Cornered by military-police repression in El Salvador, Mareros flee to neighboring Central American countries.
| Autor | Rodriguez, George |
Salvadoran President Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a former guerrilla commander of the then insurgent Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN)--now, and for the second-consecutive time, the ruling party--is set on repressing maras (violent youth gangs) that he describes as organized-crime groups (NotiCen, Sept. 10, 2015).
In the violence-stricken Northern Triangle of Central America--El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras--where gangs are strong, military and police forces permanently combat mareros, but the Salvadoran initiative is being enforced with a particularly strong approach--and so is the gangsters' ability to retaliate.
Violence is nothing new to Central America, most of whose countries were the stage for internal armed confrontation between guerrillas and military forces that lasted decades, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives--mostly civilian, and ended when a regional peace agreement was signed in 1986.
But peace has not settled in the region, with the historic military-guerrilla struggle, waged within the framework of the Cold War, now replaced by the clash between security forces and maras, which originated in the 1980s in California cities such as Los Angeles, where Central Americans-mostly undocumented Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadoran migrants--fleeing the wars had settled.
Many, including young mareros, were caught by la migra (immigration authorities) in the US and sent back to their countries of origin, where the gangs--mainly Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and Mara 18 (M-18), the more violent--were thus to take root.
Violence in the region also derives from the presence of drug cartels--initially Colombian and, more recently, Mexican--whose vicious territorial-control tactics and score-settling policies enforced through local assassins are another key factor accounting for the killings.
Different international sources agree that the three countries make up one of the most violent regions worldwide -with Honduras heading the group and El Salvador quickly catching up --presenting shockingly high homicide rates --the average, for the triangle, set at 60 to 80 homicides per 100,000 population. By those estimates, Honduras' record tops the list, with just over 90, while El Salvador's rate has climbed to 60, and Guatemala's is around 40 (NotiCen, July 30, 2015).
The numbers in El Salvador tend to show the truce started in 2012--which local maras maintained for some 18 months--did not account for much, as critics, including...
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