"Gangs are the 21st-century death squads" in El Salvador

David Boeri with WBUR has a series looking at how gang violence in forcing people to flee El Salvador for the safety of Massachusetts in Brutal Gang Violence Reigns In El Salvador. I don't remember hearing this one before and I don't know how accurate it is but

Many of the murders stem from the brutal violence of criminal gangs at war with each other and with El Salvador itself. I ask the chief medical examiner, Jose Miguel Fortin, if there is a distinguishing sign when murders are committed by gangs.

Yes, he says. When a head is found but no body, he says, that’s a gang murder. When there is a body, but it’s been dismembered, that’s a narco-trafficking murder. And when the body was dismembered while the person was alive, that’s a Mexican narco-trafficking murder.

Then there is this one that

When you count gang members, the inspector says, you should add mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and cousins. Rival gangs think the same way: When one joins, the whole family joins. And so they are marked, and marked forever, according to gang mentality.

The inspector tells me that the woman who died a week earlier first lost a son. He was shot to death by MS-13. Next gang members came for her son-in-law. They killed him too. Then they came back for the woman’s daughter. They shot her three times in the stomach.

“I pleaded with the mother,” the inspector says. “‘They’re going to kill you. They’re going to kill you.’ “We told her several times, ‘You have to go away.’ And now she’s dead.”

At the thought that she ignored his advice, the inspector adds: “It seems like people are resigned to their death; they know it’s coming for them.”

Okay, this one I knew. However, I was reading about Salvadoran death squads during the 1980s last night. Now that classes are over I get to do some light reading at night. Here is what one source told US officials in January 1981.

this group of six "enormously wealthy former landowners who lost great estates in Phase I of the agrarian reform" [these landowners were living in Miami at the time] had the following strategy:

"To rebuild the country on a new foundation it must first be destroyed totally, the economy must be wrecked, unemployment must be massive, the Junta must be ousted and a 'good' military officer brought to power who will carry out a total 'limpieza' [sic] (cleansing), killing three or four or five hundred thousand people, whatever it takes to get rid of all the communists and their allies."

Collective punishment in El Salvador is nothing new. What the gangs are engaged in today is little different from what the right-wing death squads were doing during the 1970s and 1980s, even into the 1990s. As a college student from Chalatenango is quoted as saying in the article, “First there were the death squads and now the gangs, which I think are much worse....Gangs are the 21st-century death squads.”

And obviously the civil war era deaths squads were simply following what they had considered successful historical precedent for dealing with subversives - the 1932 Matanza. It's not just machismo culture and drug trafficking that leads to high levels of violence in Central America. And it is not just the civil war and the failure of the peace accords that have contributed to the conditions today. El Salvador had one of the highest homicide rates in the world in the 1960s, prior to the escalation of revolutionary and right-wing violence.