physical restraints that the household imposed,
but also as a result of the constant violence and threat that even the family represented to them
(Cruz and Portillo Peña 1998; Santacruz and Cruz 2001; Savenije and van der Borgh 2006). As
one Eighteenth Street Gang member once put it: “I have always lived with violence. At home, I
suffered violence from my parents; the difference being on the streets is that I can pay it back”
(Cruz and Portillo 1998).
All these conditions and processes point to what James Diego Vigil (1988; 2002) has
called “multiple marginality”. Salvadoran gangs emerged as a result of multi-level processes of
marginalization. These mechanisms did not entail ethnic or racial discrimination, since ethnicity
is not a major social issue in El Salvador; but rather they entailed socioeconomic discrimination
that prompted other marginalization processes. In the 1990s, increasing numbers of young
people found themselves living in the ecologically marginal areas of the city as a result of
economic transformations and war displacements. In their communities, some youngsters were
expelled from schools and sport clubs. Lacking adequate job training, they found no employment
or suitable means to support their own lives. At home, dysfunctional and violent families, usually
strained by shortages and deprivation, drove them to the streets. Facing several mechanisms of
exclusion, many children and teenagers in post-war El Salvador found the response to their
marginalization on the streets. Salvadoran barrios provided them with both, pals and new
sources of identity. Such identities, being a Salvatrucho or a Dieciocho (18) would grant
meaning to their lives; but more importantly, they would provide youth with ways to cope with
marginality and exclusion because those imported identities have also been created as a result of
marginalization in the mega cities of Southern California (Vigil 2002).

The Institutionalization of Salvadoran Maras

Young people joined gangs not because of the influx of U.S. deportees, but because the local
conditions in post-war El Salvador were ripe for the affiliation of hundreds of teenagers with

6
these organizations. However, neither massive deportation nor marginalization explains alone
why Salvadoran youth gangs have become so powerful in Central American streets. After all,
massive deportation is not an exclusive feature of recent migration in El Salvador; and young
people are also being relentlessly marginalized in “maras-free”countries such as Nicaragua
(Rodgers 2006).
In order to understand how youth gangs have evolved over time in El Salvador, it is
necessary to understand how they have become institutionalized, this is, how they have endured,
grown stronger and become a loose alliance of franchises across El Salvador and the hemisphere
(Hagedorn 2008). It is necessary to pay attention to what I will call the “politics of violence”,
namely, the collection of institutions, actors, and policies that boosted the extreme use of
violence as a normal feature of Salvadoran youth gangs. This concept is fed by two different
inputs. The first one is that gangs are strengthened in the long run by violence and the threat of
violence coming from different social actors, not only other gangs. Conflicts and threats of
violence lead to social cohesiveness among gang members, prompt the emergence of roles and
structures within the gang, and reinforce the norms that justify the use of violence (Decker,
Bynum, and Weisel 1998; Decker and Van Winkle 1996; Hagedorn 1988). The second idea
comes from a Charles Tilly’s insight, which contends that when a phenomenon of large-scale
collective violence occurs, as that of Salvadoran maras, government forces of one sort or another
also play an important role in the overall violence (Tilly 2003). In other words, youth gangs in El
Salvador have become institutionalized as a result, in part, of what the state and the actors
associated with it have done to deal with gangs.
One of the characteristics of gangs in El Salvador is that they have been constantly
transformed by the surrounding conditions. As Moore (1991) and others have argued regarding
L.A. youth gangs, these types of organizations have never been allowed to evolve by themselves.
Salvadoran gangs are no exception. They have developed from being turf-based small gangs who
spent most of their time hanging out together at the slums and city-squares, to being a
confederation of cliques or networks, who share a sort of brand franchise (MS-13 or 18th Street),
sometimes loosely, sometimes tightly, that control some of the prisons and that have gotten
involved in organized crime activities (Cruz 2007a).

