How El Salvador Destroyed their Brutal Gangs

How did El Salvador destroy their gangs? The story of Gang violence in El Salvador isn’t safely tucked far away in Central America like you might think. It’s effects have spread to the United States where the Salvadoran gang M13 has grown exponentially. Prisons have become overcrowded and filled. 70,000 people were arrested. How did the Cold War and influx of arms into the country change the dynamic? We look at the situation from multiple points of view and perspectives to dive deep into the historical and modern day aspects.

Written by: Chris Cappy & Diego Aceituno

Edited by: Savvy Studios

The story of gang violence in El Salvador is a warning to everyone about the steps a country will go to if a domestic security problem is not addressed and allowed to fester for too long.

Nearly 20,000 people were killed in El Salvador by gang violence from 2014 to 2017 and the country was known as one of the most dangerous places in the entire world. Meanwhile the solution to destroying these gangs has forced us to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions about choosing between freedom and security. El Salvador itself is not a large country at only 21,000 square kilometers, making it roughly the size of my state of New Jersey. With 6.5 million people living in El Salvador the nation is the smallest yet most densely packed country in all of Central America. Looking at the natural beauty of the nation you would be surprised to learn it has dealt with decades of ugly civil war, gang violence, and poverty. Due to this around 20% of the country’s citizenry now live abroad in other Latin American countries and the US. Part of El Salvador's geopolitical importance comes from the fact that they are located on the coast of the Pacific near important shipping lanes and they neighbor countries that are close to the Panama canal. Instability could and has in the past quickly overflowed into neighboring countries.

El Salvador is way more closely intertwined with the United States than you might think. Total trade between the two was $6.7 billion in 2021 and 2.5 million Salvadorans call the US home. Remittances from Salvadorans who live and work in the United States totaled a whopping $7.1 billion in 2021 which makes up literally 25% of El Salvador's entire GDP.

What are Remittances? Remittances are when migrants send part of their money they earn back home to support their families. Due in part to this the USA and El Salvador tied by the hip in an economic common law union. The relationship between them is so tight that El Salvador was actually one of the only Latin American nations to join the U.S. military coalition in the 2003 war in Iraq. If that’s not in sickness and in health I don’t know what is.

Stability in El Salvador is pretty important to the US for a few reasons. One of them being that El Salvador's international airport is one of only two in all of Latin America that the U.S. military is authorized to conduct anti-narcotics missions from. That’s pretty important if you ask me. The US also has an interest in keeping immigration levels at a certain rate and violence and instability in the country can send those rates up. By the end of 2022, the global number of asylum-seekers and refugees from El Salvador had reached over 200,000 people. US military assistance to El Salvador was about $15 million between 2016 and 2020 to help address the gang violence. But In 2020 that aid stopped partly because of criticisms about a perception that the country was sliding into authoritarianism. The reason for that slide has to do with their fight against Gang Violence.

#WAR #POLICE #SECURITY