Transnational moral panic: neoliberalism and the spectre of MS-13

Abstract

Since the election of Donald Trump, MS-13, the Salvadoran street gang, has become a national security and foreign policy concern for his administration. Due to the violence of street gangs like MS-13, El Salvador has become a country with the highest rates of homicides, alongside forced migration. Like much of the mainstream media and personal accounts of asylum seekers, the arguments about violence emerging from street gangs in El Salvador from the Trump administration are based on actual material conditions, but what is often missing are the root causes. This article argues that the production of a moral panic over MS-13 has been transnationalised between the United States and El Salvador to displace the contradictions of global capitalism in El Salvador to a local and deported relative surplus population. It argues that the spectre of MS-13 in El Salvador and throughout US cities must be placed within the limits of a Salvadoran revolution, the insertion of the Salvadoran political economy into the global capitalist system in the 1980s, the development of a neoliberal Salvadoran state, and the US sponsoring of law-and-order polices in the country as a response to regulate a relative surplus population.

Keywords

El Salvador global capitalism MS-13 neoliberalism transnational moral panic

In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx¹ argued that ‘world historical-facts’ and ‘personages’ often occur twice − the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his administration’s focus on MS-13 (La Mara Salvatrucha 13) as a national security threat illustrate Marx’s observation. After the 2016 presidential election, Time magazine nominated Trump as the Person of the year. During his interview for the profile, he shared with the Time’s reporter a copy of the Long Island tabloid, Newsday, which had a front-page story headlined: ‘Extremely Violent Gang Faction’. He followed by saying: ‘They come from Central America. They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met . . . they’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal. And they are finished.’² Trump was referring to MS-13, a street gang with origins in 1980s’ Los Angeles, but now found in El Salvador and throughout Central America.³ In his first year in office, Trump signed Executive Order 13773 directing the Secretary of State, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice to prioritise targeting ‘transnational criminal organizations’. They are, he argued, the ‘drivers of crime, corruption, violence, and misery’.⁴ During his first and second State of the Union addresses, and throughout his presidency, Trump has brought up MS-13 − stating that members of this street gang have taken advantage of loopholes in the prior Obama administration’s immigration laws by entering the country as ‘unaccompanied alien minors’ and were causing a national security crisis.⁵

Although MS-13 has been used as a priority for the Trump administration to further criminalise immigration and justify the expansion of the border wall between the US and Mexico, the spectre of MS-13 is not a new phenomenon.⁶ Rather, it has been a recurring ‘transnational gang crisis’ between the US and El Salvador.⁷ Because of street gangs like MS-13, as well as ongoing police and gender-based violence, El Salvador has become a country with the highest rates of homicides and femicides in the world.⁸ This violence has exacerbated both internal and external displacement, forced migration, and asylum seeking along the US’ Southwestern border.⁹ Like much of the mainstream media and personal accounts of asylum seekers, the arguments about violence emerging from street gangs in El Salvador from the Trump administration are based on real conditions, but what is often missing are the root causes of these material conditions.¹⁰ Specifically, economic, political and ideological contradictions have shaped the terrain for this violence of gangs to thrive and continuously reproduce with no end in sight.

In this article, I argue that the spectre of MS-13 and the violence emerging from it in El Salvador and throughout US cities must be placed within 1) the limits of a Salvadoran revolution, 2) the insertion of the Salvadoran political economy into the global capitalist system in the 1980s, 3) the development of a neoliberal Salvadoran state, and 4) the US sponsoring of law-and-order polices in the country as a response to regulate a relative surplus population. In theoretical terms the focus on MS-13 as a transnational security threat for the US and Central American countries has produced a punitive populism and relied on what I call a ‘transnational moral panic’. This theorisation of a transnational moral panic draws on the critical insights of Stuart Hall and the Centre for Cultural Studies’s approach to moral panics.¹¹ According to Hall, moral panic as an ideological process

represents a way of dealing with what are diffuse and often unorganized social fears and anxieties. It deals with those fears and anxieties, not by addressing the real problems and conditions which underlie them, but by projecting and displacing them on to the identified social group.¹²

Moral panics serve to obfuscate the social relations of exploitation in capitalist society, which in the first instance create the conditions of poverty, degradation, misery and the justification for a punitive populism.

The material conditions emerging from capitalist exploitation and transnational capital accumulation in El Salvador have produced high rates of poverty and violence in the country. This moral panic over maras¹³ (Salvadoran street gangs like MS-13) in the country is based on the real problems and conditions of many working-class Salvadorans, yet the corporate media, political elites and the national bourgeoisie, with the support and sponsorship of the US state, have managed the narrative and the legitimate response to the insecurity it has created.

This article is based on field research conducted between 2010 and 2016 in San Salvador, El Salvador and Los Angeles, CA, which included participant observations in community events on the topic of forced migration, qualitative interviews with human rights lawyers, community organisers, journalists, police officials, political party representatives, and complemented by informal conversations with Salvadorans in the capital, alongside an analysis of newspaper articles, government and non-governmental documents. Through this research I show that the labels of the ‘world’s most dangerous gang’ by National Geographic and CNN, for example, and a ‘transnational threat’ to the security of North and Central American countries by the US government have produced a new racialised marker that embodies these fears and anxieties − the marero, the Salvadoran gang member, also known by the gang acronym MS-13.¹⁴ I argue this marker is a byproduct of the capitalist state’s racialisation process, which reinforces common-sense notions of criminality and evades critiques of capitalist social relations. The transnational moral panic over MS-13 first emerged as a tragedy in El Salvador, now under the current Trump administration it is a complete farce.

Rather than point, as many do, to US foreign policy as the primary culprit of MS-13 and gang violence, I argue that moral panic has obscured the results of the transformation of the global economy and its effects in El Salvador, the Central American region and US cities like Los Angeles. The conditions for a local LA street gang of Salvadoran war refugees – such as MS-13, for instance – to become a so-called transnational security threat must be understood within the structural changes of the world capitalist system and the local effects on the ground. The rise of MS-13 and other maras in El Salvador is a direct result of the class contradictions of global capitalism. However, these are concealed and, instead, common-sense interpretations of the origins of maras are limited to narratives of deportation, poverty and family disintegration − all of which play important roles, but are by no means the root cause.

