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You Must Go Home Again
Deported L.A. gangbangers take over El Salvador
Wallace, Scott Publisher: Harper's Magazine
Year Published: 2000
Resource Type: Article
On gang warfare, violence, and culture in El Salvador and how US intervention set the scene for its manifestation in the country's urban landscape.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
Officials estimate that there are more than 20,000 full-fledged gang members in San Salvador alone - four times the number of guerrillas that three successive Republican administrations spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to vanquish. Washington force-fed El Salvador with a steady diet of infantry weapons: tens of thousands of automatic rifles, bazookas, land mines, hand grenades. And then, just as U.S. aid began to slowly trickle, we began to export hardened veterans of our inner cities and federal pens. In 1998, INS deportations to El Salvador topped 5,300, and Salvadoran church officials estimate that 16 percent of the deportados arrive with what they call "grave antecedents" for criminal behaviour - the rough equivalent of dumping 1,300 violent felons on the streets of Chicago each year.
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