The gang problem and the elections

Carlos X, moderator of the San Romero mailing list, recently shared these thoughts and authorized me to republish them here:

El Salvador's "mara" (violent gang) problem is feeding the silent
violence of old war grudges and antagonism between El Salvador's left
and right in troubling ways. Today, I received an email from an
ARENA (official rightwing party of President Tony Saca) activist
stating that the FMLN (the former rebels and now opposition party) is
forging alliances with gang members and prison inmates in a
deliberate campaign to destabilize the country. He cited recent
newspaper articles supporting his position. On the other hand, an
article in the left-leaning DIARIO CO LATINO yesterday cited FMLN
sources stating that the right is promoting the gang conflict "with
all its strength" in order to boost gun sales that benefit wealthy
gun distributors who belong to the official party, and to give the
official party a Splendid Little War against gangs to tout in an
election year.

The truth almost certainly belies both assertions but, the resort to
such accusations is an alarm bell that something is rotten, very
rotten, in Denmark -- or at least in San Salvador. First of all, the
wild charges unmask the deep distrust between two sides of a
continuously polarized Salvadoran society. Secondly, the boldness
with which these charges are leveled reveals a type of political
bravado that borders on recklessness, and hardly bodes well for the
prospects of respectable and stable democratic institutions arising
in El Salvador anytime soon. Thirdly, and perhaps most
distressingly, the categorical and sweeping scope of the charges
reveal that neither the left nor the right has the first clue about
how to stop gang violence, and that they are desperately flailing
blindly in the air like blind men caught in a panic.

An interesting sideshow to this national drama is the struggle
between the left and the right to wrestle away from the other the
language of legitimization. The minister of governance told the
newspaper EL MUNDO today that the problem is a widespread impunity.
By this, he meant, that soft judges fixate on the civil rights of the
accused and end up releasing violent offenders who are left to wreak
havoc on the citizenry. The word "impunity" is more frequently
associated in El Salvador with the left's charge that rightwing
governments have been too eager to leave civil war abuses unpunished,
and to let these criminals go free, who have been left to plant the
seeds of violence among the impoverished masses, whom the free
marketeer ARENA governments have forsaken.

In any case, neither the government, nor the opposition, nor civil
society (including, the once prophetic Church) appears to be have a strategy
for confronting the gang problem in El Salvador and, so, the
frontline of the war against the Salvadoran maras is intramural rhetoric.