The punitive populism deployed in El Salvador with the support of the US state has targeted a marginalised relative surplus population that has been deprived of any access to the wealth and resources of the country. Their form of survival through gang violence, robbery, drug dealing and extortion is predicated on the emergence of a neoliberal state after the attempted revolution in the 1980s. However, their violence will never equal the viciousness of what neoliberalism and transnational capital have produced for the majority of the country – alienation, domestic uncertainty and desperation.¹⁵

MS-13: a relative surplus population and a transnational moral panic

The seeds of MS-13 are found in oligarchic rule, US imperialism, neoliberal restructuring in the Global South and the struggles for national liberation in Central America, on one hand, and the racialised police repression and neoliberal restructuring of Los Angeles, on the other. But what we commonly hear about MS-13 today is hostile to such reasoning. The common-sense argument concerning the rise of street gangs in El Salvador describes how youth and young adults involved in gangs in the US were deported to El Salvador where they then met other youth and young adults involved in homegrown gangs in the country, and joined forces. This argument usually takes into account deportations, family separation and extreme poverty as reasons for the rise of street gangs in the country.¹⁶ However, as Gonzales argues, few common-sense arguments about the rise of MS-13 take into account or link their emergence with the neoliberal policies of the Salvadoran rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party.¹⁷ Zilberg describes how a transnational gang crisis between Los Angeles and El Salvador emerged from what she calls ‘neoliberal securityscapes’ – the link between neoliberal and security policies in both El Salvador and the United States.¹⁸ Muller further notes that the development of an emerging ‘transnational penal apparatus’ between these countries has continuously criminalised youth across borders, which has exacerbated gang violence.¹⁹

Additionally, Wolf shows how the development of mano dura [hard hand] security policies were created as a political strategy by rightwing groups, such as ARENA, to gain legitimacy and protect elite interests in El Salvador.²⁰ Building on their analysis, I argue that both the criminalised deportees and marginalised youth of El Salvador can be conceptualised as part of a transnational relative surplus population that ruling elites, through the capitalist state, must regulate and control. The immiseration of the working class and peasants in El Salvador alongside the restoration of class power for the ruling class under global capitalism produced what we know as MS-13.

In Capital, Vol. I, Marx describes how an increase in capital accumulation multiplies labouring classes and the relative surplus population:

[C]apitalist accumulation. . . itself produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital’s average requirement for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population.²¹

Marx identifies three forms of the relative surplus populations that emerge from capital accumulation: the floating, the latent and the stagnant; the latter, he argues is the lowest sediment of the relative surplus population. The heterogeneity of the surplus population is evident in Marx’s description. Just as with class formations, it is also apparent that these numerous positions within the relative surplus labour population are not static; they are social relations structured through capitalist exploitation. The brutal forms of social control, to regulate and oppress relative surplus populations, rebellion and those simply trying to live, are part of the accumulation of misery in the early twenty-first century and evident in the transnational moral panic about MS-13.

Since Marx wrote, global capitalism has given rise to a relative surplus population that crosses the borders of nation states. Once capital was globalised in the 1970s, transnational capitalists broke free from state regulations through neoliberal policies that thwarted state intervention in the economy.²² These processes have further impoverished the poor and working classes throughout the globe, displacing them from the productive economy. The move from a world capitalist system based primarily on production to a global capitalist system based on finance has exacerbated the process. As of 2018, 0.08 per cent of the world’s population own 44.8 per cent of the global wealth, while 64 per cent of the bottom half of the population own 1.9 per cent.²³ Even researchers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have concluded that ‘the benefits of some policies that are an important part of the neoliberal agenda appear to have been somewhat overplayed’.²⁴ Austerity measures and transnational capital flows have only increased economic inequality worldwide – more than just exacerbating relative surplus populations, they do nothing less than kill.²⁵

An analysis of what Hong calls ‘existentially surplus’ populations and capital accumulation allows us to understand that transnational capital accumulation,²⁶ rather than gang violence, is the primary condition producing violence and mass exoduses from El Salvador. However, the transnational moral panic of the marero has become a hegemonic interpretation of the violence in the country. Moral panics have served to obfuscate material conditions, such as the violence in El Salvador.²⁷ For such moral panic is a contradictory discourse produced to address real material conditions, while not addressing those conditions, but instead evading them.²⁸ Hall and his colleagues’ important contribution, Policing the Crisis, is useful in describing the ‘mugger’ as a folk devil. It can guide us in thinking about how maras, or MS-13, have been used by those interpreting the crisis of capital accumulation to displace the fears and anxieties of the masses on to a relative surplus population. The label ‘mugging’ itself created social knowledge and became the embodiment of a larger problem in the social formation, with the mugger as a racialised subject.²⁹ Like the label of the mugger, the label of maras also creates social knowledge that often occludes rather than reveals material conditions.

In turn, the moral panic of MS-13 must be understood as transnational. Although material conditions contributed to the rise of MS-13 in El Salvador and Los Angeles, respectively, we must see them as interconnected through flows of social knowledge, people, capital and policies that cross nation-state borders. The moral panic over MS-13 has history in the development of a repressive state in El Salvador, the mass exodus of Salvadoran refugees, US imperialism, the insertion of El Salvador into global capitalism, together with the neoliberal restructuring of Los Angeles and the racist policing of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Emergence of a repressive capitalist state

According to Nelson Flores, Director of the Citizen Security and Penal Justice Program for the Foundation for the Study and Application of Constitutional Law (FESPAD) in El Salvador, the politics of security always responds to political conjunctures.³⁰ When looking at the political and economic history of El Salvador, security and militarisation have served to uphold and strengthen private property and capital accumulation. The Salvadoran oligarchy in the nineteenth century developed an expanding coffee-growing economy that set in motion a series of changes in the rural subsistence economy.³¹ In the 1880s, the Salvadoran government formally abolished communal lands in their entirety, displacing many indigenous peoples and peasants. Along with the expropriation of communal lands, anti-vagrancy laws were enacted that forced landless peasants to work on the developing coffee plantations.³²

The anti-vagrancy laws in the nineteenth century were the first laws to control a relative surplus population in El Salvador as a sovereign nation state. Since vagrancy was broadly defined, the term was used as a strategy of social control of a racialised labouring class. With its repressive tactics of controlling a population dispossessed of its means of subsistence, the emerging oligarchy, with control over the Salvadoran state, created an imagined link between criminality and poverty. The coffee plantation economy brought El Salvador into the twentieth century with one of the most unequal patterns of land distribution in Latin America.

