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CENTRAL AMERICA: Gang Violence and Anti-Gang Death Squads
By Manuel Bermúdez
SAN JOSÉ, Sep 6 (IPS) - Human rights groups report the existence of death
squads that have been killing suspected members of youth gangs in Honduras
and Guatemala.
They also criticise the increasingly strong-arm crackdown by the
authorities, which they say is not the answer to a problem with deep
socioeconomic roots.
In clashes between the two main gangs, Salvatrucha and M-18, 35 inmates were
killed in several Guatemalan prisons on Aug. 15. The prisoners were armed
with high calibre weapons, including fragmentation grenades.
Salvatrucha and M-18 originated in California after nearly one million
Salvadorans fled to the United States during El Salvador's civil war and
settled in impoverished neighbourhoods in Los Angeles where gang violence
was rife.
As El Salvador began to recover from the 12-year civil war, which ended with
a peace accord in 1992, U.S. authorities began to deport thousands of gang
members to the country, where the explosion of gang violence during the late
1990s lifted El Salvador's homicide rates above those seen during the armed
conflict.
The gangs, known in the region as maras, also spread to Honduras, Guatemala
and Nicaragua, and more recently to Mexico.
Youth gangs are seen as a national security problem in the United States,
where they are present in most big cities and many smaller ones as well.
In response, mass deportations of suspected Central American immigrant gang
members continue. Last month, U.S. authorities announced that some 600 gang
members would be sent back to their countries of origin after serving time
in prison.
Between 20 and 30 minors a day are deported to Honduras from the United
States, Mexico and Guatemala, lawyer Marta Savillón, programmes director at
Casa Alianza, told IPS.
Casa Alianza is the Latin American branch of the New York-based Covenant
House, a child advocacy organisation.
Government statistics estimate the total number of gang members in Central
America at around 100,000.
Although the civil wars are over in Central America, violence remains a
serious problem in this impoverished region. An average of six people a day
are murdered in Honduras (a country of six million), eight a day in El
Salvador (population 6.2 million) and 14 a day in Guatemala (population 12
million).
Authorities blame most of the murders on the maras, but human rights groups
say many of the killings are the work of off-duty police officers operating
in death squads carrying out a sort of "social purge".
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reports that Guatemala now has
the highest murder rate in all of Latin America, with 70 homicides per
100,000 population.
At the 26th ordinary assembly of the Central American Integration System
(SICA), held in Honduras in late June, the countries of Central America
agreed to create a rapid response force and take other joint military and
intelligence actions. Costa Rica, however, opposed the agreement.
In El Salvador and Honduras, tough anti-gang laws make it possible to throw
young people in prison for years merely because they belong to gangs, and
police have been given broad powers of arrest, hauling young people in
simply because they bear tattoos or communicate using certain hand signs.
Gang members identify themselves with tattoos, bandanas of a certain colour,
military-style haircuts, secret code words and hand signals. To join, a
would-be gang member must go through initiation rites, which usually involve
violence among members or against outsiders.
But human rights organisations say the increased repression is generating
greater violence, and is pushing the youth gangs to develop more complex
structures as a survival strategy. Some gang leaders have reportedly forged
new links with the world of drug trafficking and organised crime, in search
of protection from the stepped-up police action.
In El Salvador, 1,000 soldiers began to patrol the streets of the capital on
Sep. 1 along with the police, in "anti-gang task forces". The authorities
said the new units are to be made up of three soldiers and two police
officers. The function of the soldiers is to accompany the police for
security, not to engage in law enforcement.
The initiative forms part of the "Super Mano Dura" (Super Iron Fist)
strategy that the Salvadoran government of Antonio Saca began to implement
last year.
Savillón said the joint task forces tracked down their "victims" like
hunting expeditions. She complained that they have only made it more
difficult for groups that reach out to young people, because gang members
who in the past were identifiable and therefore accessible to those engaged
in social work and rehabilitation now go to pains to hide themselves away.
The arrests have also swept up ex-gang-members who were in the process of
rehabilitation, she added.
In Honduras, organisations like London-based Amnesty International and Casa
Alianza have also reported that death squads are killing youngsters
suspected of belonging to gangs, often merely because they sport tattoos.
Savillón told IPS that Casa Alianza has documented 2,778 murders of young
people below the age of 23 between 1998 and last July. Most of the victims
were members of maras.
Because these murders are usually not investigated, the perpetrators enjoy
total impunity, said the activist. She underlined, however, that there is no
evidence pointing to the direct participation of the state in the ongoing
killings.
A 2003 report by Amnesty International, "Honduras Zero Tolerance...for
Impunity: Extrajudicial Executions of Children and Youths since 1998", says
"Most of the victims lived in poverty, on the margins of society, with
little education and few job prospects. Honduran society has viewed the
deaths of these children and youths with indifference and apathy, some
newspapers even suggesting it as a possible solution to the problem of
public insecurity."
President Ricardo Maduro has acknowledged the problem of the killings and
set up a special unit to investigate. But in two years of efforts, the unit
has only been successful in getting the courts to convict eight of the
killers.
Ricardo Díaz, the head of the Security Ministry unit in charge of
investigating the deaths of minors, said police and members of the military
were implicated in the extrajudicial executions of young people. His office
has brought charges against 285 people.
At night, the "death squads" patrol the neighbourhoods frequented by gang
members, seize suspects and take them to the outskirts of the cities to kill
them, said Díaz.
Guatemalan human rights prosecutor Sergio Morales has also repeatedly
complained of a social purge, reflected by the frequent killings of
suspected gang members in that country as well.
The first regional conference of human rights defenders, which ended Sep. 2
in the Guatemalan city of Antigua, concluded that the increasingly hard-line
anti-terrorism, anti-drug and anti-gang policies pose a grave threat to
human rights in the region.
The causes of the spiralling violence are social and economic, say activists
and legal experts, who argue that a short-term, exclusively penal approach
will not eradicate the problem.
They point out that at least half of Central America's total population of
38 million lives below the poverty line, a proportion that rises as high as
70 percent in countries like Nicaragua, according to unofficial figures.
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala rank at the bottom of the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) human development index in Latin
America.
In the communities where the maras recruit their members, social safety nets
and state support are extremely weak.
An Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) report,
"Marginalised in Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Panama", states that
factors like "social and economic marginalisation, family problems, school
drop-out, under or unemployment, uncontrolled and unplanned urban sprawl, a
culture of violence and transculturalisation push young people to rebuild
their identity in youth gangs."
(END/2005)
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