Tuesday, April 18, 2017

For the record

Sleepy San Salvador street. Why did Reagan send thousands of prison-hardened Los Angeles gangbangers to destroy this peace? Photo by Jan van Oosthuizen.



Unless he's thinking in retroactionary terms that the malign influence of the Obama presidency stretches backwards, into the past. The virulence of the MS-13 organization in particular has to with the way it was nourished by US criminal justice policy, which was to deal with the problem by outsourcing it, deporting members in huge numbers to their home countries, especially El Salvador and Honduras, where they overwhelmed weak local governments, taking over the streets and recruiting new members and systematizing the smuggling of people back to the US, and participating alongside the Sinaloa Cartel in the Mexican drug war. A Trump-like policy over most of the past 30 years has made them ever stronger.






Update: Thanks for the shout-out, Batocchio! And there was something I wanted to add to this, which is that if you remember all those children fleeing from Central America without their parents in the spring and summer of 2014, the US prison-created drug gangs of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were what they were primarily fleeing from.

No comments:

Post a Comment