Gangland hell awaits Salvadorans ejected by United States
Aresident of Soyapango, El Salvador, said furtively: “You never get used to it. I leave my house afraid. I come home afraid.” He knows that in the second most dangerous country in the world, even wearing the wrong colour trainers can get you murdered by MS-13, the vicious international gang that has terrorised Salvadorans for 20 years.
Donald Trump has promised to crush the gang, blamed for dozens of killings around the US. Yet his decision last week to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants could both empower the group in El Salvador and provide a new generation of recruits in the US.
Charles Call, an associate professor of international peace and conflict resolution at American University, said: “I think the large number of Salvadorans who are going back to their country will be prime recruiting ground for MS-13 and will make the security situation in El Salvador worse.
“This decision is going to drive out youths who will certainly be prime candidates for recruitment of MS-13.”
The gang, originally called Mara Salvatrucha, was formed by immigrants from El Salvador in the Eighties around Macarthur Park, Los Angeles. A deportation crackdown in the Nineties exported MS-13 leaders to El Salvador. In 10 years, the gang grew to 50,000 members, engaged in murders, extortion, immigrant smuggling and racketeering.
Jorja Leap, an anthropologist at the University of California, said deported teenagers would be ripe for recruitment. “I think it is a risk that when people subject to TPS are sent back to El Salvador, it is going to increase the gang membership there,” she said. “They will join to protect themselves, because they are afraid.”
The policy, she added, represented a step backwards at a time when data from Los Angeles suggested membership was declining. “And that’s why I’m just horrified at what Trump does, because he gives oxygen to a gang that is losing oxygen,” she said. The US government says TPS recipients were only given temporary leave to remain in the US. The scheme was introduced in 2001 for refugees who had fled two earthquakes and a civil war, allowing them to stay and work legally in a country until it was safe enough to return. It had been renewed every 18 months until last week, when Mr Trump said he was cancelling the provision. Holders now have until September next year to obtain a valid visa.
Ms Leap said that many Salvadorans in America would rather stay illegally than risk returning to their home country. “I think they’re going to try to take the chance because many of them feel that they will be facing certain death if they return home,” she said. “They are going into a war zone.”
Homeland Security said last week that it considers El Salvador safe enough for families to return. But experts outside the government disagree. “It is far more dangerous than in 2001,” said Manuel Orozco, a political scientist with Interamerican Dialogue, a Washington DC think tank. “In 2001, the homicide rate was six people per day, in 2017 it was 11. Extortion rings are substantially larger.”
Mr Orozco said many Salvadoran immigrants are living middle-class lives in the US and are unprepared to return to their dangerous nation.
Vanessa Velasco, 36, and her husband came to the US as tourists in 2000. They now own their own home in San Francisco, with her husband restoring historic buildings. “Since we left, we never went back,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “My brother was killed, a casualty from the gangs, and I wasn’t able to go to his funeral.”