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Introducing her book
"I am my father's daughter"
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| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Monday, August 29 2005 |
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| SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- Sitting on a chair he crafted himself, in front of his humble abode in El Salvador's capital city, Francisco Campos remembers with certain nostalgia what his life was like when he arrived in Los Angeles at age 14. "I worked as a baby-sitter," he said, with irony in his voice. "My older sister brought me here, and the first year she made me cook and take care of her three children." But shortly thereafter, Francisco became one of the founding members of what today is considered one of the deadliest and most sought-after gangs in this hemisphere: The "Mara Salvatrucha."
The year was 1982 when a group of about 10 to 15 Salvadoran youths would gather in a small park in the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles. They had something in common: They were all refugees from a country ripped apart by a bloody civil war. They liked to hear heavy-metal music, had long hair and wore Black Sabbath T-shirts. They were poor, most of them from broken homes.
They were not violent, but feeling pushed around by the already-
established 18th Street gang, they resorted to methods they learned in their country's armed conflict, collaborating either with the leftist guerrillas or the U.S.-backed army. "The Mexican gang members would beat us up and insult us," Francisco recalled. "But we had knowledge of weapons, homemade bombs, we knew how to wield a machete."
That's not all they learned. They learned how to hate their enemy. "They tortured and killed my brother, then threw his body in El Playon, a volcanic land used by the army as a dump site," Francisco told me. "We could not reach his body, so the dogs ate it up."
More than 20 years have passed, and what began as a juvenile self-defense tactic has turned into a national-
security threat to the United States -- where the Mara Salvatrucha has spread to 33 states -- and a destabilizing factor for several Central American countries. There are no official figures, but different sources calculate between 40,000 and 100,000 gang members in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala alone. In those countries, the jails are filled with gang members embroiled in a vicious war among rivals.
The violence has been such that the authorities have had to separate the rival gangs in separate quarters in El Salvador and Honduras so they'll stop killing each other. In Guatemala, the fragile truce among rival gangs fell apart recently after what seemed like an orchestrated attack in four prisons that left dozens of members of Mara 18 (an offshoot of the 18th Street gang) dead.
"The Mara issue is not a very simple matter," El Salvador President Tony Saca told me. "It is necessary to look back at the deportations of gang members from Los Angeles in the early '90s to see the origin of the problem," he added. Many of those, according to Saca, finding fertile ground in Central America, came here to organize the gangs.
"When I was deported to El Salvador, I came with the idea to leave the gangs and drugs behind," Francisco told me. "But when I got here, I realized there were members of the 18th Street gang, so I began recruiting and organizing MS here." It wasn't difficult to find willing candidates as young as 11 years old who saw gang life as their only alternative to one of poverty and hopelessness.
In a desolate neighborhood in the Quetzaltepeque area of El Salvador, there was evidence of that fertile ground. A group of young hoodlums, with tattoos on their bodies and faces, armed and smoking marijuana, stood defiantly against a graffiti-covered wall. "See you in hell" read one cryptic message on the wall. There, no one wanted to speak out. The only thing they told me was that they have been hit by the government and fooled by the media.
Gang members in Central America are stuck in a vicious cycle of violence. They are rejected by society. Because of their tattoos, they cannot find work. Because they don't have work, they resort to drug trafficking and extortion. For their crimes they are arrested, and in jail they perfect their criminal abilities. Under those circumstances, it is no wonder so many have lost respect for life and have no fear of death. |
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