Update: Agreement with Maras in El Salvador?

Former congressman and ex-guerrilla leader Raúl Mijango, who claims to have been one of the negotiators of a peace between MS 13 and Mara 18 in El Salvador, issued a statement reinforcing claims made by a Catholic bishop attributing falling homicide rates in El Salvador to this peace agreement.  The statement included words reportedly written in collaboration with both MS 13 and Mara 18 (as translated by insightcrime.org):

Since last year we have begun internally a deep process of reflection and analysis of the serious and pressing problems facing our country, of which we have been part, as a consequence of the war that we have been forced to fight due to social exclusion, marginalization, repression, and the need for survival...

We have not negotiated anything with this government, nor do we ask to, we are tired of corrupt and lying politicians ... that's why this time to accompany our process of reflection we preferred to ask for the assistance of the Church and civil society...

They have made it possible that after 20 years we have been able to reach an agreement between the two rival gangs where we have managed ... to significantly reduce the murders in the country, and, in a gesture of goodwill, to cancel all actions that include attacks against soldiers, police and guards.

 An article in El Faro reports that Mijango's statement criticizes EL Faro's coverage of an alleged agreement between the street gangs and the government. The statement called the newspaper irresponsible and unprofessional. You can see the full statement (in Spanish) by following the link to the article in El Faro.

Obviously, there is more going on here than you or I, as outsiders, can see. I have to admit I was more inclined to believe the original story of the government brokering a deal with the gangs at first, mostly because I see El Faro as one of the few trustworthy (or at least less blatantly biased) news sources in El Salvador. Yet the missive detailing the Church/civil society led true seems genuine. I wonder what prompted El Faro to run with this story. Was it so difficult to find out about a Church brokered truce? Were they obliviously ignorant of what was going on? Were they journalists misled? Or is this the truth that is now getting covered over? If this type of story had happened in Guatemala, there would already be loud accusations of the "opposition" trying to destabilize the government. But politics operate differently in El Salvador (to some extent at least, especially because there are somewhat stable political parties and the party in power at the moment was in the opposition for so long). I'll write more on this as things unfold, for those who are interested.

Negotiating with Gangs in El Salvador

Just finished reading a piece in the online Salvadoran newspaper El Faro. I'll write more of the details of this later (in the evening, perhaps, once I've finished what I need to get done for the day), but I wanted to lay out the basics here for anyone who is interested. A week an a half ago, El Faro reported on an agreement between the government and street gangs intended to reduce homicides rates. According to the report, the treaty included transferring gang leaders from maximum to minimum security prisons and other benefits for these prisoners in exchange for less gang violence in the streets. That same week, the article confirms, homicide rates fell to nearly half of what they had been the week before. This, in one of the most violent countries in the when judging according to homicide rates. The government, of course, denies these claims.

Following the publication of this investigation and another that uncovered an organized crime network that involved street gang leaders, prominent businessmen, and local politicians, El Faro journalists began to received threats. In one instance, a government official told the newspaper that gang leaders were upset with these reports and warned El Faro to remember the fate of documentary film maker Cristian Poveda (who was killed by gang members after making a documentary about the Mara 18 gang).

Most recently, a bishop in the Catholic Church has taken credit for the fall in homicide rates (averaging 5 per day, rather than the 14 per day in January and February), claiming that the Church had brokered a truce between Mara 18 and MS 13. Many doubt this story, however, as an insightcrime.org article explains, because of the lack of details in the bishop's story.

