Central America Still Besieged by Violence Three Decades after End of Political Wars.
| Autor | Rodriguez, George |
Thirty years ago, Central America saw the end of the internal political wars that its armies and guerrillas had been waging for decades--conflicts that caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, massively displaced communities, destroyed economies, and divided nations as well as families.
The process to end the armed conflicts in Guatemala (1960-1996), El Salvador (1980-1982), and Nicaragua (1982-1990), began on Aug. 7, 1987, when a historic regional peace agreement--Procedimiento para Establecer la Paz Firme y Duradera en Centroamerica (Procedure to Establish Firm and Lasting Peace in Central America)--was signed by those three countries' presidents plus their colleagues from Honduras and Costa Rica (NotiCen, June 8, 2017). The agreement led to successful national peace negotiations.
But a new armed conflict did not take long to grip this region, were street gangs known as maras and organized crime structures are the new and highly violent enemy fighting local armies and police forces.
A fallout from the political wars, the maras phenomenon dates back to the massive migration of mostly undocumented nationals of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras--the three countries that form the Northern Triangle of Central America--fleeing from the violence in their countries in the 1980s.
Although it was not an actual war theater, Honduras, like its two immediate neighbors, was under military rule, and dictatorial repression meant, among other high-risk situations, the disappearance of close to 200 people.
Unlike the migrant flow from Nicaragua, composed mostly of wealthy opponents to the revolutionary government who settled mainly in Miami, the thousands of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, and Hondurans who fled to the US were essentially low-income and undocumented, the majority children and adolescents, who in general arrived in Western cities such as Los Angeles.
These towns were territories already divided by Mexican and other street gangs, leading the Central American youths to organize in similar groups.
Two of the new maras were to become particularly notorious for their extreme violent ways, Mara 18 (M-18) and Mara Salvatrucha (MS), now also known as MS-13.
Hundreds of undocumented migrants were then detained and deported by US authorities, including mara members who, upon returning to Central America, established their criminal structures there. The gangs have grown, with the tens of thousands of members who are now a nightmare for authorities and...
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