Whole families are fleeing this tiny country and entering the U.S. in massive numbers: FUSION

Tim Rogers, Fusion’s senior editor for Latin America

Tim Rogers, 19 agosto 2016 / FUSION

In 2014, a wave of unaccompanied kids from Central America caught the U.S. government off-guard when they flooded into Texas in record numbers, triggering what President Obama called an “urgent humanitarian situation.”

Two years later, a silent swell of a different type is starting to emerge on the U.S. southern border. And it could be a harbinger of another immigration crisis in the making.

Salvadorans are fleeing to the United States in massive numbers, and now they’re bringing the whole family along. Though the number of unaccompanied Salvadoran minors crossing the border has not returned to the surge numbers seen in 2014, the number of Salvadoran family units apprehended on the southern border has increased by a whopping 96% over the past year.

Undocumented Salvadoran families are arriving in the U.S. in greater numbers than immigrants from any other Latin American nation. Ten Salvadoran families are apprehended here for every one Mexican family, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol statistics.

There are now more Salvadorans in U.S. immigration deportation proceedings than any other nationality.

U.S. deportation proceedings in immigration courts, by nationality.

For those paying attention to the situation in El Salvador, the timing of the new surge might seem strange considering that the country’s murder rate, which was the highest in the world in 2015, has dropped significantly during the first half of this year. The country’s death toll has dropped from an average of 25 murders each day in January to around 11 murders per day over the past four months.

At first blush, that looks like good news. But behind the numbers there could be a gathering storm that’s hard to see from the outside, but one that Salvadorans can feel in the air. And that sense that the center cannot hold might explain why so many families are pulling up sticks and heading out now.

The headlines in El Salvador suggest something’s brewing—possibly a war.

The attorney general’s office last week announced that state security forces recently foiled a dangerous terrorist plot by the MS-13 (Salvatrucha) that could have escalated the country’s gang war into something more akin to a guerrilla insurrection.

In a voluminous case filed against 78 MS-13 leaders, state prosecutors accused the criminal group of plotting to purchase high-calibre weapons in Mexico and Guatemala to arm and train an “elite” commando unit of 500 gangbangers to coordinate nationwide terrorist attacks against government targets.

The prosecutor’s case, which is allegedly based on intelligence gathered from wiretaps, says the MS-13 was in the process of raising $1 million to buy assault rifles, surface-to-air weapons to shoot down helicopters, commando uniforms and bulletproof vests, according to local media outlets allowed to review the document. The plan was allegedly to place two elite commandos in each of the 249 MS-13 cliques to lead an offensive aimed at asserting territorial control while destabilizing the country’s economy and political establishment.

In an effort to sap state coffers, the Salvatrucha shock troops were allegedly planning to target police officers and politicians for daily killings, because each public employee’s death costs the government $2,000- $3,000 in funeral costs, plus an additional $20,000-$25,000 in insurance payouts to family members.

Hundreds of Salvadorans recently attended the funeral of the slain mayor of Tepetitán, who became the second mayor killed by the MS-13 this year. FOTO: MARVIN RECINOS/AFP

In short, the alleged Salvatrucha war plan would have meant an unfathomable escalation of violence in a country that already has the dubious distinction of being one of the most dangerous places in the world.

But is it any of it true? Some claim the whole government report stinks of officialist propaganda.

“This is an operation of psychological warfare,” says Paolo Luers, a former gang truce mediator and ex-FMLN guerrilla.

Luers says he thinks the government is trying to justify the “extraordinary” measures it adopted in March to crack down on gangs, while also trying to create division among the MS-13’s top leadership, an incarcerated group known as the ranfla.

MS-13 members are transferred to a high-security prison last year as part of a government effort to break their control over the streets. FOTO: MARVIN RECINOS/AFP

“I think this whole business about the 500 men is total lie,” Luers told me. “The official policy agreed to among the three gangs (The MS-13, 18-Sureños and 18-Revolucionarios) in March is to not fall into the government’s trap by getting involved in a military-style final battle, rather to retreat and reduce the level of confrontation.”

Luers says the gangs are smart enough to realize that they would lose a war against the government. Even trying to organize a military campaign on that scale would require so much money that it would mark “the beginning of the end” of the gangs’ control in the neighborhoods, he says.

The gangs themselves insist they are trying to avoid going to war with the government. In the most recent communique issued by the MS-13 and the two factions of Barrio 18, the gangs claim the recent drop of violence in El Salvador is thanks to their decision to quiet their guns.

“The reduction of violence is due to the decision made by the gangs, because we don’t have any interest in involving the country in war,” the June 18 communique said.