7
 Broadly put, it is possible to distinguish at least three different phases in the recent
evolution of youth gangs in El Salvador.6 First, as we have seen in the section about the
emergence of Salvadoran maras, youth gangs comprised a number of small territory-based
groups without any connection between them. Original maras were formed by young males and
females, ages ranging from 7 to 35 years old, with strong internal cohesiveness, and a clearly-
defined leadership within the group (Argueta et al. 1992). These gangs usually engaged in minor
violent conflicts for the control of some neighborhoods and public spaces, and carried out
different types of group activities, from partying together to planning criminal actions, such as
robberies and street brawls. Some of these gangs served as neighborhood watchdogs and kept a
close relationship with the community (Savenije and Andrade-Eekhoff 2003).
This configuration of gang phenomena started to change after the end of the civil war.
The return of young people who have witnessed gang culture in Southern California introduced
identity patterns that yielded not only the reconfiguration of gangs in two larger franchises, but
also the transformation of gang warfare in El Salvador and later in northern Central America. As
I have pointed out elsewhere (Cruz 2007a), the adoption of U.S.-born gang identities facilitated
the construction of two nation-wide confederations of cliques that exacerbated the conflicts
between gangs. Youth gangs not only fought over territory control, they also fought over
identity. Southern California gang culture revolved around identities, and these identities
prompted a different arrangement of the Salvadoran gang world. Instead of generating many
other different maras, a sort of rainbow of gangs as Vigil once put it in the case of Los Angeles
(2002), gang cross-culturalization straightened up existing gangs; it aligned all gangs with MS-
13 or Eighteenth Street. Being a Salvatrucho or an Eighteen became more important than
controlling a specific turf. By doing this, it redefined the meaning of gang warfare.
In El Salvador, where ethnic lines do not exist across the population, the difference
between being a Dieciocho or a Salvatrucho is not one of racial or ethnic cleavages, as in other
countries,7 but rather an arbitrary one. Being all Salvadorans living in their own country,
affiliation to MS-13 does not mean a particular citizenship trait; furthermore, Barrio 18
membership does not mean being less Salvadoran or rather a true Chicano.8 Young people in El

6
For a comprehensive treatment of this topic, see: Cruz (2007a).
7
See Hagedorn (2008) for a discussion about the importance of ethnicity in the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa.
8
However, it is interesting to note that Mara Salvatrucha members usually claimed that Eighteenth Street Gang
members were traitors to their country because they have sworn allegiance to a “Mexican” gang (Cruz and Portillo

8
Salvador joined Mara Salvatrucha or Eighteenth Street Gang because a certain clique happened
to be in control of the neighborhood or community where the gang candidate roamed. Once a
young man had jumped in, he was supposed to show his loyalty to the franchise by taking part in
the warfare against the rival gang. Therefore, young gang members and wannabes asserted their
identity and their allegiance to the gang franchise by attacking and killing rival franchise gang
members, even when the victims did not mean a direct threat to the clique neighborhood (Cruz
2007b). Escalation of violence was fueled by the availability of firearms, but also by the absence
of any significant program of gang prevention and control. In the mid 1990s, Salvadoran
institutions were more concerned for applying the Washington Consensus guidelines than for
strengthening public security and mitigating the devastating effects of structural adjustment
(Cruz 2007b).
Gang warfare between Barrio 18 and MS-13 shaped the gang phenomenon in El
Salvador during the 1990s. Cliques and neighborhood gangs —even the few who did not
formally belonged to any of the franchises— were drawn into war and this conflict dominated
the dynamics of gang activities. Gang violence increased social cohesion among the cliques that
happened to share the same franchise, even when their gang members barely know between each
other (Santacruz and Concha-Eastman 2001). It also provided wannabes who were seeking
retaliation for the killing of friends and relatives with new reasons for being part of the gang
(Santacruz and Cruz 2001). Finally, violence among gangs redefined the struggle for urban
spaces and the utilization of tattoos in their own body (Cruz 2007a). Instead of controlling
specific turfs, streets, and squares, gangs moved to rule regions of the city or even small cities.
They spent more time tattooing their bodies to show their allegiance to the gang franchise than
marking their territories through wall graffiti. Identity was more important than turf.
Two surveys conducted with nearly 1,000 gang members each in 1996 and 2001 showed
that the bulk of gang victimization was perpetrated by rival gangs (see Table 1). At this stage,
although police officials were responsible of a significant share of violence against maras, youth
gangs seemed to be more driven by seeking retaliation against rival groups than by confronting
the police.