Update: Messages from Zetas in Guatemala

More banners supposedly written by the Zetas appeared in Guatemala on Wednesday supporting the claim that the message thanking President Pérez for his drug legalization proposal were not written by Zetas. One white sheet written with the message appeared hanging from a roadside sign at the entrance to a village in Chiquimula while, more ominously, another appeared wrapped around the body of a university student, who had been shot three times. Although firefighters (who operate as first responders in Guatemala) found the student alive, he subsequently died in the hospital. The message, the same on both sheets, threatened the leader of the Líder political party, Manuel Baldizon, who came in second place in the most recent presidential elections. The alleged Zetas blame Líder for posting the previous banners I commented on in my previous posts (here and here), threatening to kill the politician if other messages appear in the Zetas' name. The message read: "Baldizon hijo de tu puta madre, deja de mandar a poner mantas a nombre mío!! Yo soy el Z200 te mataré hasta el perro de tu casa y a todos los del lider att. Z200." In English: "Baldizon, you son of a bitch, stop putting up signs in my name. I am Z200 and I will kill even your dog and everyone in Líder. attn: Z200." You can read an article about this in Spanish here.

More on Zetas and Drugs in Guatemala

A quick follow-up on the last post about the banners allegedly hung by the Zetas in support of President Otto Pérez' drug legalization proposal in Guatemala:

In brief analysis of the situation from insightcrime.org, that author states that the banners were most likely the work of those wishing to make Pérez look soft on crime. He claims that the Zetas would never support the legalization of drugs because the intent of these policies is to hurt drug traffickers. Although I'm not convinced it was the Zetas who wrote these public notes, I'm not terribly convinced by this argument, either. Drug traffickers won't be happy that transporting drugs in Guatemala would be legal? I'm not saying that it wouldn't lower violence linked to drug trafficking (although who knows, perhaps it would mean higher stakes and stiffer competition for those who control Guatemalan trafficking routes?), but I hesitate to take a stance on this either way, since I don't know the details of Pérez' plan, nor the numbers in terms of how much stays in Guatemala and how much moves on to Mexico and the US. The banners do seem to be more of a hoax than anything else, but saying that the Zetas wouldn't support legalizing drugs just because the policy is intended to hurt drug cartels seems like taking too much on faith. Unintended consequences are a major issue for any public policy, and I'm sure there are forces behind these proposed policies that we don't know about.

Zetas Support Legalization of Drugs in Guatemala?

I haven't written recently due to a major work overload, but I had to share this. I'm hoping to get to a more detailed discussion of this situation soon, but for now, here's a quick summary. The new President of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, has been very vocal recently about his campaign to legalize drugs in Guatemala (and to convince other countries in the region to join in this legalization) in an effort to fight narco-trafficking. This article appeared in the El Periódico newspaper today showing a banner hung on an overpass in Zone 13 in Guatemala City. The banner reads (in Spanish): Pérez y Baldetti cumplan legalizar las drogas y apoyaremos lucha contra maras. In English, it says, "If [President] Pérez and [Vice President] Baldetti legalize drugs, we will support their fight against the maras." Signed, Zetas 200. A similar sheet with similar writing also appeared in Zone 7. The newspaper calls the authors of the note "suspected Zetas," since no one knows if it was actually written and hung by members of the Zeta cartel and the people who quickly took down the sheet in Zone 13 were unidentified. According to the article, the president attributed the message to the opposition. Would legalizing drugs in Guatemala help or hurt the drug cartels? My gut response is that legalizing drugs would only hurt the traffickers if this legalization took place in their major market (the US) rather than in countries that are principally used as transportation routes. Yes, drugs are sold in Guatemala, and legalizing them might hurt the small-time drug dealers. Who benefits from legalizing the transportation, buying, and selling of drugs in a major transportation hub? Will the cartels pay taxes? I think I need to look into this further (I'm not even sure what President Pérez' proposal entails), and I'll post what I find for those of you who are interested.

Prison Fire in Honduras

I'm sure many of you have already heard about the horrifying prison fire in Honduras. Reports are now claiming that the fire started after an inmate set fire to his mattress. Hundreds are already confirmed dead, and many are still missing (presumed dead). You can read the LA Times coverage here, and the New York Times here. AP reports state that firefighters claim they could not let prisoners out of their cells because they could not locate the keys. Was this pure incompetence? I'm not sure if the ensuing investigation promised by the Honduran president will clear things up.