Outside security analysts are also scratching their heads at the government’s claims that the MS-13 was secretly preparing for war.

Related: El Salvador’s new plan to combat gang violence is insane

Adam Isacson, a regional a regional security policy expert for the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), says it makes no sense for the gangs to launch some type of guerrilla insurgency against El Salvador’s government—it’s just not their m.o.

The gangs, he says, have no ideology, no political program, and no aspiration to take over the government. Their only interest is in controlling territory for extortion and other illicit business endeavors—and that model works best when the gangs aren’t fighting the police or army.

Declaring war on the El Salvador’s government would draw way too much heat, Isacson says.

Members of the Salvadoran Armed Forces patrol an MS-13 controlled area following the murder of 11 people in in March. FOTO: MARVIN RECINOS/AFP

“It would be an awfully risky strategy because the Salvadoran government has more trained personnel, more firepower, and [U.S.] Southern Command would be prime to jump in on that,” he told me. “And it’s hard to imagine that going well for them.”

Whatever’s really happening with the gangs—whether they’re just hanging low or secretly preparing for war—the U.S. immigration numbers suggest that that many Salvadorans don’t think the government’s repressive crackdown, which is awful in its own right, will result in lasting peace. As is too often the case in Central America, things can always get worse.

And for many Salvadorans, the risks of emigrating to the U.S. is not a sufficient deterrent compared to the danger of staying behind.

The military solution: El Salvador’s new plan to combat gang violence is insane

Alex Izaguirre/ Fusion

Tim Rogers, Fusion’s senior editor for Latin America

Tim Rogers, 20 mayo 2016 / FUSION

El Salvador is one of the most violent and murderous countries in the world. And now its government has devised a truly mad plan to combat the problem—by targeting people who have tried to broker peace.

The Central American government last month passed a new law that criminalizes any attempt to “solicit, offer, promote, formulate or negotiate” a truce with the gangs. The crime is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

This month the government took its crackdown on peacemakers a step further by issuing arrest warrants for 21 people who were responsible for spearheading the 2012 gang truce.

“The government is trying to set an example so that no one contemplates dialogue anymore,” Paolo Luers, one of the only gang-truce mediators to not get arrested this month, told me in a phone interview from San Salvador. “The government considers the gang issue to be primarily a military problem that has to be resolved by force. So they are trying to disqualify all other alternative solutions. The whole thing is absurd.”

The government won’t comment on the case, other than to say that their investigation is ongoing.

Former gang truce mediator Paolo Luers says the crackdown on the negotiators is a witch hunt intended to discredit any alternative to war.

The 15-month gang truce, which fell apart in May 2013, led to a dramatic but temporary drop in the country’s murder rate. Critics complained that the process was rife with corruption and impunity, and argued that the truce helped strengthened the gangs’ control over the streets by empowering its leadership behind bars.

Graph shows how the monthly murder rate dropped during the 15-month gang truce.

Now the government is opting for a military solution while cutting off any possibility for a future ceasefire. In the past two weeks, the government has arrested former police commissioners, prison wardens and chief mediator Raul Mijango for their roles brokering the 2012 gang truce. Mijango was arrested on May 3 and then paraded before a judge in his underwear, as if he too were a gangbanger.

Former gang whisperer Raul Mijango has spent the past two weeks in jail for his role in the 2012 gang truce

The criminalization of the failed gang truce appears to mark El Salvador’s irreversible commitment to a military campaign against the MS-13 and Barrio 18. And if that’s the case, the U.S. should brace itself for a new tidal wave of Central American refugees arriving on the Texas border in the months and years ahead.

The swell has already started. Salvadorans fleeing violence are arriving on the U.S. southern border in record numbers. More undocumented Salvadorans have been apprehended in the U.S. during the first half of this year than in all of 2015.

Government numbers show Salvadorans are already coming in massive numbers this year.

U.S. border patrol numbers show that nearly 10 Salvadorans are apprehended in the U.S. for every 1 Mexican. That’s an amazing discrepancy, especially considering that El Salvador is a lot farther away than Mexico and has a population that’s 20 times smaller. What’s even more disconcerting is that those people could be the frontrunners in what could soon become a much larger exodus.

El Salvador’s government defends its “extraordinary security measures” as an early success. They point to public opinion polls and a recent drop in the murder rate as proof that the iron-fisted policy is working.

The gangs, which are extremely violent and run massive extortion rings across the country, are wildly unpopular in El Salvador, where many citizens applaud the government’s guns-blazing approach to dealing with the problem.

