Cite some facts about the seven major Mexican cartels and how they operate. What are at least three proposed solutions offered (p.408-410) for reducing the influence of the cartels? Finally, is it imp

“It Was Like an Army” In the wake of the truce, the police once again entered red zones like Manuel’s neighborhood shooting first and asking questions in the torture chamber, unleashing the worst tactics of the civil war years. On one such occasion, police held him on the floor of an interrogation room and tortured him with electric shocks. Then his interrogators squeezed his fingers with pliers while asking about a list of names of suspected gang members. Manuel was left to languish in an o vercrowded cell, where inmates defecated on the floor. They led him outside daily to be subjected to stress positions, naked, and doused with liquid teargas. He broke down crying. Some of the other inmates were “disappeared” after authorities transferred t hem to prisons controlled by rivals —a death sentence. When he was finally released, all Manuel could think about was killing the officers who had would put him there. In El Salvador, he concluded, human rights don’t exist. His enmity was amplified by the k nowledge that the some of those abusing him were complicit in the crimes of which they 8399_State of War_1P.indd 79 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Four – “It Was Like an Army” 80 STATE OF WAR were accusing him. In the years since Mano Dura, the gangs had grown m ore powerful along with the ranks of their new allies eager to profit from them. At El Paso, a restaurant outside Santa Ana, Manuel had dined with judges, lawyers, and investigators willing to resolve their criminal cases for a hefty fee. On one occasion, after most of his clique was picked up, the arresting officers told them the names of the gang members who had ratted them out. The clique decided to kill the informants and their families —the police had used them and then released them on the st reets to the lions. But worst of all was the fact that he had long ago left the gang and became calmado . In 2008, embarrassed at the way his son looked at him, always hiding out on the heels of a drug deal gone bad. He made little money. And he was tired o f worrying that any moment he could be killed in a shootout or murdered by his own gang. One night, he was partying with his friend, “El Loco,” when he finally broke down. They were surrounded by women, with money and guns on the table. But Manuel felt emp ty and alone. He picked up his guns —a .38 revolver and a .45 semi -automatic —and said he was leaving. He said he would shoot anyone he encountered on the street and that he hoped it was a cop. El Loco told him he was crazy. When Manuel got home, he called a nother homeboy and asked him to come pick up the guns —he was done. The voice on the other end of the phone asked him what he would do for a living, but Manuel had no answer. He knelt, put his forehead to his hands, and asked God for a job. A few days later , an intermediary who knew he was looking for a way out found him one —a job program in a new factory that was hiring former gang members ready for a second chance. 8399_State of War_1P.indd 80 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS Which is where I met him —in a factory that produces ath - 81 letic apparel for U.S. colleges. He credits the program for his ability to leave the gang life behind him. Why aren’t there more programs like it, he asked. We were sitting in an office at the fac tory where he works, which is ringed by an urban fabric of gangcontrolled slums. Today kids join gangs because of the money, he said, but 80 percent of them could be convinced to quit if they had a real job. “It’s always the stick, the stick, the stick.” Never the carrot. When it introduced the Firm Hand, ARENA promised extensive gang prevention and rehabilitation programs as well. But these were rolled out late, if at all: Mano Amiga (Friendly Hand), a gang prevention program for at -risk youth; and Mano Ex tendida (Extended Hand), a rehabilitation program that aspired to “teach values, offer spiritual assistance, education, job training, health services, tattoo removal, cultural activities, and sports activities and to facilitate the search for employment.” The programs were targeted at the twenty most crime -ridden communities. But the agency tasked with overseeing them was the Secretariat de la Juventud, which was a problematic choice. “During its lifetime,” the agency “spent vast amounts of public money on promotion. However, most of its technical staff lacked the necessary expertise and were simply young ARENA supporters who received a generous salary while being groomed as a future party cadre. Overall, the SJ appeared to be a fundamentally weak and politi cized institution that was created to demonstrate the Saca government’s commitment to prevention and rehabilitation, but displayed neither a vision of comprehensive gang control nor a real interest in it,” according to Wolf. Alex Renderos, a Salvadoran journalist who worked for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times , told me that one of 8399_State of War_1P.indd 81 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Four – “It Was Like an Army” 82 STATE OF WAR these programs was, in reality, an ARENA intelligence -gathering operation. Gang members would be given jobs but in order to keep them they would have to give up the names of the leaders of their cliques. This precipitated a period of fierce bloodletting in which those who collaborated were murdered by their gangs. During a brief window around the 2012 truce, Renderos was one of a few journalists who were allowed access to MS gang leaders like “El Diablito of Hollywood,” before they were again secluded within the confines of maximum security prisons. “You don’ t know how many good friends I had to kill because of Mano Amiga,” El Diablito reportedly told him. “Friends and family. Dozens.” I asked Manuel if that was true. “That’s what I’m telling you. That’s what I’m telling you,” he said. “They threw this out and said the firm hand against the criminal and the friendly hand goes to the one who wants to work, to —” He paused, trying to remember