Dependence on coffee production and unequal distributions of wealth in the country led to mass organising and attempted rebellions throughout the early twentieth century. A popular uprising against the elites of El Salvador in 1932 ended with the massacre of over 30,000 peasants, the majority indigenous, in a three-week period. The matanza [massacre], as it is known today, had a chilling effect on all sectors of the Salvadoran population.³³ While the popular insurgency was one of the broadest mobilisations in Latin America during this period, the repressive response was one of the largest episodes of state repression in Latin America in the twentieth century.³⁴ From the matanza of 1932 to the 1970s, El Salvador came under a military dictatorship. In his testimony of surviving the matanza, recorded by poet Roque Dalton, communist revolutionary Miguel Marmol described the matanza as a ‘climate of physical terror’. Marmol noted, ‘I think the drama of ’32 is for El Salvador what the Nazi barbarism was for Europe, the North American barbarism in Vietnam, a phenomenon that changed the face of the nation.’³⁵ The Salvadoran ‘barbarism’ that Marmol describes haunts El Salvador today.

State violence, revolution and mass migration

The period between the 1970s and the 1990s in El Salvador is best understood through the work of the Liberation psychologist and Jesuit priest Ignacio Martín-Baró. According to him, state repression during the 1970s and what would culminate into a revolutionary war produced a social ‘normal abnormality’ arising from heavy exploitation and dehumanising oppression.³⁶ ‘In Central America the majority of the population has never been able to satisfy its most basic needs for food, housing, health, and education, and the contrast between this miserable situation and the superabundance enjoyed by the small oligarchic minorities constitutes’, Martín-Baró argued, ‘the first and most basic violation of human rights.’³⁷ This structural misery led to an armed insurrection in the country against the oligarchy. Between 1980 and 1992, the US government funded an imposing $6 billion dollars of military, economic and covert aid to El Salvador. International financial institutions mobilised an additional $1 billion.³⁸

Human rights activist and lawyer Mirna Perla argues that the US Cold War, its counter-insurgency tactics and the repressive state in El Salvador, ascribed negative social identities to people who were doing nothing but clamouring for a better life and justice.³⁹ Communists and community organisers became the enemy. The revolutionary war between the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the US-backed Salvadoran government took more than 75,000 civilian lives, tens of thousands of soldiers and guerillas, and left many more either disappeared or maimed. The armed conflict forced a surge of Salvadoran transnational displacement to other parts of the globe, including US cities such as Los Angeles, Washington DC and San Francisco.⁴⁰ This was by far the largest displacement from the country at that point in history. During the 1980s, the low-end estimate of Central Americans who migrated to the United States was around 3 million people, which was 15 per cent of the total 20 million people in Central America at the time, the majority coming from El Salvador.⁴¹

Working-class Salvadoran refugees faced a cycle of state-sponsored economic and political violence against the poor. Cities such as Los Angeles were going through their own political and economic changes as Salvadoran refugees arrived. Throughout the 1980s, Los Angeles faced deindustrialisation, an economic recession, high unemployment rates and excessive police brutality.⁴² In South Central LA, for example, poor Latina/o and Black residents were segregated and isolated from employment opportunities that paid a living wage; they could find only menial jobs, and were unable to maintain reasonable living standards. Thirty-three per cent of the area’s population lived below the poverty line, which was nearly twice the rate of all city residents. Salvadorans arriving in LA shared the hardships that working-class Mexicans, Chicana/os, and Blacks were facing.⁴³ The Salvadoran youth and their families left a country whose social fabric had been torn apart due to psychological and physical warfare, only to arrive to a city whose social fabric was also crumbling due to economic restructuring.

The militarisation of Salvadoran society and the civil war would leave what Martín-Baró calls a ‘psychosocial trauma’ in the country that would continue to exist in the children and the following generation who would later emerge to be a national and transnational security threat.⁴⁴ The marginalised youth who join gangs like MS-13, like the indigenous people who were displaced from their lands in the late nineteenth century, and the guerilla insurgency during the civil war, have become a potential threat to capital accumulation. The threat is their ability to reveal the primary contradiction of capital: the accumulation of wealth of one class requires the complete deprivation and misery of another.⁴⁵

El Salvador’s neoliberal turn

During the height of the revolutionary war, elites in El Salvador reconfigured their accumulation strategy from a national-oriented one to a transnational one. A fraction of the ruling class, which had been supported by the US Agency for International Development (US-AID), created economic associations such as the Foundation for Social and Economic Development (FUSADES). Through this economic association and its organic intellectuals, elites in El Salvador took control over the ARENA party and organised a neoliberal programme. The National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP) supported this new economic model. A counter-revolution within capital was emerging as a revolutionary class struggle was taking place in the country. Between 1989 and 2009, the ARENA party implemented twenty years of neoliberal restructuring that hollowed out any opportunity to develop a social democracy in El Salvador. Although an insurgency took place and peace accords were signed in 1992, bringing forth weak civil liberties and political participation through civilian democracy, the application of structural adjustments and economic stabilisation programmes that occurred favoured the emerging transnational capitalist class.⁴⁶ As stated by the jurist and former Chief Justice of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal of El Salvador, Julio Olivo Granadino, the FMLN ‘didn’t have enough bullets to change the economic system’.⁴⁷ Although the FMLN did not lose militarily, its revolutionary strategy of taking state power was unsuccessful.

