San Salvador — Victor Manuel “Mango” Laínez, 29, sat in a recreation kiosk in his working class neighborhood of Los Atlanta, counting scars from 23 stab and bullet wounds. The injuries were sustained a few years earlier when he left the notorious MS-13 gang.
“Here are the wounds by my heart, here’s where I put my hand up to block (the knife) and the blood streamed out,” he explained in graphic detail as he displayed marks all over his chest, stomach, face, hands, and back.
Mango is one of the lucky ones. These days, few of El Salvador’s estimated 20,000 gang members (70,000 – 100,000 throughout Mexico and Central America) make it out alive. El Salvador had 66 homicides per 100,000 people in 2010, making it the second most violent nation in the hemisphere, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Honduras, leads the region with 82 homicides per 100,000 people, and demographers expect both nations will close 2011 with even higher rates.
Despite the bleak outlook, there’s still hope. A new San Salvador pilot program called Jóvenes Constructores is aimed at helping youth like him find the psychological, educational, and vocational support they need to obtain employment and steer clear of risky behavior.
In 2009, USAID agreed to fund some $15 million in crime prevention activities for El Salvador’s youth over a four-year period. Of that, $2 million goes to Jóvenes Constructores, which has teamed up with five youth outreach programs in San Salvador to recreate a successful U.S. program called YouthBuild USA. Over its 17-year history, YouthBuild USA has managed to educate some 92,000 high school students throughout the U.S. inner cities by teaching them the technical and managerial skills needed for construction. The end goal is to help youth translate their apprenticeships into responsibility and teamwork, soft skills required of any profession. Similar YouthBuild programs are now running in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.
“Crime, violence, and a lack of educational, social, and economic opportunity for young people in Central America weakens countries that should be valuable trading partners, drives migration from the region to the United States and elsewhere, and perpetuates a cycle of crime and violence that has devastating effects not just on Central American communities, but also on our own.” USAID’s El Salvador office wrote in a statement. “We feel strongly that it is in the U.S. taxpayers’ interest to make smart long-term investments that will save money in the long-term and address the root causes of the problem.”
A U.S. approach with a close cultural understanding
In addition to the training in construction, YouthBuild USA participants can attend high school classes, study for the GED, and learn English as a second language, and all of its instructors double as counselors to mentor youth, who go through the challenges of inner city life and immigration.
Washington D.C.’s own YouthBuild program has served as a particularly good sounding board for leaders of Jóvenes Constructores El Salvador who have made several visits this year to discuss what kinds of programming is culturally appropriate and logistically feasible in El Salvador. At least half of the students enrolled in the Latin American Youth Center YouthBuild Public Charter School in Washington’s Columbia Heights neighborhood are of Central American origin.
Thanks to the neighborhood’s recent gentrification, drug trafficking, muggings, and drive-by shootings are not as common as they were a decade ago. However, gangs like MS-13 still have a presence among the poorer and more vulnerable residents.
“There’s just a lack of legitimate jobs and economic opportunity, and that tends to mean that what becomes attractive or maybe one of the only things that’s available is doing other things in order to earn money – selling drugs or getting involved in gangs,” said Patricia Bravo, who founded Columbia Heights’ YouthBuild program.
That’s why YouthBuild continues to serve a need in this Washington neighborhood.
“(The instructors) treat you like you’re their children or you’re their family, your sibling, and they’re always telling you how to handle yourself in this country,” said Josue Alexander Martínez, 19, a local YouthBuild participant in Columbia Heights. Peers tried to pressure Martinez into joining a gang in El Salvador. Instead, he fled to the United States, where YouthBuild steered him clear of the same transnational gang in Washington.
Social workers say these types of programs are even more urgently needed in a place like El Salvador. Many Salvadoran youth joined gangs like MS-13 and 18th Street in America’s inner cities while seeking refuge from their country’s 12-year civil war in the 1980s. After United Nations peace accords were signed in 1992, masses of Central American gang members were deported to a homeland they hardly remembered, so they reconnected with each other south of the border. Gangs also offered power and protection for youth like Mango who became desensitized to violence at a young age.
Jóvenes Constructores El Salvador also offers counseling, and it currently trains youth in business management and retail sales, tourism and hospitality, English as a Second Language, silk screening, computer maintenance and repairs, baking and culinary arts, cosmetology, mechanics, electrical wiring, and motorcycle delivery services. It’s also developing an environmental construction curriculum for some green development projects.
Economic and social challenges
Low wages can make the legitimate jobs youth train for a tough sell. Most employers only offer about $100 a month in a place where grocery prices are comparable to the United States. To make matters more complicated, employers are often skittish about hiring a young person from neighborhoods with a history of gang violence.
