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Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala launched Tuesday a new tri-national task force to combat gangs and organized crime with specialized elite security, centralized intelligence and ramped-up patrols on hundreds of miles of shared borders as high rates of emigration and soaring levels of violence continue to rock the region.
OPINION:
El Salvador’s War on Terror
Leaders of Central America’s so-called Northern Triangle — Honduras’ Juan Orlando Hernandez, Guatemala’s Jimmy Morales and El Salvador’s Salvador Sanchez Ceren — officially launched the anti-gang force during an event Tuesday in the western Honduran city of Ocotepeque, near the three-way border between the countries, after signing the agreement in August.
“Today we’re going to have three countries in the same effort, tackling a highly damaging phenomenon to our peoples,” Hernandez said ahead of the inauguration.
The plan includes measures to tighten security on nearly 400 miles of shared borders to stem migration, particularly of gang members, and cut down on trafficking of illicit drugs and other contraband items. It also creates a centralized arrest warrant system to enable local security forces to capture suspects that skirt border patrols. According to its leader, the task force will involve the participation of police, military, prosecutors and intelligence systems in the three countries.
The tri-national security initiative follows in the footsteps of the U.S.-backed war on drugs that has already ravaged the region, and critics argue that the tough-on-crime approach fails to address the underlying causes of chronic and systemic poverty and inequality that push desperate youth to join gangs or turn to drug trafficking in the first place, fueling the cycle of violence.
In 2015, a total of 16,527 murders shook Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, collectively home to 30 million people, many of whom live in poverty. An estimated 10 percent of the Northern Triangle’s population has fled the region in the face danger, forced gang recruitment and dismal economic opportunities.
Meanwhile, Honduras’ human rights record and rule of law has deteriorated drastically in the wake of the 2009 U.S.-backed coup, while longstanding impunity for civil war-era atrocities in Guatemala and El Salvador has failed to break a decades-old culture of violence and its remnants in the criminal underworld.
Gang violence, which has long plagued El Salvador, has become a greater regional concern in Central America in recent years as organized crime syndicates are increasingly transnational, often with links to cartels in South America and Mexico. Many link the roots of gang culture in El Salvador to the experiences of highly-marginalized Salvadoran migrants in the street gangs of Los Angeles. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans went to the United States in the 1980s, fleeing political persecution and violence during El Salvador's brutal U.S.-backed civil war that left 80,000 dead and an unknown number disappeared over the span of 12 years.
The seeds of transnational gangs were later planted when Salvadorans deported from the United States brought gang culture and related experiences back to Central America. El Salvador's largest rival gangs, Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha – also known as MS-13 – both have roots in Los Angeles and tens of thousands of current members in the United States.
Historically, powerful gangs in El Salvador focused heavily on crimes such as extortion and were largely separate from groups of “transporters” that carted drugs through the region. But in recent years, these gangs are sinking deeper into drug trafficking — and building transnational networks to support the trade. Present-day drug trafficking routes in Central America are said to have their roots in the civil war, when smugglers transported arms and other items through the conflict-gripped region. In Central America today, authorities estimate that there are now some 70,000 gang members operating in the Northern Triangle alone.
Drug trafficking groups predating the more recent mutation of El Salvador’s gangs have been known to infiltrate police and judicial institutions and work in concert with corrupt border officials to get the job done more easily. In Guatemala and Honduras, rampant corruption in government institutions has bankrupted faith in the governments to deal with organized crime and soaring homicide rates.
OPINION:
El Salvador Struggles to Break Legacy of Civil War Violence
Following the 2009 coup in Honduras, the country catapulted into the spotlight as the murder capital of the world as a wave of political violence was unleashed and a new reign of lawlessness spurred the growth of criminal groups with impunity. Last year, El Salvador took the notorious moniker with 6,600 homicides in the country of 6.3 million — a level of violence not seen since the end of the country’s more than decade-long civil war in 1992.
The brutal spike in violence was blamed on gangs, and the militarized response — though popular among a terrorized and desperate society — has done little to stem the crisis.
El Salvador lived a brief reprieve beginning in 2012 when a truce between rival gangs Barrio 18 and Mara Salvatrucha spurred a temporary drop in violence. President Sanchez Ceren’s predecessor, Mauricio Funes — who won power for the left-wing FMLN party in 2009 after two decades of right-wing governments — played an unknown role in the negotiations.
The 15-month agreement succeeded in cutting the country’s murder rate in half. But as soon as the truce began to unravel in 2013, violence creeped back up and shot past pre-truce levels.
Sanchez Ceren, who entered office in 2014, has rejected the idea of dialogue with gangs, instead supporting tough-on-crime policies that have included continued deployment of militarized patrols in the streets to dissuade gang extortion, locking down jails to block kingpins from running gangs from prison and declaring gangs “terrorist organizations.” Critics argue that, though popular, such iron fist policies often work to scapegoat violence exclusively on youth, dehumanizing the gang problem and distracting attention from the urgent need for social programming, prevention and rehabilitation.
Now, on a tri-national level, the Northern Triangle’s joint response to regional gang violence and security concerns promotes more militarization to crack down on the problem.
The new anti-gang task force is also closely linked to the U.S.-backed war on drugs and its latest offspring, Washington’s controversial US$750 million Alliance for Prosperity security aid package for the Northern Triangle. The plan, approved earlier this year, more than doubles U.S. aid to the region in the name of security, development and stemming the massive wave of migration from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala not seen since civil wars tore apart the region.
The aid package deal has received criticism, with some arguing that it will only exacerbate key drivers of the crisis by promoting increased militarization, privatization and criminalization — strategies that have already proven to worsen inequality and threaten human rights.
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