Gangs of Central America: Causes, Costs, and Interventions
By Dennis Rodgers, Robert Muggah, and Chris Stevenson
Violence is on the upswing in Central America, with the region currently exhibiting some of the highest rates of reported criminal violence in Latin America and indeed the world (Moser and McIlwaine, 2004). The recent Global Burden of Armed Violence report estimates the annual global homicide rate to be around 7.6 per 100,000, yet in the Americas the figure exceeds 20 per 100,000, and in Central America it is almost 30 per 100,000 (Geneva Declaration Secretariat, 2008). Not surprisingly, perhaps, homicide is described as one of the primary regional public health issues (WHO, 2008a; Briceño-León, 2005, p. 1629). Many factors have shaped this particular panorama of violence, which is both heterogeneous and dynamic. The World Bank, for example, attributes the rise in Central American violence to ‘a complex set of factors, including rapid urbanization, persistent poverty and inequality, social exclusion, political violence, organized crime, post-conflict cultures, the emergence of illegal drug use and trafficking and authoritarian family structures’ (World Bank, 2008a, p. 3).S
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The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, for its part, emphasizes the role of geography and weak institutions as aggravating rates of violence; with almost 90 per cent of the United States’ cocaine supply inevitably passing through weak Central American states from Andean production centres, it is little wonder that organized crime violence is deeply entrenched (UNODC, 2008, p. 38). Most of this regional violence tends to be perpetrated and experienced among young men between 15 and 34 years of age.1 These statistics are not necessarily surprising considering that the most prominent aspect of the new landscape of Central American violence is the gang phenomenon. Although gangs have long been a feature of Central American societies, they have come to the fore in the region in an unprecedented manner since the early 1990s.2 Estimates of the total proportion of contemporary regional violence attributable to gangs vary widely—from 10 to 60 per cent3 —as they have been accused of a whole slew of crimes and delinquency, ranging from mugging, theft, and intimidation to rape, assault, and drug dealing. There have even been attempts to link them to revolution and global terrorism. A 2005 US Army War College publication, for example, contends that Central American gangs constitute a ‘new urban insurgency’ that has as ultimate objective ‘to depose or control the governments of targeted countries’ through ‘coups d’street’ (Manwaring, 2005; 2006).4 Along similar lines, Anne Aguilera, head of the Central America office of the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs branch of the US State Department, asserted in an interview published in the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica on 8 April 2005 that gangs were ‘the greatest problem for national security at this time in Central America’ (Bruneau, 2005). Although gangs are unquestionably a significant contemporary concern in the region, such sensationalist pronouncements suggest that they remain profoundly misunderstood.5 The purpose of this Occasional Paper is to debunk some of these myths and present a balanced assessment of the causes, costs, and interventions relating to Central American gang violence.
Geneva: Small Arms Survey, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2009. 44p.