the word. “ —to ‘reintegrate’ into society. But how are you going to reintegrate into society when you don’t have a job, not hing dignified, without any rights,” he asked. “The friendly hand never arrived.” In light of the government’s failures and the NGOs that make money saying they help ex -gang members —“ pure bullshit” —Manuel thinks private industry could launch their own programs. American policies in the region have long restricted U.S. funding from going to any program where participants had criminal ties —codified into law in 2012 when the Treasury Department designated MS -13 a transnational criminal organization, alongs ide Al Qaeda and the Japanese Yakuza. This made it illegal for U.S. funding to go to any organizations engaged with the gang, even jobs programs to help leave the gang life. 8399_State of War_1P.indd 82 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPO RTS But in 2015, as the murder rate surged to 103 homicides for 83 every 100,000 residents —more than twenty times the rate in the United States —the arrival of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America at the U.S. Mexico border caused the Obama administration to investigate the factors driving their flight. The results pointed to violence from narcos and gangs —a study from the Center for Global Development found that for every ten additional murders in the Northern Triangle countries, six more c hildren migrated to the United States — which prompted a reconsideration of the ban and opened the door to funding some organizations working to rehabilitate former gang members and give them a way out. In 2017, the Treasury Department awarded a waiver to t he State Department and USAID to fund the program that rescued Manuel from the gang. But the waiver must be renewed each year —a relationship that’s tenuous at best under the tenure of President Trump. In the absence of the carrot, he’s seen the stick drive more than a dozen of his fellow gang members who had been calmado back into the gang life. It’s a hard pull to ignore. One of them was El Mafioso, who as a young man had his mother beg for him to be released. The other day, Manuel saw him surrounded by about twenty young lookouts in the process of trying to become active gang members. “It was like an army,” he said. To understand this cycle of escalation and retaliation and where it might be headed, I met with Carlos Martinez in the crowded , buzzing office of El Faro , headquarters of the country’s hip and scruffy journalistic intelligentsia. Martinez’s family is testament to the paradoxes of El Salvador’s historical elite: His mother is an avowed leftist and devotee of slain 8399_State of Wa r_1P.indd 83 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Four – “It Was Like an Army” 84 STATE OF WAR archbishop Óscar Romero, whose assassination marked the onset of the civil war; her older brother Roberto D’Aubuisson is the right -wing leader believed to have given the ord er for the assassination. Martinez’s online newspaper consistently produces some of the best journalism about the gang problem in Latin America. He answered my questions in long bursts of targeted oratory, punctuated by cups of water. In the beginning, he said, the war was between two gangs, a conflict that had carried over from Los Angeles’s Macarthur Park to kill untold thousands across Latin America. Extortion monetized the conflict, but it remained a war between two criminal organizations. The first tim e the gangs displayed an awareness of their power on the national stage was after Barrio 18 torched the bus full of people. “President Funes created another law, which again prohibited gangs and again gave gang members more years in jail for more things.” In response, the gangs launched national strikes that paralyzed the country’s public transportation system for days. “That’s what the guerilla did during the civil war. The gangs demonstrated this before the truce, ‘We can act in coordination and paralyze the public transportation system of this country.’ That is a political act,” he said. “The truce perfected those possibilities.” The truce exposed a startling degree of sophistication and organizational capacity on the part of the gangs. The polit icians had sought them out and dealt with them as equals, and the gangs had learned their political power. Just as significantly, they learned how much they have in common. When the politicians turned on them, the gangs realized they shared more with each other than with the state that persecuted them. 8399_State of War_1P.indd 84 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS It wasn’t until Sanchez Cerén took office, militarized the 85 police, and unleashed the death squads, that these two crimi nal organizations understood themselves to be at war with the state. When Cerén announced that the era of negotiating with gangs was finished, new anti -gang units were created and unshackled from the traditional oversight of agencies like Internal Affairs. The country’s vice president announced that police were free to use lethal force without fear of suffering any consequences. Things got exceedingly ugly. “The police live in the same communities that the gang members live in, and the gangs responded savagely. They killed children in front of their parents. They decapitated police in front of their children. They killed mothers and they raped wives. And the police responded with the same.” In the process, “that conflict that had been planted over decades in a cycle of revenge, over which so much blood had been spilled, that conflict was suddenly redirected toward the state.” Throughout the history of the gangs, each stage of their evolution has been catalyzed by state action. Now the state is in a war from which there is no discernible exit. It has managed to push these criminal organizations to embrace a political agenda while the turf war between them is diminishing toward something like a Westphalian peace. “Each gang respects the opponent’s territory for its criminal activities and what they both understand is that the state is their enemy,” he said. “What is an organization that defines itself by its conflict with another gang? It is a gang. What is an organization that defines