The peace accords and the postwar policies replaced a revolutionary war with an economic one. ‘Reforms, especially privatisation, allowed elites to regroup under the postwar conditions and to colonise new spaces of power, thereby reproducing the inequities at the base of Salvadoran social conflict’, Haglund argues.⁴⁸ The privatisation of state industries, the banking system, tax reforms, defunding of public institutions, the growth of the maquiladora industry, free trade policies with Mexico and Chile, the dollarisation of the Salvadoran economy and the signing of the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2004 produced economic inequality far worse than before the revolutionary war. To respond to crime emerging from this immiseration, the Salvadoran government under ARENA passed the Private Security Services Law in 2014 that proliferated an industry of private security whose profits in 2003 reached an estimated $82.9 million and soared to $319 million in 2005.⁴⁹ The emergence of a transnational capitalist class did not mean the end of the Salvadoran oligarchy; rather, this led to the reorganisation of the ruling class into business groups such as Grupo Cuscatlan, Grupo Banagricola, Grupo Banco Salvadoreño and Grupo Banco de Comerico.

The production of a transnational moral panic

In her study of postwar El Salvador, Moodie notes that working-class Salvadorans felt more uncertain about their lives in the 1990s than they did during the war.⁵⁰ The 1990s saw the reorganisation of property and privilege in El Salvador. The peace accords brought a new terrain for progressive and leftist social movements to engage capital, but on capital’s terms. Economic restructuring was one process; another was law and order, specifically the national police, prison system and judicial system. Old security forces such as the National Police (PN), the National Guard, Treasury Police and rural paramilitary forces were disbanded. The military, which was involved in domestic policing, was constitutionally banned from any security function other than national defence or national emergencies. In its place, a new National Civilian Police (PNC) would be trained and deployed. Yet the continuous concentration of wealth and corrupt institutions of public safety produced the feelings of uncertainty described by Moodie.

Rather than El Salvador’s criminal justice system developing a system based on public safety and the respect for aggrieved communities, a ‘punitive populism’ emerged, according to Nelson Flores of FESPAD, that sought to resolve problems through state-sanctioned violence.⁵¹ It targeted the working classes, but specifically a fraction of the relative surplus population: the homeless, unemployed and disenfranchised youth. The combination of the civil war and the structural adjustment programmes abandoned a whole generation of youth whose families either were murdered or disappeared, fled during the war, or were living in extreme poverty. In the early 1990s, thousands of youth were in the streets begging for food and money.⁵² In 1991, 33 per cent of the urban population lived in extreme poverty, while another third lived in moderate poverty. In rural El Salvador, the poverty rate was 71 per cent.⁵³ These numbers remained consistent throughout the 1990s.

After the civil war and the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), mass deportations from the US ensued. Between 1998 and 2007, more than 74,000 Salvadorans were deported,⁵⁴ many of whom were youth or young adults who were refugees during the armed conflict and had been raised in cities such as Los Angeles. These deported youth were ‘banished’ from the US and arrived in a country they did not know.⁵⁵ This alienation only added to their social, economic and cultural marginalisation. Alex Sanchez from Homies Unidos, who was deported from the US in 1994, remembers arriving to El Salvador with no one waiting for him at the airport.⁵⁶ He recalled all the homeless youth he came across once he was in El Salvador:

I use to see these kids in el centro [centre of San Salvador] that were glue sniffers. I use to hear of these kids dying in the street. You know sniffing glue, being abused. No one gave a fuck about these kids. I use to see how the cops used to push them out to the alleys; people pushing them off the streets. These were the street kids. This was right after the war. It was the kids that were abandoned after the war, the kids no one gave a fuck about. You know, and this was 1994. This was two years after the war.⁵⁷

The youth Sanchez saw in the streets were denied the promises of the peace accords – a chance at a peaceful and tranquil life. Instead they were criminalised and had to deal with poverty and the psychological trauma of war on their own.⁵⁸ The deported and abandoned youth of El Salvador had to find a way of survival within the logics of neoliberalism.

In 1993, the Central American University’s Public Opinion Institute’s survey on the population’s view on crime, showed that more than 70 per cent of the population considered crime to be the main problem of the country. Thirty-four per cent of the respondents in urban areas said they or an immediate family member had been robbed in the last four months. Between 1994 and 1996, El Salvador had the highest homicide rate of all Latin America. In 1994 alone, 7,673 people were murdered according to government statistics.⁵⁹ These numbers and anxieties over crime were not made up, but the cause and interpretation in the media and government began to link the upsurge in crime and violence directly to the emerging youth gangs and deported young adults.

Violent crimes such as robbery and assault were becoming routine. The rise in crime was related to the ‘relatively limited government expenditures on social services throughout the 1990s’ which served to ‘limit severely opportunities for youth to pursue decent and dignified lives’.⁶⁰ Many youths banded together, organised themselves and provided their own social reproduction, as neoliberalism required them to do so. Yet the violence of the repressive state played a role in their organisation. As Martín-Baró predicted, the violence that Salvadorans lived during the 1980s would seep into the everyday lives of Salvadorans even after the armed conflict ended.

Youth gangs in El Salvador had existed for many years.⁶¹ In the 1990s, what was new was the mass deportation of criminalised youth from the US. The criminalisation of Latino youth in cities such as Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s produced a common-sense link between Latino urban youth, gangs and criminality.⁶² This racialisation of Latino youth that emerged from the policing tactics of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) would then serve to mark them out once deported to El Salvador. This ‘imputed gang identity’ would influence how they would be received by the Salvadoran state and civil society.⁶³ They would not just be deportees, but rather criminal deportees.⁶⁴

The fear of rising crime and violence, alongside the media and government’s argument that youth gangs and the recent criminal deportees were its culprits, led to the re-emergence of death squads targeting marginalised youth. In 1994, a group calling itself La Sombra Negra, or ‘The Black Shadow’, claimed it would cleanse the country of crime; death squads during the 1980s had been used to silence political opposition. A 1996 Amnesty International report found that some members of La Sombra Negra were ‘former soldiers with some tacit support from the PNC’.⁶⁵ The extra-legal violence by the police and the death squads did not alleviate the violence emerging from gang violence; rather, it allowed it to continue unabated. As Cruz asserts, when we speak of the violence in El Salvador we must centre the state. ‘State institutions’, he argues, ‘have proven to be not only inefficacious for tackling violence, but also brokers of it.’⁶⁶

While in El Salvador, Sanchez witnessed both the violence of gangs and the death squads. This violence was of a sort he had never seen before. It was a violence that was being allowed to flourish under the restructuring of the neoliberal state. The violence among gangs was against one another. They were killing each other, but something changed when the death squads emerged.

