Street Gang Exports: The Road from Los Angeles to Latin America

uring the Salvadoran civil war of the 1980s roughly twenty percent of El Salvador’s population arrived in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities as refugees. They came escaping death and hoping for a better future for their children.

The photographs in this exhibition give a glimpse of the gang violence these refugees found in Los Angeles slums and of the ways it has maimed and scarred lives being lived far from LA. My subjects are teenagers for whom gang violence and exile have become routine. But these youths who are often seen one-dimensionally as perpetrators of violence are also its victims. Gangs kill, but they also protect. In the world teen gang members inhabit that is the emotional price paid for survival each day.

Preview

Hide legend

For more than a decade, American street gangs have been spreading to Central America and the Caribbean, a trend greatly accelerated by the policies of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Unfortunately, sweeping the gang problem across U.S. borders does not present a tidy solution.

When young immigrant offenders and gang members who grew up in the United States are deported to countries like El Salvador, they are denied the minimal anchors of family and “home.” Adrift in the shantytowns of San Salvador, they bond for protection and introduce LA gang life to the impoverished youth of El Salvador’s post-war generation.

When I began photographing Salvadoran immigrant gang members in Los Angeles in 1993, I was saddened, but not surprised by how many of them had witnessed war atrocities against family members or neighbors in early childhood. Some of them had even fought as child combatants--guerrillas or soldiers--on either side of the Salvadoran civil war.

However, I was truly shocked and deeply disturbed by what I witnessed in El Salvador later that same year. There had been no youth gangs there when I covered the Salvadoran conflict in the 1980s. But by 1994 I found gang-tattooed teenagers and U.S. gang graffiti in nearly every corner of El Salvador. By the late 90s most youths I met there could recount details about the gang cliques and vendetta wars of Los Angeles, even if they’d never been to the United States. Few remembered anything about the civil war I’d photographed less than a decade earlier in their own country. Crack cocaine was the preferred escape from traumatic flashbacks of prison violence and of friends gunned down by rival gangs or death squad vigilantes.

As we enter the twenty-first century, hard-won human rights gains made in emerging democracies like El Salvador face new threats. The tragic irony is that El Salvador at peace now has the highest per capita homicide rate in the American hemisphere. Pan American Health Organization statistics place the death toll above that of Colombia and even higher than El Salvador’s own average annual casualty rate during the 1980s decade of civil war.

Vendettas between two street gangs originating in Los Angeles-- Mara Salvatrucha and its rival the Eighteenth Street gang--account for a visible portion of the violence in El Salvador. But institutional violence also contributes to these staggering statistics. Death squad vigilantes target street children and teenage gang members, while the organized criminals profiting from the Salvadoran drug trade remain untouchable. As crack houses spread throughout Salvadoran shanty towns and street children mimic the ways of deported gang members from the United States, another generation is being displaced, maimed and silenced in an unreported war.