1998). This charge, nonetheless, has to be understood as part of the gang warfare between Barrio 18 and MS-13. In
any case, both gangs have also thriven among Guatemalans and Hondurans living in their own countries.

9
 Table 1
Who has physically hurt you in the last six months? (%)
Year of survey
1996 2001
Rival gang 55.8 48.5
Police 29.9 30.9
Private individuals 4.6 11.0
Same gang member 4.6 6.3
Others 3.5 2.0
Don’t know 1.9 1.2

Sources: (Cruz and Portillo Peña 1998; Santacruz and Concha-Eastman 2001)

This second stage in Salvadoran gang development lasted until the early 2000s. In 2001,
Santacruz and Concha-Eastman had already reported that gangs were slowly moving to a more
criminal oriented behavior as a result, in part, of the introduction of hard drugs, such as cocaine
and crack, into the Salvadoran market. However, the definitive push for the transformation of
Salvadoran gangs came from the state. It came from the 2003 enactment of the Mano Dura Act.
Mano dura (firm hand) was a wide government effort to tackle gangs and to gain public support
for the approaching elections of 2004 (Aguilar 2004). It comprised a national law that allowed
police officers to randomly apprehend and book young men on suspicion of being gang member.
It also included a considerable media and public relations campaign aimed to depict gangs as
shouldering the primary responsibility for violence and crime in El Salvador (Cruz 2009).
The Mano Dura act put in motion a series of events that ended up transforming
Salvadoran gangs. First, it unleashed massive police and military crackdowns on gangs. These
operations allowed for the capture and mass incarceration of gang members, thus saturating and
overpopulating the already inadequate prison system. For example, a 2005 report by the
National Civilian Police details how between July 23, 2003 and July 8, 2005 the police captured
30,934 alleged gang members. Although the majority of these indictments represent different
captures of the same person (gang members were arrested, freed after 48 hours and then arrested
again), the figure reflects the volume of gang-related police activity that took place in a relatively
short period of time (Aguilar and Miranda 2006). Second, by overpopulating the prisons, these
crackdowns provided the opportunity for gang organization and strengthening. Being in prisons,
youth gangs began to organize themselves into hierarchical structures. Dozens of gang members
who shared the same gang franchise, but who came from different places in the country,
established contact, recognized other cliques, and refashioned gang organization. This was made

10
possible, in part, by the decision of the authorities to separate gangs in detention centers
according to their gang membership.9 By allocating all youth gang members together, the mano
dura policies nourished a sort of long-term national gang assembly and facilitated
communication and connections among gang members both nationwide as well as internationally
insofar as deportees with contacts in the U.S. also served sentences inside the Salvadoran jails.
Third, the stroke against gangs opened the door to extralegal activities perpetrated by
state agents and actors associated with them. Security institutions loosened their internal control
and supervision systems, and gang persecution led to violation of the fundamental human rights
of those arrested. In addition, the overall climate of the “war on gangs” made it possible for
armed groups engaged in “social cleansing” to increase their activities against young people
suspected of belonging to gangs (Cruz and Carranza 2006). A report from the Forensic Institute
(Instituto de Medicina Legal) of El Salvador in 2005 cited by Cruz, Fernández and Santamaría
(2007) stated that 59 percent of the more than 3,800 murders committed that year were by
unknown assailants, many of them bearing the marks of summary executions. Highly regarded
human rights organizations, such as the Archbishop Legal Aid Office in San Salvador, attributed
many homicides of gang members in 2006 to social cleansing groups (Thale and Falkenburger
2006).
And finally, the mano dura policies allowed actors other than those linked to state
apparatuses to participate in the war on gangs. This included involvement by businessmen from
a variety of levels in financing illegal groups, the participation of civilians seeking retribution in
the form of “social cleansing,” and the development of an economy of crime wherein assassins
were contracted to do away with enemies (Cruz, Fernandez de Castro, and Santamaría
2007). Table 2 shows the opinions of more than three hundred imprisoned gang members in
2006 about who is responsible of killing their peers.