itself by its conflict with the state? I do not know. That is a mutation that the state is currently accelerating, and it also asks citizens to position themselves in that war.” 8399_State of War_1P.indd 85 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Four – “It Was Like an Army” 86 STAT E OF WAR To fight that war, they have freed the hand of the security forces. When they do that, he continues, “things such as the one that I will now tell you about start to happen.” Martinez recounted the story of a joint patrol of soldiers and police who entered a community called Zacamil. The gang members, already tipped off by their lookouts, had melted into the neighborhood. Instead the troops encountered a nineteen -year -old man whose mother had sent him to buy tortillas for lunch. They took off his shirt to search for tattoos, but he was not a gang member. By the time his mother came out to look for him, the security forces were hitting him and stabbing him with a pen to force him to tell them where the rest of the gang members were. When the mother asked them to stop, they pointed their rifles at her and called her an old whore. Finally the neighbors came out and the patrol let him go. “It appears that nothing has happened. It is settled; the boy is free. But a mother witnessed how the state tortured her son, and a son witnessed how the state humiliated his mother.” On that day, he said, a mother and a son in a divided society realize they have something in common with the gangs: The state regards them as part of the same class. This creates a social paradox: The upper and middle classes are the most virulently anti -gang, while the communities in which the gangs have the strongest presence —that is, the people who live directly under their brutal yoke —are the most sympathetic. That’s because the gang members, for better or worse, are a part of that community. He told me another story, about the community of Montreal, where the young man who held power was named Oscar. Oscar was smart and ruled with 8399_State of War_1P.indd 86 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS an iron fist. But he also took on a role administering disputes to 87 minimize conflict; which is to say he ruled but also governed. There was a man there who would beat his wife every time he got drunk, which made him the source of a public disturbance. In Montreal, if you call the police, Martinez explained, the gang members kill you because they don’t want the police in their neighborhood. So Oscar warned him that if someone calls the police because of him, Oscar would kill him. The man never beat his wife again. Instead, they separated. His wife went to Oscar to say that, despite being grateful that her husband was no longer beating her, he hadn’t left any money to support their child. So Oscar told him to deliver a certain sum on a certain day of every month or else he would kill him. “That man is now the most responsible man with his family,” Martinez tells me. “This is a true story. I know the man. I know the woman. And I knew Oscar.” For those in the neighborho od, there is no shortage of reasons to hate the gang that extorts their businesses and threatens their guests or worse (if you’re a young woman that a gang member takes a fancy to, this is “a curse from which no one can protect you”). Nonetheless, when the police entered Montreal and executed Oscar, the community was indignant. “I was sent a photo of Oscar’s corpse. They killed him on his knees. His brain was splattered ahead of his body,” said Martinez. The residents in this area might have been grateful t o have been liberated from a tyrant, but instead they saw the murder as a betrayal. If the state had hoped to drive a wedge between the gang and the community, it had failed. Of course, this is of little concern to the upper and middle classes, who know the gangs only through the 8399_State of War_1P.indd 87 9/17/19 10:58 AM Chapter Four – “It Was Like an Army” 88 STATE OF WAR extortion they pay if they own a business or through what they see on television. That is the sector of society that applaude d the unconstitutional laws like Mano Dura and all its successors, Martinez said, and continues to endorse, more tacitly, the work of the death squads. As they watch Oscar’s corpse on the newscast over lunch, they say, “‘Excellent! One less gang member.” He continued, “this is the reason why in such communities, where there are a lot of very poor people, the state is not a good school or a good hospital, or a good street, or a good system of public transportation. The state is not good employment. The state is a police officer. The state is a soldier. If the state represented in that police officer or that soldier tortures your son and humiliates your mother, you are generating a division that sums up everything we’ve been discussing,” he said. “What you are creating is a bomb.” And if the only indicator you pay attention to is the murder rate, the problem will grow infinitely more complex right under your nose. At the same time, the gangs are fluid, constantly evolving. So far their biggest mutations have co me in response to state action, nearly always the stick. In 2012, at the truce’s onset, when he asked the MS leadership if they were going to disband as part of the truce, Martinez said, “they almost ate me alive.” In the last interview he did with their r epresentatives, one year ago, they told him they were open to dismantling the gang if the government would negotiate with them in public with an organization like the UN as witness, and if the government would propose a reintegration and rehabilitation law that to consider reviewing unjust sentences. “These are not stupid conditions. The evolution of gangs, I think, will depend on the stimuli and the possibilities they receive. If they receive, I think, more and 8399_State of War_1P.indd 8 8 9/17/19 10:58 AM WILLIAM WHEELER COLUMBIA GLOBAL REPORTS better stimuli from drug trafficking than from the state, I think 89 it is likely to evolve in that direction. If they receive stimuli in another direction, it is very likely that the gang will end , although it seems absurd at the moment, sitting at a negotiating table discussing his own disbanding.” 8399_