The Long Tunnel Ahead
Jose CABEZAS/AFP/Getty ImagesA police investigator collects evidence beside a murdered man in the town of Quezalteque on July 5, 2013. The victim, 19-year-old Carlos Ernesto Alvarez, a tuk-tuk driver, was killed allegedly by gang members when he was cleaning his vehicle.
That demographic shift — in which a high-birthrate/high-death rate model transitions to a low-birthrate/low-mortality one — promises more trouble for El Salvador in the coming decades.
Salvadorans were still having an above-the-world-average four kids per woman as recently as 1990. And all those kids grew up in a country where they still aren’t allowed to own anything valuable, and they wouldn’t know what to do with money if they had it, thanks to a public school system that still only really works for the rich families.
With a big demographic bulge of under-25s, combined with a drop in stable families, there is a surplus of unattached, uneducated, unmarried, unemployed, unemployable, and uncontrollable young men. Starting at around age 12, when these boys realize their career prospects include hitman, drug mule, or serf, they make ideal cannon fodder for ambitious gang leaders.
In short, life is cheap and getting cheaper in El Salvador’s barrios, which doesn’t bode well for the future.
None of the people in charge of this nightmare seem to know what to do. The Salvadoran authorities keep arresting people and sending them to prison, but that just creates job opportunities for the upwardly mobile killers and drug dealers vying to fill the void.
Likewise, gang leaders who haven’t been arrested yet probably think things will quiet down once they’re in charge, but then they get arrested or killed, and it’s back to square one.
For their part, the current government has now adopted an extremely tough approach, an “iron fist” security plan that has police “shooting to kill” and even saw the arrest and imprisonment of academics and law enforcement officials who helped broker the 2012 truce.
However, there’s also talk of ending the drug war, just to take the wind out of the gangs’ sails, but while that may starve the underworld of the money it needs for new machetes, it also ruins virtually the only industry half of Salvadorans are qualified to work in.
What will happen to El Salvador if the criminal profits of the cocaine trade dry up, leaving hundreds of thousands of already desperate young men even more desperate for a living? Nobody knows, and it takes a brave heart even to ask the question.
Next, read the recent study that shows just how the war on drugs has failed. Then, take a look at the murder map that reveals where most of the world’s homicides take place.
