In El Salvador, torn by violence, a way out for gang members
CIUDAD ARCE, El Salvador — The gang tattoo etched sharply on William Amaya Valladares would bar him from a regular job in much of the country.
But here he is, the menacing stamp of the Mara Salvatrucha gang crawling up his neck, as he sweeps the seams of T-shirts bearing U.S. college logos through a buzzing sewing machine at breakneck speed.
On any given day, the T-shirts may read U Mass, Penn State, or Florida Gators — conjuring buoyant images of student life that could hardly be further from Amaya’s reality.
But after spending much of his youth in one of El Salvador’s most notorious gangs, all that matters now to Amaya, 24, is a job that pays enough to support him and his two children.
He joined MS-13, as the gang is known, when he was 14 years old, seeking the companionship and sense of community he could not find at home. Neither lasted.
“Once you have been in it for two, three, four years, it has filled the emptiness you have,” he said, speaking during his lunch break here at the garment plant, which produces the T-shirts for a Pennsylvania company, League Collegiate Outfitters. “But then you realize that you’re in something serious.”
The future in a gang is always the same, he said. “At the end is jail, the cemetery or the hospital.”
In El Salvador, torn by social discord and a surge of criminal violence, hope seems dim for the nation’s youth. But Rodrigo Bolanos, the general manager of the League factory here, believes in small triumphs.
“This is my country, all these are my countrymen; El Salvador cannot be successful if we cannot take care of our people,” Bolanos said at the seven-year-old garment plant in this industrial suburb some 30 miles northwest of San Salvador, the capital. “I see it as a desert, and this is an oasis with a fountain.”
A U.S.-educated industrial engineer by training, Bolanos combines missionary fervor with the competitive jargon of the garment industry. In his experience, hiring people whom nobody else will employ makes business sense.
Among the employees here are a handful of disabled workers — often forgotten in a country that is too chaotic to attend to them. Yet he has found that their presence “removes violence from the environment.”
Module No. 6 at the plant is staffed by former gang members like Amaya, who add up to some 50 people working in the plant.
El Salvador is reeling from violence at levels not seen since the civil war of the 1980s, as the government struggles to rein in the gangs that control neighborhoods in many of the country’s cities and towns.
In August, there were 911 murders, surpassing the previous record of 670 in June. More than 50 percent of the dead were under the age of 30, according to the coroner’s office.
For the country to gain some traction against crime, gang members who want to leave the streets need to find another way to earn a living. The word for it here is reinsertion, which means a chance at a normal life.
There are efforts to set up bakeries and chicken farms for former gang members, or to allocate street market stalls to their families.
In a broad security plan designed by a citizens’ government advisory council — “Safe El Salvador” — creating jobs for young people is the first, and one of the most expensive, proposals. It is certainly uppermost on the minds of those who work with young people.
Bolanos has his own solution: Hire anybody who wants to work.
Francisco Huezo is one of them. He had fallen on such hard times that even the gang he joined at 12, Barrio 18, kicked him out.
For a couple of years, he was living under a traffic bridge in San Salvador with his girlfriend, Beatriz, and her two children, stealing money for crack and heroin and scavenging for food in the trash.
Then, one day in January, at the suggestion of an evangelical pastor, a drug-dazed Huezo went for a tour of the League plant. Bolanos offered him a job. Huezo, 24, swore off drugs. He rented a covered corner at the edge of a vacant lot, strung a plastic curtain in front of it to make a home and enrolled the children — 13-year-old Cecilia and nine-year-old Roberto — in school for the first time.
In June, other workers from the factory chipped in to buy metal sheeting and built a tiny house on the lot. “It feels good to have a good job,” he said.
An outing for gang members consists of calling a taxi to go to a shopping mall, just to eat and wander around, said a Catholic priest in one neighborhood where a gang has taken over a house just outside the parish church.
To hear Amaya tell it, gang life is suffused with boredom punctuated by violence.
“We would get up to hang out, do nothing, go out to the corner, get high, run from the police, listen to music,” he said.
He said he sold drugs on the street and shook down businesses. “The Coke trucks had to pay $4 every time they wanted to make a delivery in the neighborhood,” he said.
The money went to buy weapons.
“To rise in the gang, you have to defend territory,” he said.
Amaya said he spent seven years in the gang before he joined an evangelical church and was allowed to leave. He began working at the League plant two years ago. There, his boss, Bolanos, brims with ideas: “Our goal is to get people back in society, get them back on track,” he said.
Every worker spends half an hour on a computer each workday practicing English through an online course. The factory pays for high school equivalency classes and has just arranged with a local university to offer a two-year engineering degree. The company subsidizes a clinic, day care, breakfast and lunch, adjusts schedules for employees studying for a college degree, and has even set up a plan to lend money to people who want to raise tilapia in tanks at home for extra income.
The efforts raise labor costs — to some $500 a month for each worker overall, compared to the average wage of about $300 a month in garment plants. But the benefits eliminate turnover, Bolanos said, which ultimately generate savings.
“Other companies are barely making it because they are training people every month.” he said. His efficiencies mean he could sell to a customer demanding the tightest margins. “If I worked for Walmart, could I do this? The answer is yes.”
The factory has just hired about 100 new workers and plans to add another 150 or so to reach 700 by December, Bolanos said. He hopes to offer jobs to residents of the poor neighborhood nearby, including those finishing prison sentences.
A few minutes’ drive from the plant sit the shells of some 100 houses abandoned after a low-income housing developer ran out of money. Bolanos has outfitted two of them for disabled employees, who sleep under cotton quilts made for the University of Illinois and Quinnipiac University.
His plan is to raise money to restore the rest of the houses for workers, complete with green spaces.