El Salvador suffers from a couple of problems that I didn’t see in Peru, the country where I served previously as a Peace Corps volunteer.
There are an estimated 60,000 young men involved in street gangs (“maras”) here in El Sal. Another 250,000 Salvadorans are the gangbangers' dependents. The word “mara” comes from the word “marabunta”—army ant. The largest gangs are Salvatrucha-13 and Calle 18. The gangs virtually run many neighborhoods in San Salvador, the capital, charging “renta” to every business owner and engaging in drug activity, robbery, murder and mayhem in much the same way that their counterparts in L.A. and New York do. That’s no coincidence. Many of the leaders come from L.A. They’re young people whose families once migrated, legally or illegally, to the U.S. or who themselves migrated illegally. The young people lived in bad neighborhoods, found no employment opportunities, turned to crime, were imprisoned, deported, and put the skills they’d learned on the streets in the U.S. to work on the streets of San Salvador, San Miguel and Santa Ana.
As a result, El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world, averaging 10–15 a day. This is mostly gangbangers killing gangbangers. Even so, innocent people often get in the way or else die because they didn’t keep up with their renta or otherwise crossed a gang member.
Where I live, in Perquín, in northeastern El Salvador, maras still aren’t much of a problem. That’s changing, however. There are now active gangs in San Francisco de Gotera, about 30 km from Perquín. Three Salvadoran soldiers dressed in camouflage and carrying AK-47s patrol the streets of Perquín every night. Imelda, the proprietor of the pupusería above which I live, feeds them breakfast, lunch and dinner. They say that they’ve been assigned to Perquín because mareros from Gotera are attempting to establish themselves here and because the distribution of drugs—mostly marijuana—is becoming a problem at the local high school.
With so many Salvadorans in gangs or dependent upon gang members—nearly 5% of the population—it’s difficult to predict what might happen here in the future or how the country could ever possibly rid itself of the problems of gangs and gang violence. Some people say that the situation can be rectified only through the equivalent of another civil war like the war that tore the country apart in the 1980s. Except this time it will be a war between ordinary people and mareros.
As I mentioned previously, many of the gang members are imports from the U.S., which brings us to the other apparently insurmountable problem facing El Salvador. Every year 54,000 Salvadorans—nearly 1% of the population—abandon El Salvador to enter the U.S. illegally via Mexico. One out of six Salvadorans is now living in the U.S. In other words, 1.5 million Salvadorans live in the U.S. and 6.2 million Salvadorans live in El Salvador! If that same percentage of Americans fled America to look for work in El Salvador, 50 million Americans would be residing illegally in El Sal. And I haven’t even mentioned the hundreds of thousands who’ve left El Salvador for Canada or Europe or other countries in Central or South America.
Consequently, many talented people who could be helping to solve El Salvador’s gang problem and other problems are not here to do so. The Salvadorans who live in the U.S. save up money, send it back home, and other family members use this money to hire a “coyote” ($5,000 will get you from San Salvador to El Paso or Tucson) who accompanies them to the border and provides the contacts and pays the bribes necessary to allow the family member to enter the U.S. Recently, the twelve-year-old daughter of an acquaintance of mine and two even younger cousins left Perquín with a coyote and two months later sent word back to their family that they’d arrived safely at the home of a family member in Miami.
It’s that easy and that “safe.” That’s because the coyotes many times aren’t the dark, anonymous, reckless characters, preying on and exploiting the desperate and the helpless, that we imagine them to be. There are a couple living in every town the size of Perquín in all of El Salvador. Everybody knows them. Nobody mentions their names. Nobody would tell an outsider like me who they are, because one never knows when one might need or want the services of the local coyote, who’s really nothing more or less than a dude with connections, experience, and an unusual, somewhat perverse form of entrepreneurial spirit, who moves people the way Red Ball Flyers move freight.
So what one frequently senses in El Salvador is a kind of dormancy—kids not really trying very hard in school but instead waiting for their turn to come to pack their duffel and head for “el otro lado”; families waiting for their “remesa” to arrive at the Western Union: the money that many family members send back home every month from the U.S. Sometimes there’s a sense that 6.2 million people have taken a number and are standing in line and waiting, not all that patiently, to get the hell out of here.
It’s not a pretty scenario. And it makes you wonder how even one, let alone both such immense roadblocks to development can ever be removed. Think about it. One-and-a-half million gone to the U.S.; another million in Europe or elsewhere; another 60,000 in gangs. That’s more than 3 million people pulling the country down while only 6 million—and many of them not very enthusiastically—struggle to build it up. It’s a tug-of-war and the team in the black Spandex has two fat guys on its side.
But let’s try to end on a positive note here. Entropy is our friend. What tends to happen in most situations is that apparently unbeatable entities beat themselves. Either the gangs will kill each other off and save the government the trouble or they’ll overplay their hand and commit so many atrocities (or else commit a single atrocity against someone of the wrong nationality and economic status) and international resolve will take over. If there’s less violence and insecurity in the country and more economic opportunity, more people will stay home; some of the Salvadorans residing in other countries will see that there’s a chance to make money here and they’ll return.
More likely perhaps, it will be a combination of both factors that will lead to a solution. The gang problem will be partially resolved and the economic problems will be partially resolved and the majority in the middle—because there are always more people in the middle than at either extreme—will decide to cast their lot with the home team. Gang members who were never that enthusiastic in the first place will move into the economy. Ex-pats who weren’t that enthusiastic, either, will come home. The ordinary Salvadorans who never left and who never tattooed, goatee-ed and undershirted themselves to pledge allegiance to MS-13 or Calle 18, will cast their lot with what was always much more appealing and much less scary: they’ll get enthusiastic about opening businesses, making and spending money in El Salvador. At that point El Salvador will cease being a suburb of Miami and Houston and return to being its own country.
Sounds good to me. Let’s try it.
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