9
In 2001, a prison policy was implemented that separated gang members by their gang identity to prevent outbreaks
of violence inside the prisons. In practice, this has led to certain jails being known as Mara Salvatrucha prisons and
others as Eighteenth Street jails. See: Valencia, Daniel. 2009. Los alegatos de Frankestein. Entrevista con Carlos
Ernesto Mojica Lechuga, alias "El Viejo Lin". In El Faro, April 13, 2009.
http://www.elfaro.net/secciones/Noticias/20090413/noticias2_20090413.asp

11
 Table 2
Opinion about who is responsible of murders against other gang members
Perpetrators Percentage

Police and other government officials 43.0

Rival gang 21.2
Cleansing groups and vigilantes 11.4
Organized crime, drug traffickers 7.0
Same gang, same clique 3.8
Don’t know 13.6

Source: (Aguilar 2007)

In response, gangs prepared for an all-out war against the state and its agents. For the
youth gangs franchises, whether MS-13 or Barrio 18, this war did not have a political agenda,
although some gang leaderships tried to articulate one10; rather gang members prepared to face
crackdowns by punishing those they suspected of collaborating with state agents or simply by
incorporating more actively into the criminal networks that provided more resources to cope with
the government strike (Cruz and Carranza 2006). As envisaged by some gang scholars when
analyzing the role of violence in U.S. gangs (Decker and Van Winkle 1996; Hagedorn 1988),
Salvadoran maras responded to the mano dura law with more group cohesion, brand-new
hierarchical organization, and resolved violence. The use of extralegal force by state actors
expanded the spaces for the mediation of violence; and group confinement in jails provided them
access to all sorts of criminal networks. Gangs also responded to state attacks by wielding
extreme violence. Massive incarceration provided the strategic space, the resources, and the
connections with other violent actors that allowed them to strengthening their own organizations.
In conclusion, the current situation of youth gangs in El Salvador is the result of the
politics of violence, this is, the interplay of actors, institutions, and policies that wielded violence
as the primary tool for dealing with marginalized youth in El Salvador.

The Violence of Salvadoran Maras

In spite of the end of the civil war nearly two decades ago, violence still reigns in El Salvador. A
United Nations report (UNODC 2007) states that the murder rate for this Central American
country was 56 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2006. This is the highest homicide rate in the western
hemisphere, and is six times the worldwide average. Yet, it is difficult to ascertain the exact

10
See: Valencia (2009) on footnote 9.

12
degree to which youth gangs participate in homicidal violence. Reliable data related to the
responsibility of youth gangs in the overall violence is scarce. According to police sources,
around 30 percent of homicides in 2004 and 2005 were perpetrated by gang members; however,
the Salvadoran Forensic Institute indicated that gang related murders were only 10 percent in
2004, and 13.4 percent in 2005 (Aguilar and Miranda 2006). Gangs do not seem to be the sole
perpetrators of violence, in fact there are many other violent actors behind the crime figures
(UNODC 2007), but it would be inaccurate to say that youth gangs do not significantly take part
in the overall crime maelstrom.
In any case, young people, whether gang members or not, endure high levels of violence
in El Salvador. A report from the same forensic institute reveals that 41 percent of murders in
2006 were perpetrated against young people aged 10 to 24 years old.11 Nevertheless, violent
behavior takes a significant toll on gangs. A survey conducted with more than one thousand gang
members in the metropolitan area of San Salvador showed that 70 percent of gang members in
1996 had lost at least one close friend or relative as a consequence of violence (Cruz and Portillo
Peña 1998). The survey also revealed that nearly 52 percent of gang members had needed
medical attention after being assaulted by other people. Santacruz and Concha-Eastman (2001)
found that violent behavior usually brought with it high rates of victimization among gang
members.
As gangs have institutionalized in El Salvador, the violence used by them has increased
and turned more complex and organized. Before the transformation of gangs in the early 1990s,
the maras criminal activities can be described as mugging, pick-pocketing, shoplifting, brawling,
and other rather low-level felonies. Occasionally, they would engage in deadly assaults, rapes,
and robberies. Drug consumption was limited to marijuana, and early gangs used industrial glue
as inhalant to get high. Cocaine and other hard drugs were not mentioned in early studies
(Argueta et al. 1992). Since the mid 1990s, gangs got involved in more serious types of crimes.
Research reports (Cruz and Portillo Peña 1998; Santacruz and Cruz 2001; Smutt and Miranda
1998) usually pointed out that gangs were involved in murders, rapes, assaults, and robberies;
some of the cliques started collaborating with organized crime cartels in drug trafficking and
began to consume hard drugs and use firearms more regularly. Santacruz and Concha-Eastman
(2001), for example, reported that 40 percent of gang members in San Salvador were using drugs