For the first time I saw something I had never seen. Not about the death squad or the violence. But the gangs, both MS and 18 Street, saw the general common people as the enemy because the enemy didn’t fit the profile anymore. They were killing each other; they weren’t killing civilians. But because the death squad came in, they were civilians. And they didn’t fit the profile of a gang, especially since they wore ski masks, and were former military, as we understood. So, all of a sudden, civil society became the enemy. This was a direct result of the death squads. And it changed the whole way gangs until this very day look at the civilian population.⁶⁷

This affected the impoverished communities they lived in. Yet with the emergence of death squads, the violence and antagonism felt in these communities increased. Extra-legal, state-sanctioned repression exacerbated street violence.

El Salvador entered the twenty-first century with greater inequality than when the peace accords were signed in 1992. There was more migration than before, more people relied on remittances than ever before, the poverty rate was at an all-time high and street violence was an everyday occurrence for the poor of the country. Social movements contested these conditions through strikes, mass mobilisations, and through electoral politics increasing the FMLN’s hold on the country. In 2003, the FMLN had a strong performance in legislative and municipal elections. In these elections, the FMLN won more seats in the legislative assembly over ARENA, the mayoralty of San Salvador for the third consecutive time and seven of the fourteen departmental capitals.⁶⁸ Although only an electoral challenge, ARENA and its political-economic model were under assault.

The criminalisation of political and economic struggles is a central aspect of social control and is, according to Hall et al. ‘often accompanied by heavy ideological “work”, required to shift labels about until they stick, extending and widening their reference, or trying to win over one labelled section against another’.⁶⁹ The degradation of the working class in El Salvador was framed as a gang problem. Before the presidential elections in 2004, President Francisco Flores declared a state of emergency for the country was under siege by violent street gangs. ‘Throughout the country criminal gangs called maras have taken possession of an enormous amount of neighbourhoods and communities, committing numerous and terrible crimes’, he declared in a presidential address heard through numerous radio and television networks. ‘This is no longer only a threat to the residents of these communities, but the entire country. There are more gang members than armed police and military forces combined, thus they are a threat to all Salvadorans.’ Recognising that the poor were already suffering from the violence that the conditions of poverty produced, Flores targeted the fear and anxieties of the middle and upper strata of Salvadoran society through Operation Mano Dura.⁷⁰

Operation Mano Dura along with the La Ley Anti-Mara [Anti-Gang Law] approved on 9 October 2003 were the construction of ‘total war’ on street gangs. The Anti-Gang Law was passed by ARENA and the National Coalition Party (PCN) but was rejected by the FMLN, the United Democratic Center (CDU), and the Christian Democratic Party (PDC). The latter political parties found the laws to be unconstitutional. Nevertheless, these laws and Mano Dura were immediately put into effect. Flores spoke to the silent majority through a moral panic over street gangs. The maras became the embodiment of everything that was wrong in El Salvador. ‘Criminal gangs have dropped to dangerous levels of moral degradation and barbarism’, Flores argued. Additionally, he explained that ‘we have all known of beheadings, mutilations, satanic acts, and dismemberments committed against children, the elderly, and defenceless women. It’s time to free ourselves from this scourge.’⁷¹ The maras thus functioned as ‘an emissary, a cultural donor and bearer of seminal political messages’.⁷²

To gain legitimacy, rightwing politicians and their capitalist supporters used the marginalised relative surplus population to keep their hold on power. The development of a punitive populism with an emphasis on a demonised population worked in their favour. The PNC and the rightwing’s argument that criminal deportees brought the violent gang culture from the US to destroy the social fabric of the country fitted well with the hyper-sensationalised fear and anxieties over crime that had real material bases. Plan Mano Dura made it illegal to be a member of a gang. It expanded police power and provided the police with discretionary faculties that limited civil rights. These laws were the Salvadoran version of zero-tolerance policing strategies that were enacted in Los Angeles and throughout the US. Like the US, these laws resulted in mass incarceration and an increase in homicides. Initial sweeps conducted under Mano Dura yielded arrests of more than 17,000 people.⁷³ The anti-gang laws targeted youth from the ages of 12 to 18. The discretionary power given to both the police and military forces encouraged repression. They targeted anyone with tattoos, rounded up groups of youth in public spaces, and raided people’s homes. Although Plan Mano Dura was a six-month ‘emergency plan’, the long-term damage was done. It created a ‘total war’ strategy against poor youth and gained legitimacy for ARENA.

The law-and-order platform was effective in gaining support for ARENA, however, with help from the US. The fear-mongering by the US and the punitive populism of ARENA won it the 2004 presidential elections in El Salvador. During the run-up to the election, several US congressmen suggested that a FMLN victory would result in the review or termination of temporary protected status (TPS) for Salvadorans living in the US and a reconsideration of remittance policies. Former US Ambassador Rose Linkins argued a FMLN victory would deteriorate US-Salvadoran relations. Their fear of a FMLN victory was because of its presidential candidate, a former guerilla commander and leader of the Communist Party, Shafick Handal. A policy report written for members of Congress noted: ‘Throughout the campaign, Shafick Handal vocally opposed ARENA’s privatization schemes, the dollarization of the economy, participation in DR-CAFTA, and sending Salvadoran troops to Iraq.’⁷⁴

