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In Search of Cobijo:
Proliferation of Youth Violence in Post-War El Salvador in
Response to Lack of the Martyrdom Narrative

Nicole Einbinder
University of Washington, Jackson School of International Studies
June 2015
JSIS 385

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Research Question
In January of 1992, El Salvadors 12-year civil war came to a close when the two rival
parties the right-wing government and guerrilla forces known as the Farabundo Mart National
Liberation Front (FMLN) came together in Chapultepec, Mexico to sign a Peace Agreement1 to
end Latin Americas deadliest internal armed conflict. In the wake of a bloody war that displaced
millions and took up to 80,000 lives, of which two-thirds were civilians,2 the newfound peace
was a chance for the state to pursue democratization3 and create a more positive post-war
narrative, especially after a United Nations Truth Commission revealed that 85 percent of the
violence was caused by the government.4 Yet, a week after the Commissions report was
revealed, and based on the assumption that accountability for past aggressions was politically
untenable,5 the state established a blanket amnesty law that granted complete amnesty to all
those involved in human rights abuses prior to the 1992 accords.6
Historically, El Salvador is a society characterized by political instability. In 1932, a
communist-led 7 peasant rebellion over grievances like the unequal distribution of land and
wealth led to La Matanza massacre in which the army killed approximately 10,000 people in
Western El Salvador.8 In response to La Matanza, the state shifted from oligarchical control to a
military dictatorship that favored land-owning elites as peasants faced repression and discontent.

1 Belisario Betancur, Reinaldo Figueredo Planchart, and Thomas Buergenthal, From Madness to Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador: Report
of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, United States Institute of Peace (1993): 1.

David Garibay, A Peace Built on Forgetting Demobilised Combatants in Post-War El Salvador, International Social Science Journal 58, no.
189 (2006): 467-468.

3 Christine J. Wade, El Salvador: Contradictions of Neoliberalism and Building Sustainable Peace, International Journal of Peace Studies 13,
no. 2 (2008): 16.

4 Betancur, Planchart, Buergenthal, From Madness to Hope, 36.


5 Bernhard Leidner and Mengyao Li, How to (Re)Build Human Rights Consciousness and Behavior in Postconflict Societies: An Integrative
Literature Review and Framework for Past and Future Research, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 21, no. 1 (2015): 110.

6 Irina Carlota Silber, Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post-War El Salvador, Gender & History 16 no. 3 (2004):
563.

7 Yvon Grenier, The Emergence of Insurgency in El Salvador (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1999), 1.
8 Brandt G. Peterson, Remains out of Place: Race, Trauma, and Nationalism in El Salvador, Anthropological Theory 7 no. 1 (2007): 60.

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Poverty and landlessness continued to manifest itself in the 1970s,9 while internal power
struggles ultimately paved the way for an October 1979 coup that led to the rise of right-wing
military juntas.10 In 1980, leftist-Marxist organizations united and formed the FMLN as the
vanguard of the Salvadoran people against government-induced inequality and poverty.11 The
guerrilla organization was influenced by La Matanza massacre, and the similar plight faced by
peasants in the 1930s, with its name derived from the revolutionary leader of that uprising,
Farabundo Marti, who was executed by the state.12 Throughout the civil war, the government
tried to suppress rebel forces and reassert control through counterinsurgency policies like death
squads, arbitrary executions, and massacres of entire communities.13 Such tactics were
legitimized through the constant channel of funds sent by the U.S. to suppress leftist guerrilla
forces14 within the midst of Reagans staunch anti-communist agenda.15
In 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero,16 a vocal advocate for the poor, was assassinated at the
hands of a right-wing assassin while at mass. Romeros death sent shockwaves throughout El
Salvador and instigated the countrys spiral into violence and war. While traditionally the
Catholic Church was viewed as conservative and allied with elites,17 Romeros death signaled its
shift to a politically impactful institution that aligned with the poors plight. The churchs
ideological shift was heavily influenced by the tenets of liberation theology, characterized by its

9 El Salvador, Lonely Planet, accessed June 3, 2015, http://www.lonelyplanet.com/el-salvador/history#256525


10 The Reformist Coup of 1979, El Salvador, accessed March 10, 2015, http://countrystudies.us/el-salvador/13.htm.
11 Grenier, The Emergence of Insurgency, 76.
12 Peterson, Remains Out Of Place, 67.
13 Garibay, A Peace Built on Forgetting, 468.
14 Americas Watch Committee. El Salvadors Decade of Terror: Human Rights Since The Assassination of Archbishop Romero (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1991), 141.

15 Emilie Hafner-Burton & James Ron, The Latin Bias: Regions, the Anglo-American Media, and Human Rights, International Studies
Quarterly 57 no. 3 (2013): 486.

16 Romero was beatified in May 2015 as the first step to declare his official martyrdom in the Catholic Church.
17 Christian Smith, The Emergence of Liberation Theology: Radical Religion and Social Movement Theory (Chicago & London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1.

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interpretation of the faith out of the experience of the poor18 that provided a biblically grounded
critique of social injustices and economic inequalities in Latin America.19 Catholic activists first
began to employ liberation theology in response to the 1970s governmental repression and
increased political mobilization,20 with such tenets especially influential for the FMLN guerrillas
who used the image of Christ as a symbol of sacrifice who combatted injustice and suffered like
the guerrillas and peasants.21 In response, the state and military suppressed the church throughout
the decade, with thousands of lay workers and nearly two dozen priests and nuns murdered
between 1979 and 1989.22 Despite such threats, however, religion remained influential as
Catholicism became linked to solidarity and resistance in the face of repression.23
The end of the civil war in 1992 signaled a major shift in El Salvador the peace accords
officially ended a turbulent decade of state-sanctioned political repression,24 while the FMLN
transformed from a guerrilla group to legitimate political party that has run the state since 2009
and rivals the conservative ARENA party. 25 Yet, despite rapid political and economic
liberalization to establish democracy,26 post-war El Salvador has instead faced heightened
disillusionment among the masses and an increase in violence. As such, by 1995, the Attorney
Generals Office reported an intentional homicide rate of 136.5 per 100,000 more murders per
capita than during the war and a statistic that made El Salvador one of the worlds most
18 Philip Berryman, Liberation theology: essential facts about the revolutionary movement in Latin America--and beyond (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1987), 4.

