Government responses and the dark side of gang suppression in Central America Book Chapter

Cruz, JM. (2011). Government responses and the dark side of gang suppression in Central America . 137-157.

cited authors

  • Cruz, JM

authors

abstract

  • Why have Central American maras become so violent and organized? How did youth gangs in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras turn into a major threat to security in North America, while in Nicaragua they still remain street bands? What is the key difference in the evolution of the gang phenomena in these Central American countries? Most of the studies on maras in the region have focused on the factors that supposedly lie behind their emergence, such as migration, poverty, social exclusion, a culture of violence, and family disintegration.1 Although some of these explanations help us understand the early development of Central American street gangs, they have failed to elucidate why organizations such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS- 13) and the 18th Street Gang have not taken root within the impoverished and troubled society of Nicaragua. More importantly, those hypotheses also fail to explain why maras have institutionalized and developed into powerful, armed groups. Some authors have pointed out that states themselves have been major players in the growth of maras because governments have not always enacted the right policies and strategies to curb the maras phenomenon. In most of the literature about gangs, and about Central American maras in particular, there is an assumption that the role of the state in the development of gangs is just a matter of successful or failed institutional policies: gangs appear and expand in those countries in which the government fails to enact the appropriate policies and enforce the law. In societies where intelligent policies and strategies effectively enforce the law, the conventional wisdom says, gangs are contained and deactivated. So the task of creating public policies regarding youth crime and gangs is often reduced to attempting to hit on the "right formula" to tackle gangs. In several cases, these assumptions can be deemed correct. A sound policy and an effective law enforcement strategy are indeed conducive to the control of gangs or, at least, to the reduction of their felonies and violence. But this prescription presupposes that the state and its formal institutions of security are in full control of the forces that carry out the rules, plans, and strategies to curb gangs and their violence; it also presupposes that institutions of security operate only within the limits established by the law. In other words, the notion that the problem of gang reproduction and expansion has to do exclusively with the types of implemented policies and the effectiveness of law enforcement implies that the state is represented only by formal institutions that practice law- Abiding behavior. This chapter will refute such notions, based on an examination of the maras phenomenon in Central America. The main argument is that in order to understand why youth gangs have evolved into criminal organizations in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras but not in Nicaragua, we should study the degree to which government attempts to curb gangs involved a significant share of informal measures. Such measures have entailed state actors operating on their own, as well as the use of illegal activities, to suppress and control gang violence. This is not to say that government responses in Central America, particularly in the gang- ridden countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, were all illegal or that top government officials deliberately sought to break the law in their battle against maras. It means that in the institutionally weak and unstable states of Central America, every policy to tackle maras has been accompanied by a significant amount of informal activity that transformed gang behavior in unexpected ways. Behind this proposition lie three theoretical premises and one factual point about gangs in northern Central America. First, gangs in general, and particularly Central American maras, have never been a static phenomenon, and as Joan Moore has pointed out regarding Los Angeles gangs, they have never been allowed to evolve by themselves.2 Therefore it is impossible to understand the current character of Central American gangs without addressing the particular contexts within which they have developed. Second, gangs respond to threats of violence or attacks by increasing group cohesion and strengthening their organization.3 And third, as gangs grow stronger, they integrate what have been called "networks of criminal governance," which contribute to the overall levels of violence.4 As for the reality of gangs, research shows that current maras in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras have become a new expression of organized crime in Central America.5 In this chapter, I argue that the steep transformation of street gangs into maras in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras but not in Nicaragua is largely due to the types of responses wielded by the states, to the extent that these responses allowed or even encouraged actions that reinforced what Elin Ranum calls illegal spheres.6 Gangs transformed themselves in order to deal with the conditions created by state and government policies, and they took advantage of the spaces of illegality and informality opened by those policies. Gangs in Central America ended up more violent and more organized because government responses compelled them to strengthen, as well as provided the opportunities and resources to do it through the areas of illegality and the networks of crime broadened by such policies. The preceding statement does not mean that other factors, in particular the considerable influx of returned migrants and deportees from the United States, have not contributed to the transformation of gangs in Central America, but the impact of migration and deportation has been frequently oversold, and it has diverted attention away from research on the impact of domestic factors, such as state policies and the political economy of violent armed groups. The central subject of this chapter, then, is state responses against gangs and how they have contributed to the transformation of Central American maras. That is why the comparison between Nicaragua and northern Central America is illuminating. Although Nicaragua also has street gangs, they never developed into the power protection rackets they are today in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.7 This chapter is divided in three sections. The first section briefly describes the policies, laws, and strategies the four Central American governments implemented to tackle the maras. The second part addresses the political economy of the responses: how governments decided on the policies; the political forces that prevailed in the formulation of the responses; and the discourses used to frame the responses. The third part explores the outcomes of the governments' policies, particularly with regard to their effectiveness in curbing gang crime and gang development, the consequences (intended and unintended) that government policies yielded, and how they created conditions that strengthened or weakened gangs. Copyright © 2011 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

publication date

  • December 1, 2011

International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 13

start page

  • 137

end page

  • 157