A few months later, the newly elected ARENA president, Antonio Saca, announced Super Mano Dura. Unlike the ‘emergency plan’ of Flores, Saca sought to make permanent penal code reforms alongside a continued joint police-military operation. Super Mano Dura increased the prison sentence for gang membership from three to five years, and for gang leadership from six to nine years. Super Mano Dura, together with Mano Dura and the death squads were all class projects aimed at controlling and responding to relative surplus populations and managing the way the violence of the country was understood. In its country assistance strategy assessment in 2005, the World Bank stated that violence and crime in El Salvador was among the highest in Latin America. According to the assessment, 90 per cent of Salvadorans felt generally unsafe, and 25 per cent reported feeling insecure in their homes.⁷⁵ ‘The persistently high level of crime and violence has negatively affected the image of the country and the investment climate’, the report argued. Like the World Bank assessment, Saca and ARENA continued to focus their attention on maras. ‘Your party is over!’ Saca told these youth gangs on national television while four heavily armed men stood on each side of him. ‘The Super Mano Dura plan ensures that criminals and thieves will remain in jail!’, he said.⁷⁶ ‘I am convinced that these actions are supported by all Salvadorans, whose primary purpose is to ensure the citizens of our country the protection – permanently threatened by crime.’ Social movements and political parties such as the FMLN pointed to the contradictions of neoliberalism, yet ARENA and its transnational elites sought to displace these contradictions onto a marginalised fraction of the working class. However, this working class was transnational, and the US was to support this ideological work and provide the material support to legitimate it.

In the post-9/11 era, the US linked its global ‘war on terror’ with other so-called threats to national security. US Southern Command, also known as Southcom, focused its attention on what it terms ‘transnational threats’; one of which is street gangs such as MS-13 and Mara 18, that, Southcom argues, cross the borders of Central America, Mexico and the US continually. In a 2006 report, US-AID urged the United States to ‘act quickly and seize the opportunity to work with Central American countries and Mexico to develop a coordinated response’ to this ‘transnational threat’.⁷⁷ Gangs were, reportedly, threatening democratic development and slowing economic growth in Central American countries, creating a direct threat to the national security of the US.

The US involvement in this transnational moral panic included both domestic and transnational efforts. Nationally, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement developed an anti-gang initiative titled ‘Operation Community Shield’ that targeted both MS-13 and Mara 18 members. According to the web page of the National Gang Unit, ‘US immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recognizes that transnational criminal street gangs represent a significant threat to public safety in communities throughout the United States.’⁷⁸ The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also created a special task force focusing on MS-13 and created a liaison office in San Salvador that would co-ordinate regional information-sharing and anti-gang efforts known as the Transnational Anti-Gang (TAG) Initiative.⁷⁹ Since 2007, the FBI’s anti-gang programme has co-ordinated the Central American Law Enforcement Exchange (CALEE) programme in which police officers throughout Central America and the US share intelligence and training tactics.

The LAPD has been a central part of this exchange programme, which provides tactics, interrogation techniques, cryptanalysis, anti-gang suppression techniques and ride-alongs in urban neighbourhoods of Los Angeles and El Salvador.⁸⁰ According to FBI officials, these types of collaborations stand to benefit the city of Los Angeles.⁸¹ In May 2007, LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa visited El Salvador and emphasised that the country was a new frontier in trade and tourism but lacked the security to prosper. Villaraigosa blamed youth gangs for the insecurity in the country. ‘These gangs are transnational and we’ve got to work across borders, smart, in a multi-pronged way – suppression, prevention, and intervention.’⁸² The US Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) in collaboration with US-AID created a ‘community-policing program’ for 200 municipalities in El Salvador. However, as a sub-commissioner of the PNC noted during an interview, many PNC officers refuse to see themselves as working with the community, or with criminalised youth for that matter. A former PNC officer further noted that police were not meant to do community work – they are there to enforce the law, and that means the repression of urban areas.⁸³

In July 2005, the US opened the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in San Salvador − part of other international police academies created in 1995 by then President Clinton. Yet unlike other ILEAS, the one in El Salvador faced major opposition from human rights organisations, with it being compared to the School of the Americas now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).⁸⁴ Unlike WHINSEC, the ILEA is run jointly by the US State Department and Salvadoran Ministry of Government. Between 2005 and 2007, they provided $3.6 million dollars for the academy. Throughout the twentieth century, US police officials were involved in police training in Latin America, especially in the Greater Antilles and Central America.⁸⁵ Yet what is new is the rhetoric that is used to justify an international police academy. During the cold war, counter-insurgency was justified to fight so-called communist aggression. Now the key words are transnational gangs, drugs, organised crime and terrorism – what Zilberg referred to as the ‘gang-crime-terrorism continuum’.⁸⁶ Manwaring, a military strategist and intellectual for the US, argues that the emerging transnational gangs, which he refers to as ‘third-generation’ gangs, are a new, mutated urban insurgency, which, he claims, challenges state sovereignty and regional security. Using the common language of racial profiling by police, Manwaring concludes, ‘third-generation gangs look like ducks, walk like ducks, and act like ducks – a peculiar breed, but ducks nevertheless!’⁸⁷ If the gangs are not repressed, he notes, democracy and free market economies are directly at risk. Again, the focus on militarised policing in the eyes of intellectuals like Manwaring is not to eliminate institutions of oppression and exploitation or alleviate poverty, but rather their maintenance and expansion.

The militarisation under the neoliberal state received even more support from a transnational agreement with the US in 2008. The Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), originally part of the Mérida Initiative with Mexico, provides military aid to Central American countries to allegedly combat drug trafficking and gang violence.⁸⁸ Between 2008 and 2013, Congress appropriated $466.5 million dollars for CARSI. In 2013, President Obama requested another $107.5 million. There was no conspiracy or plan to deport criminalised youth to expand gangs in El Salvador, but the outcome has been used to legitimate a transnational militarised response to the contradictions of neoliberalism. The militarisation of public security and punitive populism may have opposition, but because of the everyday violence, many see it as the only solution. Salvadorans in the country may not all experience physical threats, but the transnational moral panic has created an endless state of fear. People are willing to lose civil rights and democracy to feel secure, Sanchez notes. ‘But what’, she asks, ‘does this do?’⁸⁹

El Turno del Ofendido (The Turn of the Aggrieved)