Government propaganda

The gangs, however, say they have declared a unilateral ceasefire and that’s the real reason the murder rate is dropping.

“The homicide numbers from the past weeks show that we are men of our word,” reads the gangs’ last joint communique. “Since we made the decision to suspend all offensive actions, the blood quota has dropped from 24 deaths per day to 11. And most of the dead have been on the side of the gangs since the government, far from suspending its death squad operations of extermination, has only increased.”

The government on Monday released its first nationwide Top 100 Most Wanted list. Three days later it updated the list showing three suspected gangsters were killed «while committing crimes.»

Despite the continued crackdown, incarcerated gang leaders are allegedly sticking to their unilateral ceasefire in hopes of avoiding an all-out war with the government.

“The gangs’ position is: The government invited us to war, and we didn’t accept,” Luers says.

How long that remains their position is anyone’s guess.

How a bucket of fried chicken could prevent gang war in El Salvador. Tim Rogers/Fus

Tim Rogers trabaja para FUSION, una plataforma digital que tiene dos padres: UNIVISION, el medio líder en español en Estados Unidos, y la cadena ABC. Viajó a El Salvador para cubrir la beatificación de monseñor Romero, pero le intrigó otra historia: la guerra entre las pandillas y las fuerzas de seguridad del gobierno del FMLN. Segunda Vuelta reproduce su reportaje.

Tom Rogers, 29 mayo 2015/FUSION

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — A greasy 12-piece combo of fried chicken isn’t always the smartest menu choice. But in this case, the double Promoción Súper Campero was all about preserving my health.

I was cabbing across San Salvador cradling two soggy-bottom boxes of chicken parts to make a prandial offering to the leaders of the Pandilla 18, one of El Salvador’s two main gangs. I was told not to come empty-handed.

“We always start every round of peace talks by eating Pollo Campero,” Salvadoran gang whisperer Raul Mijango told me after arranging the interview. “So bring eight pieces of chicken.”

I brought 12. Plus a sizable side of soddened fries and 2 liters of Pepsi.

Good for your health. Fried chicken is the stuff that peace is made of.

I was on a mission to talk to gang leaders about their country’s spiking murder rate. El Salvador is lurching towards its worst levels of violence in decades. The gang truce that momentarily quieted the guns in 2012-’13 is now a fading memory as the army launches an aggressive military offensive with three new rapid response battalions.

The country’s murder rate in the past few months has reached levels not seen in El Salvador since the darkest days of the country’s civil war, which claimed 75,000 lives between 1980-1992.

For a country that fought so hard to implement an institutionalized peace process 25 years ago, the government’s addlepated rush to find a military solution to the gang problem is baffling. It’s even more befuddling when you think that the ruling FMLN came to power democratically, thanks precisely to the gains of El Salvador’s peace process.

Crime scene in San Salvador

Violence is nothing new in Central America. But it’s a worsening condition in the so-called “northern triangle,” which has been bleeding people as fast as it can breed them. Nearly one in ten Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans has emigrated in recent years, according to government numbers. Most beat a path more or less directly to the United States, where President Barack Obama was forced to take executive action last year to respond to what he called an “urgent humanitarian situation” on the border.

Some people fear another exodus is in the works as El Salvador gears up for a fight unlike anything Central America has seen in a long time.

El Salvador is becoming increasingly militarized.

March was the country’s bloodiest month on the books, notching 481 murders — a ghoulish feat in a country the size of Massachusetts. May is on pace to surpass that record. In short, Salvadorans are killing each other with a greater zeal than ever before.

“If this trend doesn’t change, we could easily get to 100 deaths per day,” said Mijango, whose former life as an FMLN guerrilla commander helped him win cred as a gang mediator. “This is much more complicated than the phenomenon of armed insurrection during the ’80s and the beginning of the 90s. During the armed conflict, the military structure of the FMLN didn’t even total 15,000 fighters. Now the gangs have close 70,000 members, and with a support network of more than half a million Salvadorans.”

Head gang mediator and former FMLN guerrilla commander Raul Mijango (photo/ Tim Rogers)

In short, he said, there aren’t enough jails to hold all those gang members. And there’s way too many people involved in the mess for the government to consider shooting it’s way out of trouble. The only real solution, Mijango stressed, has got to be negotiated at the table, not settled in the streets.

That’s what I wanted to talk to the gangsters about over lunch.

Oh shit, I forgot the coleslaw

When I arrived at Mijango’s office for my gangsta picnic, I started to wonder if we were going to have some uninvited guests.