A friend passed along an amateur video of the blaze posted on youtube that I could not help but watch (I am a victim, like most people, of morbid curiosity). I don't really recommend you watch the video (it was not too graphic but was still disturbing). What was most interesting to me was the video linked to it. Well, not the video, really, but the comments to the video. In the amateur video of the fire, the man behind the camera keeps repeating "dios santo" and "pobrecitos" ("my god"--"poor things"). He laments what he sees as the late response of the firefighters and the obvious gunshots echoing in the neighborhood. Bystanders speculate that perhaps a bomb had exploded. But the comments to the AP report of the incident, which the first video I mention is a response to, tell another story of anger and resentment towards prisoners that I have heard in Guatemala and El Salvador as well. The comments section on youtube and other anonymous forums often attracts so-called trolls and other rancorous individuals who what to stir up trouble or vent their venom. But this does not mean that there are not people out there who honestly feel the same way as those who posted on this particular comments section. Posts demonized the victims of the blaze. One (in Spanish) dismissed the incident as justice, saying that the prisoners were going to burn in hell anyway. People wrote about how rape victims and family members of murder victims would be celebrating, and there is serious confusion as to whether this particular prison were high security or not (as if it would be less of a tragedy if the victims were murderers and more of a tragedy if they were only thieves). I wonder, does it matter what crimes these prisoners were convicted of? Is the thought of burning to death locked in a prison cell less horrifying when the victims are convicted rapists and murderers?

Are Disappearances Murder?

A fellow political scientist's blog post got me thinking about a subject I hadn't considered before, at least not in this context. The post discusses the alarming rate of disappearances in El Salvador and whether or not these disappearances should be considered gang violence, as the article by Hannah Stone that he cites suggests. The author of the blog rightly points out that it is difficult to determine what should be considered gang violence, not just as this applies to disappearances but to murders and other types of violence as well. It brings up the important question of not only how homicide statistics are gathered, but what definition of homicide is used (and what deaths are left off the list). Homicides are often used as indicators of the crime rate because, presumably, homicides do not often go unreported. Which, I think, is kind of a moot point when looking at disappearance rates or thinking of hidden graves. In some countries, criminal suspects killed by the police are not included in homicide reports even though many human rights defenders would argue that those killed are victims of murder. Some statistics include deaths due to car crashes as homicide, while others don't. It makes homicide statistics that much more murky. It also makes me curious as to what the disappearance rate is in Guatemala or Honduras, or, for that matter, Brazil or Argentina.

Pichação in São Paulo

An articlein the New York Times about graffiti in São Paulo offers an interesting twist to Kelling and Wilson's broken windows theory of crime. 

Laid out in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article, and later in a book by Kelling and Coles (1998), the broken windows theory is, simply, that disorder and crime are inherently linked. That is, vandalism and anti-social behavior will lead to further vandalism, which will most likely lead to an escalation in crime. A building with one broken window will inevitably end up with all its windows broken--as Kelling and Wilson explain, "one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing." Areas with abandoned buildings, graffiti, broken windows, homeless sleeping on the streets, beggars, etc. are more like to attract crime due to disorder--crime rises where people aren't confident that informal controls will maintain public order. Though widely criticized by criminologists for confusing correlation with causation, the broken windows theory was a cornerstone of William Bratton's various zero-tolerance crime control policies, including Rudy Giuliani's reforms in New York other projects across Latin America. 

The article describes how gangs of angry Paulistas (citizens of São Paulo) are using a specific kind of graffiti, called pichação (from the verb "pichar," to cover with tar), to protest social and economic inequality in Brazil. Well, something like that. In the article, Djan Ivson Silva, a leader of a pichação gang, claims their work is meant "'to remind society that this city is a visual aggression to begin with, and hostile to anyone who is not rich.'" Here, vandals explicitly target areas outside the normal realm of "broken windows" for their vandalism, emerging from the marginal neighborhoods where graffiti is (presumably) already a set practice to paint politically charged symbols on skyscrapers and public monuments (I use the term marginal in English in the sociological sense of exclusion rather than the more loaded term "marginal" in Portuguese that carries with it racist and elitist connotations). The vandalism is overtly political rather than insidiously political, proclaiming its disorder in orderly places rather than, as Kelling and Wilson describe, becoming political by gradually attracting more vandalism and crime. (note: I'm sure that a quick google search would turn up quite a few articles on how pichação breeds crime.)

