Review of A Year Inside MS-13: See, Hear, and Shut Up, by Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson (OR Books, 2019).
Last year, Donald Trump’s administration issued a press release titled “What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13,” the El Salvador–based transnational gang. The dispatch deployed the term “animals” an additional nine times in its explanation of how Mara Salvatrucha “follows the motto of ‘kill, rape, control’ by committing shocking acts of violence in an attempt to instill fear and gain control.”
Considering this motto could also apply to the past many decades of US military intervention worldwide, it seems there might be More Important Things You Need To Know about transnational violence — like the United States’s role in the rise of MS-13 itself. During the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s, the United States backed brutal right-wing forces that were responsible for tens of thousands of killings and countless atrocities. Many Salvadorans fled the country, with a substantial percentage ending up in Los Angeles, where gangs formed as a means of self-defense for marginalized communities. Then in 1992, at the end of the war, the United States undertook massive deportations of Salvadoran gang members (clearly the best step to ensure a shattered country’s chances of recovery).
For a glimpse at how things have panned out since then, a good place to start is Salvadoran sociocultural anthropologist Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson’s A Year Inside MS-13: See, Hear, and Shut Up, newly translated from Spanish by Natascha Uhlmann. Martínez d’Aubuisson, who spent 2010 in the company of the Guanacos Criminales Salvatrucha — the MS-13 clica that presides over “the last neighborhood on the hill” in Mejicanos, a suburb of San Salvador — describes his book as a “snapshot in time [and] a collection of field notes . . . that served as the basis for my academic work.” And while there’s certainly no shortage of violence in its pages, the work is mercifully free of the “violent animal” approach, offering instead a snapshot of humans who are — like everyone else — products of their contexts. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.