In 2009, after twenty years of struggle as a political party, the FMLN won the presidential elections. Popular movements from below and to the Left, nationally, internationally and transnationally organised to support its victory. After twenty years of ARENA, the popular chant was ‘ARENA Nunca Mas!’ (ARENA never again!). Instead of an original leader or militant of the party, the FMLN presidency was headed by a progressive journalist named Mauricio Funes. ‘Now is the turn of the aggrieved, now it’s the opportunity of the excluded, the opportunity of the marginalised, now it’s the opportunity of the real democrats’, Funes told a crowd of supporters once his victory was announced.⁹⁰ In his speech, Funes paraphrased the words of the famous Salvadoran revolutionary poet, Roque Dalton, who, in his poem ‘El Turno del Ofendido’ (The Turn of the Aggrieved) describes the beatings, the incarcerations and the hate that Salvadorans faced under the military dictatorships. At the end of the poem Dalton says, ‘Now is the hour of my turn, the turn of the aggrieved; who for years has been silenced, despite the cries.’⁹¹ Funes’ use of Dalton was a reflection of the political conjuncture of El Salvador in 2009. The ARENA project had reached breaking point. Despite its punitive populism and transnational moral panic, its political project was in crisis. It was a moment of triumph for the Left of El Salvador. The FMLN represented the turn of the aggrieved. Would the criminalised youth and bearers of the transnational moral panic be part of this aggrieved group?

In an open letter to the Funes administration, leaders of both MS-13 and Mara 18 asked that they be included in the round-table to reduce the violence that had plagued the country for so long. The letter, publicised by FESPAD, stated, ‘We ask for a dialogue that seeks adequate mechanisms so both gangs can be heard and propose alternatives.’ They added, ‘We were born without much hope of receiving the minimum living conditions for the development of young boys and girls, accustomed to violence . . . without an education, health, and economic stability at home.’⁹² The letter urged a new approach be taken in combatting the violence, that listens to criminalised youth. ‘We have the will to change, but not only ourselves, [but also] the country we live in.’ Like other social movements, they pointed to the twenty years of neoliberalism in the country that had created the conditions for such gang violence to emerge. They noted that since the 1990s, millions of dollars had been spent on anti-gang conferences, forums and studies that did not alleviate the problem. ‘With those millions of dollars, you could have already solved some of the conditions that have produced and perpetuated the violence’, they stated.⁹³ The letter argued that the gang violence would not disappear until the root causes of poverty, inequality and marginality were addressed.

In the early months of the newly elected FMLN government, initiatives were proposed to counter the punitive populism that ARENA had created in the country. Individuals such as ex-FMLN Deputy Manuel Melgar (Minister of Public Security and Justice), academic Henry Campos (Vice Minister of Public Security and Justice) and lawyer Douglas Moreno (General Director of Prisons) headed the Public Security Cabinet, which focused on social programmes that emphasised violence and crime prevention. ARENA was quick to call these policies weak on crime and argued that the FMLN was siding with criminals. A media and political attack was waged on the Funes administration. Television and radio shows hosted ARENA politicians, wealthy business owners and police chiefs arguing that crime was increasing and the FMLN’s administration was too weak to combat it.

These attacks on the FMLN produced an unfavourable public reaction to its proposed crime prevention strategy. They sought to tackle the root causes of crime and violence such as poverty, economic inequality and the separation of families through migration, but the media attack was preventing such a discourse becoming common sense. The pressure of the public outcry over crime and violence pushed Funes to send 2,200 military troops on to the streets of El Salvador in support of the PNC who were allowed to carry out searches, make arrests and set up checkpoints. The punitive populism that emerged in the 1990s mentioned by Flores was alive and well in 2009.⁹⁴ According to a poll released by the newspaper El Diario de Hoy, 93 per cent of respondents were in favour of bringing the military on to the streets although it went against the peace accords signed in 1992.⁹⁵ An FMLN municipal secretary in El Salvador described how people demanded security in the form of repressive force; they did not want a political analysis, they wanted action.⁹⁶ The militarisation introduced by CARSI continued under the FMLN on the pretext of gang violence.

That punitive populism would increase in 2010 after a brutal burning and shooting of two buses.⁹⁷ Eleven people were burned to death while thirteen were severely injured. Melgar, the Minister of Public Security and Justice, called this an ‘act of terrorism aimed at provoking fear in the population’.⁹⁸ It was immediately associated with gangs. Following this incident, the Legislative Assembly passed the Law on Prohibition of Maras, Gangs, Associations, and Organizations of Criminal Nature, which further criminalised gang membership, banned MS-13, Mara 18 and other gangs including the Sombra Negra (Black Shadow) death squad.⁹⁹ Unlike previous anti-gang laws, this one also made it illegal to be part of a death squad. Yet, the conflation of being a gang member and a member of a death squad ignored the significant differences between the two. One is a result of poverty and marginality while the other is politically motivated. Although the death squads were mentioned, the priority was the policing of gang-affiliated youth. The PNC and military further criminalised poor youth by rounding them up on the basis of their appearance.

The letter sent to Funes by MS-13 and Mara 18 was ignored. Funes’ attempt to bring a more progressive approach to violence was halted by severe attacks from the media and rightwing parties.¹⁰⁰ Instead, a new anti-gang law was initiated with the support of CARSI. Despite this repression, the criminalised relative surplus population was to emerge again with an attempt at peace. In 2012, both gangs announced a truce. According to a report by a University of El Salvador research group, the truce was negotiated with the help of ex-FMLN Deputy Raúl Mijango and Bishop Fabio Colindres.¹⁰¹ Mijango made public a communiqué co-written by leaders of both gangs in which they stated they had analysed and reflected on their reality which led them to an agreement to end the conflict between their groups, as well as attacks on PNC, the military and aggressions against civil society. Unfortunately, though, the gang truce like the letter would not be acted on by the state forces. Within the first year of the truce the homicide rate was reduced by 52 per cent. Working-class neighbourhoods that saw a sharp decline in homicides were labelled ‘violence-free zones’.¹⁰² Between February and May of 2013, various municipalities such as Santa Tecla, Quetzaltepeque, Sonsonate, Puerto de la Libertad, Apopa, Puerto El Triunfo and El Vicente were celebrated as such violence-free zones.¹⁰³ Despite the decrease in violence and homicides, many Salvadorans remained sceptical of the gang truce. Media outlets and ARENA continued to argue that the FMLN was negotiating with criminals. In response, Funes commented, ‘the historical legacy of the ARENA party is a country with 15 or 16 homicides per day. Gentlemen of ARENA accept that, you gave us a country with 15 homicides per day, with a homicide rate of 70 per 100,000 habitants which has left us with the dishonourable position of being the second most violent country in the world.’¹⁰⁴