The photo on the left, taken from a Brazilian newspaper article on pichação, is an example of the rune-like graffiti. The words underneath says, roughly, "In a country full corruption, who has the right to criticize pinchação!"

The article also makes it seem like these gangs are not only in it for the political statement, but also for the pure competition of it. Gangs fight for the most coveted canvases for their art (that is, the tallest buildings, the most prominent public spaces), even to the point of death. It seems, in some sense, like the work of Project Mayhem--angry young men desecrating public property to prove themselves to each other and to prove that they are in on the joke, that they know what's happening and it doesn't matter what we think. It's not a perfect metaphorical fit. The men of Project Mayhem do come from the same lives as the pichação gangs, from the streets of the favelas and the poorest neighborhoods, for one (although they think they have as much grievance against society). But the parallel is there, and for me, its an interesting one.

Maras and Organized Crime

I just had an interesting conversation with a colleague about crime and justice in Central America (a topic which comes up a lot in conversation for me, unsurprisingly). One of the points my conversation partner brought up was the shift of focus in the international media away from the issue of youth gangs and towards drug trafficking, specifically when talking about Guatemala. She noted that in the past, the focus of reports on violence in Guatemala tended to lay the blame on the maras--the image of all that was wrong was the tattooed face of a teenage gangster. More recent coverage has to do more with the threat of organized crime and drug trafficking, especially the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel. I think this has a lot to do with shifting international priorities in the region and the bloody drug war in Mexico. Drug gangs have replaced street gangs in the media as the ones who decapitate rivals and commit atrocious acts of violence. The maras and the drug cartels are, of course, intimately connected in many ways. Just as I was having this conversation, I came across an article written by another colleague on the issue of maras in El Salvador. She points out connections between the two types criminal organizations that I have seen mentioned in local and international coverage of crime in Central America: drug traffickers hire mareros as assassins, as protection along smuggling routes, and as small-time local drug dealers. The interesting thing, however, is that the maras in El Salvador make most of their money from extortion. It brings to mind passages from the political science literature on state building in Europe that reference the mafia-style way in which new states were formed through protection rackets. But are the maras considered organized crime? How much are they like the mafia, either in the US or in Italy? Is the extortion they commit anything like the mafia-type protection racket? I don't think I know enough about the US or Italian mafia or other types of organized crime to say, but I think the question is interesting.

New Start

So, with earnest good intentions, I dedicate myself once again to write at least once a week on my blog. I'm back in the US again, writing up the dissertation, so tales of my adventures are less likely to appear. But if you, dear readers, are interested in reading about Latin American politics and other interesting things related to my research that has caught my eye, give my blog another gander. Here's what I've got for you today:

NPR has an interesting story on firearms today. It looks at the history of the Glock, the Austrian handgun that has become ubiquitous in the US. According to the author of the book Glock: The Rise of America's Gun, Paul Barrett, this particular handgun became popular not only because it is easy to learn to use but because the manufacturer gave discounts to police departments for bulk orders, it was featured in movies and television, and (my favorite reason) it was featured in rap lyrics--in part because Glock was easy to rhyme with, as the author puts it, "words you might want to use in rap lyrics."

The most interesting part of the article for me, however, is Barrett's discussion of the role Glock played in the Assault Weapons bill here in the US, and how large capacity firearms like the Glock ended up on the street after police stations replaced their older weapons with new guns. For anyone interested in the connections between politics, capitalism, and crime, this interview is worth a listen (or a read, if you're so inclined).

I followed a link from NPR to this Washington Post investigation on guns in the US. The various articles linked to this page are fascinating and also worth some time to check out. I especially recommend the articles that trace the path guns follow from first sale to recovery at a crime scene.