11
The report can be found at: http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_397.pdf. Last date accessed: April 10, 2009.

13
such as crack and cocaine; the same study revealed that youth gangs had easy access to firearms:
46.3 per cent of male gang members had handguns, 21 per cent had “homemade” guns, and 11.6
per cent had grenades.
The mano dura blow seemed to have moved youth gangs toward a more organized type
of violence, but criminalization of gang activities has even led to more difficulties in collecting
data and researching gang life in El Salvador. Some recent research based on interviews carried
out with gang members in prisons (Aguilar and Carranza 2008) and on government intelligence
(USAID 2006) points out that maras are increasingly engaging in racketeering and extortion
activities against business owners and bus drivers in major cities. In fact, according to the police,
57 per cent of the 1,427 arrests under the charge of extortion in 2006 were carried out against
gang members. Gangs are also participating in hit men activities, and collaborating with cartels
of organized crime and drug trafficking. According to the survey conducted among gang
members in prisons in 2006, 27 per cent of gang members who said that had collaborated with
organized crime cartels have worked as hit men, 21 per cent have smuggled arms into the
country, and 17 per cent have participated in car hijacks (Aguilar and Carranza 2008).
While government officials claim that youth gangs are taking over drug trafficking
corridors in Central America and controlling organized crime cartels (USAID 2006), the
evidence is rather weak and suggests that although some cliques might be fighting over the
control of drug markets, others remain clearly separated from organized crime structures
(Aguilar and Carranza 2008). There are even some indications that cliques are turning more
autonomous from the franchise guidelines generated from the prisons, and they are going back to
pursue their own particular economic interests in the neighborhood they control.12
In sum, violence is embedded in youth gang activities in El Salvador. The range and
magnitude of violence and criminal activities have changed and have become more and more
severe over time. Violence, whether perpetrated by the same gangs or perpetrated by the state,
has transformed the maras and has contributed to their institutionalization in Central America.

Conclusion
Youth gangs in El Salvador are the result of complex mechanisms of marginalization and
violence. Widespread poverty, inequality, and social exclusion provided the breeding ground for

12
Telephone interview with María Santacruz Giralt, April 13, 2009.

14
the emergence of groups of young men and women searching for identity and respect. They
found them in the streets mingled with imported gang culture from Southern California. Such
culture not only provided patterns of behavior, but also granted norms and values that
reconfigured the gang phenomenon. In the 1990s, Mara Salvatrucha and Salvadoran Eighteenth
Street Gang took over the streets by assimilation, not by warfare. Nevertheless, since then, gang
identity has been constructed through the use of violence, and local conditions such as
institutional weakness, availability of firearms and relentless marginalization fueled the universal
warfare between the two major gangs. The mano dura law only exacerbated gang violence. It
institutionalized the state’s use of violence against the youth, and provided the maras with the
opportunity to organize, unite their cliques, and develop regional and national leaderships. In
addition, the all-war against gangs brought in new violent actors, more resources, and fresh
motifs to the maelstrom of Salvadoran violence.

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