The abandoned Salvadorean children forced to turn to a life of crime
Charles Carlos holds his bare feet, cut and bruised from the harsh concrete floor, as he sits in his cell in the Tonacatepeque juvenile detention centre, just outside San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital.
The 16-year-old who is serving seven years for murder in one of the world’s most dangerous cities speaks quietly, without making eye contact.
“My mum just got up one day and left for the US. I was nine,” he says.
Of the 20 inmates sharing a wing with Carlos in the centre, most grew up without a mother or father figure.
They became easy prey for exploitation and recruitment by the rival MS-13 and 18 Street gangs, which control marginalised communities across the Northern Triangle.
Carlos was inducted into MS-13 before he had the chance to save enough money to join his mother in Houston, Texas. He said he soon came to believe in “the cause”, which for these gangsters is death. He said he has killed more than 20 people and committed rape.
“I started running errands for them and keeping watch for police patrols, but then as I got older, I became properly involved,” he says. “But they looked after me. They became family.”
Many of the tens of thousands of migrants who have fled Central America for the United States say they are escaping the bloody gang conflict and the poverty that underpins it.
The US department for homeland security says 49,000 unaccompanied children were apprehended at the border last year and, according to the
United Nations, roughly half of the children who flee El Salvador and Honduras say they are travelling to the US to reunite with their parents or other loved ones.
Last October, Donald Trump cut aid for Central American countries due to the flow of migrants.
Finding a political solution to the structural causes of violence is now one of the biggest challenges, and in El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, the president-elect, thinks he has the answer. Earlier this month, he pledged to open more schools and said he had signed a contract with the Spanish football league to create youth training academies across El Salvador.
While he was mayor of San Salvador, between 2015 and 2018, the city’s murder rate fell by 16 per cent. Mr Bukele’s supporters say this was largely due to providing more recreational facilities in the poorest communities.
But Lilia Ivett Padilla, director of Fusalmo, which works with children and teenagers at risk of exploitation by the gangs, is not convinced.
“It’s not as simple as football pitches because the gangs eventually just destroy them,” she says. “It’s about being in the middle of the community and working with vulnerable families.”
At Las Margaritas school in Soyapango, one of El Salvador’s most dangerous cities, psychologists from Fusalmo work with pupils and families as part of a structured seven-month programme. Such prevention schemes are surprisingly unusual.
In El Salvador, the government says the 15 per cent cut in the murder rate between 2017 and 2018 is a direct result of its so-called “iron fist” policies of mass incarcerations and harsher prison conditions.
“It’s widely acknowledged that hard-line approaches don’t work in the long run,” says José Miguel Cruz, an academic from Florida International University, who researches gangs. “The problem is that the government is not serious about rehabilitation.”
But rehabilitation is both difficult and dangerous. Turning to God is the only accepted method for leaving the gang. Those who try to leave or give up of their own accord are executed.
At the prison in San Francisco Gotera, the Yo Cambio or I Change programme has been running for more than a year. Here, inmates have denounced the gangs, have committed to becoming evangelical Christians and have agreed to participate in skills and craft workshops aimed at improving their employment opportunities. In return, their sentences are shortened.
In Tonacatepeque, where there is no formal rehabilitation programme, Carlos makes eye contact for the first time. “I want to work with computers, but I don’t think I deserve a future after what I’ve done,” he says. “I think my future will be an early death.”
‘I don’t think I deserve a future after what I’ve done. I think my future will be an early death’