El Salvador racked by ga

By TERESA BORDEN
Cox News Service
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
ATLANTA — The gang violence in René Aguilar's hometown in El Salvador begins subtly enough, though no one misses the signs.

Sidelong looks in the market. An unfamiliar face among the known toughs. And then, the sound of shots and the now commonplace cry of "Muerto, muerto!" as passers-by scatter.

"Dead man," they shout, and the only thing left for the police to do is to pick up the body. The shooter is long gone.

It's the kind of scene Aguilar was fleeing when he arrived in Atlanta without papers last August.

Aguilar is not a gang member. He's just a guy with a wife, two stepchildren and a small tortilla stand in Sonsonate. Now that he is in Atlanta, his wife runs the tortilla stand, making about $12 a day and paying one of those bills to a trusted boy to escort her daughter to school and back. They live daily with the imported gang violence that racks their country and has made Sonsonate its second city for murder, behind San Salvador, the capital.

"You might see, almost daily, one or two murders," Aguilar said. "You get scared when you realize the situation."

Already forced to leave their country because of chronic unemployment, Salvadorans now may cite the permanent fear they live in because of Mara Salvatrucha and M-1. Those Salvadoran gangs were born in the 1980s in inner-city Los Angeles, as thousands of refugees fleeing El Salvador's U.S.-financed civil war streamed into the United States.

Some of the refugees started and joined the gangs, sometimes to defend themselves from U.S. gangs. They accumulated criminal records and got themselves deported back to El Salvador in the late 1990s. There, they started home-grown versions of the criminal groups, which have become ever more violent. Of more than 2,500 murders in El Salvador last year, officials say, about one-third were gang-related.

Mario and Ana Flamenco, both naturalized U.S. citizens also from Sonsonate, have felt the touch of the gangs, too. Her brother, a psychologist who worked for the juvenile justice system in El Salvador, was found strangled in his home in 1999. The crime was never solved, but Mario Flamenco believes gang members were probably responsible.

"They killed him on a Friday night and he was not found until the following Monday," he said. "He never reported to work."

The couple moved four months ago to Atlanta from Los Angeles, where they say gang warfare has been rampant in their neighborhood for years. Mara Salvatrucha rules the streets there. And two of Ana Flamenco's nephews joined gangs there.

They both were arrested, tried and sentenced. After one finished his sentence, he was deported to El Salvador, where he joined a gang after several months. But it was too violent even for him, Ana Flamenco said.

He returned to Southern California and was arrested by immigration authorities: Deportees with criminal records are barred from re-entering the United States and can be charged with a felony if they do. He was sentenced to two years and is expected to be deported again.

"He says that when he gets deported again he will not return," Ana Flamenco said. "He is too scared."

Salvadoran authorities have not sat on their hands. They launched a major crackdown against gang violence in July 2003, called Plan Mano Dura ("Operation Hard Hand"), which resulted in more than 8,000 arrests, said René Figueroa, the country's minister of the interior. But it failed. In most of the cases, judges let the suspects go for lack of evidence.

New President Elías Antonio Saca pledged to do something when he took office in 2004. One measure gave police broad new arrest powers. Then Saca launched Plan Super Mano Dura — "Operation Super Hard Hand." Figueroa says that, so far, it has put more than 70 gang leaders behind bars.

But human rights groups have criticized the new initiative.

"They arrest people because of how they look and what they wear," said Alex Sanchez, program director for Homies Unidos, a Los Angeles-based group founded by former gang members that works to rehabilitate those still in them. The group also has had operations in El Salvador since 1996. "It's like what happens here. A lot of people use gangs as scapegoats for every problem that exists."

The public seems to support Saca's measures. A poll commissioned by the Interior Ministry showed that more than 70 percent of respondents believe Operation Super Hard Hand has been somewhat to very effective in fighting the gang problem.

But the criticism also has led Saca's government to begin a new effort that, along with the punitive measures, also makes a stab at rehabilitation and job placement for former gang members. It is called Plan Mano Amiga ("Operation Helping Hand"), and Figueroa said it aims to incorporate a safety net of government institutions, churches, associations, private enterprise and non-governmental organizations to rehabilitate gang members and give them jobs.

Sanchez is suspicious of the effort, saying it is long on intentions and short on money. "The help they're talking about doesn't have any funds," he said.

Indeed, when asked about a budget, Figueroa said that because the Mano Amiga efforts are so broad-based and involve so many different entities, a budget estimate would be difficult to come by.

Those efforts are likely to take much longer to measure, anyway, and gangs in El Salvador will not go away while the larger problem of unemployment remains dire.

"The killings will continue, the gangs will continue," Aguilar said. "In El Salvador, poor people and people who are not of high rank do not matter much in the world."