Despite a recognition that the peace truce had decreased violence in the country, neither political party openly supported or legitimated it. The transnationalisation of a moral panic over street gangs had made it political suicide to openly support a gang truce. The maras remained the embodiment of the violence that the contradictions of neoliberalism produced. At the same time as the gang truce emerged, federal authorities in the US designated MS-13 a ‘transnational criminal organization’. This would allow for the seizure of assets found within the jurisdiction of the US. This designation was the first for a street gang. ‘As the reach of gangs becomes more international, the seizing and freezing of assets becomes essential to addressing the violence that comes with it’, argued LAPD Chief Charlie Beck.¹⁰⁵ The US continued its support of transnational capital despite the emergence of a local attempt to create peace in El Salvador. If the gang truce had been allowed to flourish and been deemed legitimate, it would have unmasked the transnational moral panic. So the transnational moral panic continues while the turn and dreams of the truly aggrieved, the relative surplus population, are endlessly deferred.

Conclusion: the barbarism lives on

The barbarism of the 1932 massacres that Marmol described lives on transnationally. In the summer of 2014, an alleged ‘urgent humanitarian situation’ occurred at the US-Mexican border – what was commonly referred to as an upsurge.¹⁰⁶ Central American migrant families and unaccompanied minors began arriving at the border and were held in US private detention facilities. This upsurge of migration was blamed on the insecurity and violence occurring in Central America and the supposedly lax immigration policies of the Obama administration. The US and Mexican governments began increasing border security and apprehended a record number of migrants. Between October 2014 and April 2015, Mexico detained 92,889 migrants, while the US detained 70,448.¹⁰⁷ Mothers and their children fleeing structural violence were detained in private detention facilities such as the Karnes County Residential Center, run by GEO Group, and The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, run by Corrections Corporation of America.

In a January 2015 New York Times Op-Ed, US Vice President Biden asserted that the upsurge of unaccompanied minors was the result of inadequate education, institutional corruption, rampant crime and a lack of investment in Central America. A US-Northern Triangle pact (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras) called the Alliance for Prosperity was proposed which would increase the securitisation funding already allocated through the CARSI. In early 2015 the Obama administration requested $1 billion for this initiative. At the end of 2015, US Congress allocated $750 million. That same year, the rightwing-led Supreme Court of El Salvador declared maras like MS-13 in El Salvador a ‘terrorist’ organisation.¹⁰⁸ Unfortunately, as Esther Portillo, organiser with the Human Rights Alliance for Child Refugees and Families, notes, ‘While experts contend that corrupt security forces have eroded the human rights of its citizens, the US continues to support military and security forces.’¹⁰⁹

The mass exoduses from 2014 have continued unabated through the numerous migrant caravans from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Mainstream media and political pundits argue these caravans stem from the violence and poverty of these countries. Yet, what continues to be neglected is that the violence of poverty, in the form of femicide, police repression and gang violence that Central American families and children are fleeing, is rooted in past and present capitalist relations of exploitation, all of which are exacerbated by neoliberalism and punitive populism. In El Salvador and Central America, the maras are neoliberalism’s great contradiction. Between 2014 and 2019, the second term of an FMLN government under Salvador Sánchez Céren continued mano dura style policies against maras, and the result was devastating. Since 2014, El Salvador faced homicide rates higher than those during the civil war. Each day saw violence between street gangs, between death squads and street gangs, and government repression of them. The Sánchez Céren administration created its own mano dura policies through Plan El Salvador Seguro (Plan for Safe El Salvador) and its medidias extraordinarias (extraordinary measures) increasing militarisation and police repression of the poor. According to the Attorney General’s Office for the Defense of Human Rights in El Salvador and the United Nations, between 2014 and 2018, extrajudicial killings by the PNC and the military have increased through so-called enfrentamientos (confrontations) with gang members.¹¹⁰

The tragedy of criminalising a relative surplus population during the end of the twentieth century and the first decade of the 2000s in El Salvador has now brought about the farce of a transnational security threat of MS-13 by the Trump administration. By using MS-13 as a folk devil for real concerns over economic inequality and collective safety, repressive immigration policies have been deployed. The elimination of TPS for Salvadorans, the raids throughout the US, and US Supreme Court rulings of indefinitely detaining migrants are all intertwined with the need for ‘national security’. In El Salvador, the newly elected president, Nayib Bukele, a former businessman and mayor of San Salvador, has continued a punitive populist approach through Plan Control Territorial (Territorial Control Plan) which arrested 4,200 people in the first four weeks of its deployment. The Salvadoran National Assembly reassigned $31 million at Bukele’s request for his Plan, while also organising 800 police and soldiers to police the Salvadoran borders.¹¹¹ These policies have been celebrated and supported by US Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan and the new US Strategy for Engagement in Central America.¹¹²

The militarisation and punitive populism of Salvadoran society and the US support for it has been a response to transnational capital’s own instability – a recognition that its political economy is unstable and requires a constant legitimation through the criminalisation of its own contradictions. I have argued that a transnational moral panic over MS-13 in El Salvador and the United States is a spectre haunting the crisis of global capitalism in the region. The limits of a Salvadoran revolutionary struggle, the insertion of the Salvadoran political economy into the global capitalist system, the development of a neoliberal Salvadoran state and the US sponsoring of law-and-order policies in El Salvador have produced a punitive populism as a response to regulate a relative surplus population. For now, a leftist, collective response and mobilisation that returns to a materialist analysis of crime and transnational criminalisation awaits.

Footnotes

Steven Osuna is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach, California, US.

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28.

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29.

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