“They used to offer me $5,000 for taking pot across the border to Honduras in a day,” said Mango. “I’d go because I’m telling you, the economic situation is tough, and you always have to find ways to survive.”
“On an economic basis, there’s no way we can compete,” said Katharine Andrade Eekhoff who administrates USAID funds to Jóvenes Constructores in El Salvador through Catholic Relief Services. “What we’re looking to ensure is that the moment a kid walks into the program they’re in contact with people who are modeling the kind of lifestyle and expectations of Jóvenes Constructores. It’s a hard talk but youth are responding.”
The organization provides creative extracurricular activities like sports and arts with instructors who have faced similar challenges.
Up the hill from Los Atlanta, a group of about six young people sat in a Catholic church learning to create color palates under the direction of artist Roberto Trigueros. Their favorite rock music blared from a stereo.
“Just like these young people, I was out there looking for a path a few years ago that would make me feel comfortable. It’s great that I’ve been able to make a living doing this,” said Trigueros. “I can share this with them…Perhaps I’m part of this example that if you persevere, if you’re disciplined and you take advantage of opportunities, you can succeed.”
Trigueros never joined a gang but says he learned to “coexist” with plenty of them in the working class community while growing up in San Salvador. He used his artistic aspirations as an excuse not to join gang life, searching instead, for opportunities to exhibit and sell his work.
“Through painting you can express pressures like violence that you feel in society, and you can also show the peace you want to create,” said Trigueros’ 20-year-old painting student Luis Jose Rivera.
Mango seconded that. “They help me to think about positive things in meetings, and I distract myself with painting,” said Mango as he pointed to neighborhood murals he helped to paint.
It’s also an important way of releasing the childhood traumas that got him into gangs in the first place.
“I remember I was going with my mother to the mill to grind corn, and on the way there, we saw some soldiers grab a guerilla and shoot him point blank in the head,” Mango said, while reflecting on the 12-year civil war he witnessed as a youngster. After the guerilla collapsed to the ground, one of the soldiers ordered the others to bash the guerrilla’s teeth in with the butt of their rifles to take his gold fillings.
Breathing new life into the barrio
In just under three years, Jóvenes Constructores has created notable signs of change in the once turbulent Los Atlanta neighborhood. All around the neighborhood, murals depict past traumas and hopes for the future, while youth playing on several recently refurbished sports courts suggest a newfound sense of freedom.
“The Jóvenes Constructores project with the (local) Quetzalcoatl Foundation came in to make miracles because I wouldn’t have been able to sit here in this kiosk in this area. From here out that direction, it was our turf. From here to up there it was someone else’s,” recalled Mango as he stared out onto the neighborhood’s central sports court. “I hope someday, God willing, that my criminal record will be erased, that I obtain work, even if I’m old, but that I find work to support my family.”
In the meantime, he says he keeps a close eye on his own kids, ages one and 10, and those of the neighbors. Other deactivated gang members in Los Atlanta do the same, using their tumultuous lives as an example of what youth should never choose to go through.
“I told them it’s simple,” Edwin Gionni Aguilar, a former gang member in his 30s, said of talks he had with neighborhood teens. “You get in and you’ll have women, money, drugs, whatever you want, but you won’t have peace and tranquility. When you sleep you’ll be thinking that they’re going to do something to your family, think about it…life is priceless.”
He is proud at how they are internalizing that message.
“I’ve seen a lot of young people working and studying. They’ve graduated and they have a little job. It’s not much but at least they have one,” he said.
Meanwhile, Los Atlanta’s children are starting to think with the innocence of children growing up in more peaceful environments.
Standing on the central sports court, a nine-year-old boy named Ricardo said he understood this area was once a gang battlefield; forbidden to kids who could get caught in the crossfire. Asked whether he felt “secure” now, he mindlessly shifted the question to one about bikes versus scooters.
“More or less. I fall down sometimes,” Ricardo responded. “I’d say the scooter is more secure because it’s got twice the wheels.”
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- Julienne Gage is an independent journalist who specializes in coverage of Latin America, the Caribbean, and U.S. Latino affairs. Between 1997 and 2000, she investigated gang rehabilitation and prevention programs in El Salvador for a master’s in cultural anthropology through Western Washington University. She obtained access to this 2011 youth story after finishing fieldwork on an agriculture reporting project for The Howard G. Buffett Foundation and Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Central America. While CRS also administrates funds for Jóvenes Constructores, Gage’s youth story was funded and produced independently of that organization.