There were two white-helmeted, machine-gun toting Salvadoran soldiers standing outside Mijango’s front door, looking like they had just stepped out of 1974.

It’s not uncommon to see soldiers in the streets of San Salvador.

I dutifully reported the situation to Mijango, wondering — a bit naively — if I wasn’t being used as a Judas goat to lure the Pandilla 18 into a trap. Mijango assured me the militarization of his neighborhood is normal, but ordered his caretaker to go open the front gate so the pandilleros could enter the building without breaking stride.

Ultimately, only one gang leader showed up for my chicken giveaway. We’ll call him “Santiago,” because he warned me not to use his real name (which, incidentally, is not Santiago).

“This didn’t come with a salad?” Santiago sniffed, looking at the greasy spread of poultry remains and listless fries that I had arranged lovingly in a heap on ceramic plates.

Santiago, 32, shows off his gang tats. He asked that we not show his face.

I looked inside the tattered remains of the Pollo Campero paper bag, knowing I had forgotten the coleslaw. I offered an apologetic shrug — the kind that makes everything better.

Luckily, Santiago came prepared. He pulled out a green, squash-sized fruit that he identified by an unfamiliar name that I forgot instantly, and deftly halved it with a knife. It tasted like the product of a brief romance between an avocado and an artichoke. I ate it gratefully.

I liked Santiago immediately. The 32-year-old gang spokesman was eloquent, clear-eyed, well-read, charismatic, and a good man to have at a saladless luncheon. He’s part of the new easy-blend generation of gangsters who don’t wear their ink like a tribal war mask, but hide tats under a shirt like businessmen.

Santiago checks his cellphone for messages.

For several years, Santiago’s business has been that of peacemaker among the gangs. But recently business has been bad. The 2012 gang truce negotiated between the Pandilla 18 and the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) came unglued sometime around May 2013, when the government appointed a new minister of security who didn’t share his predecessor’s enthusiasm for a negotiated peace.

The new minister blocked the gang mediators from entering the jails and then suspended the meetings between the “ranflas” — or top gang leaders of the Pandilla 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, all of whom are behind bars. Despite the hurdles, the gang truce limped into 2014 hamstrung by restrictions to the flow of communication between the prisons and the streets.

‘El Sirra,’ one of the ranfla of the MS-13 (Salvatrucha) leads a prayer inside prison. photo/ courtesy of Paolo Luers

The government felt that the gang mediations had foolishly given the incarcerated gang leaders too many privileges and too much power, allowing the ranflas to strengthen their vertical command structure and bolster their criminal empires from behind bars.

But former gang mediator Paolo Luers says the government’s decision to change tack was mostly an electoral calculation. The ruling FMLN, Luers says, was trying to defang the opposition’s campaign criticism by “blocking and delegitimizing” its own gang truce and getting tough on crime.

El Salvador’s rightwing opposition has long been suspicious of the former guerrilla party’s perceived ties to the gangs. To assuage those concerns, the FMLN went to extremes to distance itself from the gangs by taking an iron-fist approach to dealing with the problem. In doing so, says Luers, the FMLN has “become more rightwing than the rightwing itself.”

Gang mediator and former FMLN combatant Paolo Luers.

Though the gang members initially cheered the FMLN’s 2009 electoral victory as a win for their brothers from another mother, the bloom faded quickly as the former revolutionaries stepped confidently into their new role as “The Man.” After initially supporting the gang truce in 2012, the FMLN started to turn the screws on the gangs with a series of reforms intended to break the gangs.

“We, as the gang, felt we could identify with the Frente (FMLN) before they came to power. And when they became the government, we said: ‘Hey! sonovabitch stud, the Frente won!” Santiago said. “We thought, Now things are going to be different, because in their struggle for power they too extorted people, and kidnapped people, killed people and stole. And, stud, now they are in power and they understand why many times people commit errors. Shit, they understand why people screw up sometimes. And they are going to understand us, man. ARENA (the rightwing former government) never understood us because they were born in cribs of gold. They never understood us, but these guys will understand us.

“At least we thought they would. Now we understand they didn’t understand us. They didn’t want to understand us.”

The real issue, Santiago claims, is that the FMLN grew jealous of the gangs’ nascent efforts to identify more with the poor and downtrodden — a population the FMLN claims as its own. But once the FMLN took control of the government, they started to lose touch with the poor, and didn’t want the gangs moving in on their turf, Santiago claims.

Santiago says the government didn’t want the gangs stepping into the vacuum it left in the neighborhoods.

