Murder to Excellence El Salvador

Описание: On 23 August alone there were 52 murders, making it the bloodiest day of the year. From January to August, ‪#‎ElSalvador‬ recorded 4,246 homicides‬, an average of 17.5 a day, and up 67% on the same eight-month period in 2014. The country has a population of only 6.4 million people. Violence has risen steadily in El Salvador since a 2012 truce between the country’s two main gangs, the ‪MaraSalvatrucha‬ (‪#‎MS13‬) and its rival Barrio18‬,began to fall apart last year.

On current trends, the homicide rate will pass 90 per 100,000 people in 2015, overtaking that of Honduras as the highest in the world (not including battlegrounds like ‪#‎Syria‬). This would make El Salvador almost 20 times deadlier than the ‪#‎US‬ and 90 times deadlier than the ‪#‎UK‬.

This is no failed state, no dictatorship struggling with an insurgency, no rubble-strewn target of suicide bombers.
These “mara” have their origins in the gangs of ‪#‎LosAngeles‬. When #ElSalvador’s civil war ended in 1992, the #US ‪#‎deported‬ thousands of illegal ‪#‎migrants‬ back to their home country. Many brought back the violent street culture and mutual hatred that had shaped their existence in ‪#‎California‬. Over the past two decades, they have grown, evolved and wreaked more carnage in El Salvador due to the weak government, dire inequality and a historical national tendency towards ‪#‎violence‬ both in institutions and households.
In financial and political terms, El Salvador’s gangs are disorganised small fry compared to the ‪#‎mafia‬, the ‪#‎Yakuza‬ or the narco-cartels of ‪#‎Colombia‬ and ‪#‎Mexico‬.

They largely miss out on the lucrative drug-trafficking business, even though most of the world’s ‪#‎cocaine‬ passes through this country on its way to the US. Instead, they are left with low-value distribution of ‪‎marijuana‬ and cocaine in the local market. The rest of their income comes from robbery and extortion – often in their own low-income communities. When rival gangsters kill one another, it is almost always a case of the poor ‪‎killing‬ the poor.