“The government doesn’t want to allow any situation for the gangs to change their strategies and their logic. You know why? Because for 12 years the Fente was against the state. And during that time the poor, the unprotected, the marginalized, the humble identified with them.”

But when the Frente become the government, he says, they could no longer play the role of establishment and opposition.

“When you use a $15,000 watch and when you put on a suit that costs $3,000-$4,000, you stop being the voice of the poor. Period. It’s that simple,” Santiago says.

The FMLN’s move to government left a vacuum in the neighborhoods. And it was a space the gangs were starting to move into thanks to the truce, which helped the gangs evolve from warmongers to peacemakers, Santiago says.

“Who do you think has the sufficient capacity and organizational structure and muscle to step into that role? It’s called the pandillas. We’re the only ones with the capacity and the logistics to fill that space that (the FMLN) abandoned.”
– Santiago, leader of the Pandilla 18

Santiago says the Pandilla 18 started to embrace its new role, and even organized a Christmas gift handout, using some of its extortion war chest to buy presents for neighborhood kids — the gangster version of a tax refund on the “war tax.” The ruling party didn’t appreciate the gang’s amateur populism.

Earlier this year, the FMLN government went fully on the offensive. It announced a new campaign to regain control of the prisons and break the gangs’ extortion rackets. In April the government moved the ranflas back to a maximum-security prison where they’re now held incommunicado. And this month the army rolled out its new rapid response anti-gang battalions, launching an aggressive crackdown that Santiago likens to “social cleansing.”

El Salvador’s ministry of security did not respond to my repeated requests for an interview.

.

Now, the voices for peace are having a hard time shouting over the “drums of war,” Santiago says. The gangs feel trapped and that will-o’-the-wispish promise of peace in 2012 is dimming in the rearview mirror in the march to war.

“How can I tell people not to defend themselves, and to let someone kill them because if they defend themselves the media will spin that against us?” Santiago demanded.

I reminded him that I brought flan, and we made excited dessert preparations.

Will a super gang cometh?

One of the scariest possibilities of the government’s offensive against the gangs is that the Pandilla 18 and the Salvatrucha will merge together to form a super gang. Well, sorta.

The formal unification of the gangs’ command structures is highly unlikely. The two pandillas, both of which can trace their origins to the streets of LA, are already splintered into hundreds of cells — known as “cliques”—and are part of an international franchise. The Pandilla 18 is, in reality, two separate gangs in El Salvador, The Sureños and Los Revolucionarios.

Still, Mijango says it’s not unreasonable to think the myriad gangs of different stripes could start coordinating on an operational level now that the government has all of them cornered.

Member of the Mara Salvatrucha.

The gang-on-gang violence is already diminishing amid the surge of state-on-gang violence, according to Santiago and the gang mediators. In recent weeks, gangs have attacked police posts and soldiers—sometimes with grenades — in retaliation for deadly raids on their neighborhoods.

Strangely enough, the violence in El Salvador is starting to look more like the asymmetrical, low-intensity warfare of the past, only without the ideological trappings of the cold war-era.

State security forces go on patrol for gang members.

“Now we have a problem between the gangs and the state. And I think the more the state attacks the gangs, the more they are going to be forced to unite,” Mijango said. “It’s a simple strategy — the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Plus, Mijango says, the gang truce of 2012 opened new channels of communication between the gangs. And that’s something that never existed before. Santiago confirms that he’s regularly in touch with other street-level gang leaders, and with a quick phone call can verify who’s responsible for what attacks, and when the government is lying by assigning false blame on rival gangs.

Santiago says he doesn’t think the gang unification process will go beyond the current level of communication, but admits he can’t explain who’s behind a mysterious video published last month by a group that claims to be a united super gang of Salvatrucha and Pandilla 18 members. The armed, masked men in the video call for the release of of the ranflas held in the maximum security prison Zacatecoluca.

Vea el video

“We are ready for dialogue or war,” the alleged “Pandillas Unidas” gang leader says on the video. “Dialogue or lead, you, the leaders of the country, must decide,” the self-styled gang leader concluded, before misquoting Che Guevara.

Santiago thinks it’s a fake made to confuse the public and justify a ramped-up military offensive. But his reason for dismissing the video seems a little flimsy (not that I’d say so to his face).

“We’re not that good at social media,” he said. “That’s something we need to work on.”

If the rumors of a super gang are true or not, El Salvador appears to be approaching a crucial crossroads — one that will determine its future for many years to come. One path could lead to a tragic escalation of violence, while the other path …well, leads to fried chicken. The gangs says they’re ready to talk peace, if the government brings the drumsticks.

P.S. Don’t forget the coleslaw.