19 Anna L. Peterson & Brandt G. Peterson, Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador, Social Research 75 no. 2 (2008):
520.

20 Anna L. Petesron, Manuel A. Vsquez, and Philip J. Williams, Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas, (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 2.

21 Peterson and Peterson, Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory, 535.


22 Peterson, Vsquez, and Williams, Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization, 2.
23 Daniel H. Levine, Assessing the Impacts of Liberation Theology in Latin America, The Review of Politics, 50 no. 2 (1988), 242.
24 Sandra Smith-Nonini, C. Healing The Body Politic: El Salvadors Popular Struggle For Health Rights From Civil War to Neoliberal
Peace (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 7.

25 Jocelyn Viterna. 2012. The Left and Life in El Salvador, Politics & Gender 8 no. 2 (2012): 249.
26 Wade, El Salvador: Contradictions of Neoliberalism, 17.

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dangerous countries.27 Amnesty specifically was a major trigger for manifestation of
disillusionment that enabled formation of social amnesia of history, with the population cut off
from the past that created their current political and socio-economic framework. In this regard,
the state politicized memory to reinforce a specific post-war narrative to promote their interests
and not be accountable for wartime abuses.28 Further, prewar economic and social grievances
persisted into the post-war decades as the population faced socio-economic inequalities like
poverty, few economic reforms to improve life for the majority,29 unresponsive state
institutions,30 and a continued culture of violence.31
In the post-war years, a new phenomenon has also emerged: the proliferation of las maras
youth gangs engaged in acts of violence and criminality and widely associated with state terror
and insecurity. Between ten to thirty thousand active gang members roam the streets of El
Salvador and are associated with two major organizations: Mara Salvatrucha, aka MS-13, and
Mara 18, or 18th street, both with transnational ties to the U.S. and often heavily armed.32 As
such, many Salvadoran barrios neighborhoods have become violent battlegrounds as ganginvolved youth roam the streets and engage in random acts of violence, ritualistic gang beatings
and killings, brutal acts of intimidation against innocent citizens, and entrenched warfare
between warring sects struggling for control.33
The rise of gang violence in El Salvador is the direct offshoot of the civil war, as
constant violence compelled many guerrillas to flee the country and immigrate to the United
27 Ellen Moodie, El Capitn Cinchazo Blood and Meaning in Postwar San Salvador. In Landscapes of Struggle, edited by Aldo LauriaSantiago and Leigh Binford, 226-244. (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2004), 227.

28 Susannah Radstone & Bill Schwarz, Memory: Histories, Theories, and Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 2-4.
29 Nonini-Smith, Healing the Body Politic, 7.
30 Heather Berkman, Social Exclusion and Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean, Inter-American Development Bank (2007): 10.
31 Manuel A. Vasquez, Saving Souls Transnationally: Pentecostalism and Gangs in El Salvador and the United States, University of Florida
(2003): 4.

32 Mo Hume, Armed Violence and Poverty in El Salvador, Centre for International Cooperation and Security (2004): 11.
33 Luz E. Nagle, Criminal Gangs in Latin America: The Next Great to Regional Security and Stability? Texas Hispanic Journal of Law &
Policy 14 no. 1 (2008): 9.

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States, particularly to impoverished neighborhoods in Los Angeles known for preexistent gang
activity. Within these communities, Salvadorans faced grievances like culture shock, language
barriers, underpaid jobs, and discrimination. These conditions spurred some Salvadorans to take
to the streets, with MS-1334 created by Salvadoran youth in the early 1980s as self-protection
against already established gangs and to escape difficult personal situations.35 As criminality
expanded, and in response to the end of the civil war, the U.S. implemented the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996 to forcibly remove criminals and
gang members to their countries of origin.36 El Salvador in particular was a major location for
deported criminals in 2004 alone, 2,726 violent offenders were sent to the state.37 Hence, the
immigration policies effectively transplanted the MS-13 and M-18 gangs to Central America,38
where deportees continued to employ their gang lifestyles and engage in acts of violence.39 In
response to the rise of las maras in El Salvador, the government introduced anti-gang Mano
Dura policies in 2003 to subvert criminalized gang activity through immediate imprisonment of
gang members. However, and despite the stringent laws, Salvadoran youth continue to join and
participate in gang life. 40
Post-war El Salvador has experienced incessant turmoil and polarization despite attempts by the
government to pursue democratization out of the shadows of bloody warfare. Within this
framework, a sense of disillusionment has taken hold as many Salvadorans continue to face the

34 Mara refers to the marabunta ants, a highly aggressive New World army ant, while Salvatrucha is a Salvadoran Spanish slang term used
to describe streetwise toughness. The number 13 relates to the position of the letter m in the alphabet and is thought to be related to the
Mexican Mafia, which controls Latino prison gangs in Southern California.

35 Sonja Wolf, Mara Salvatrucha: The Most Dangerous Street Gang in the Americas? Latin American Politics and Society 54 no. 1 (2012):
71.

36 Juan J. Fogelbach, Gangs, Violence, and Victims in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, San Diego International Law Journal 12 no. 2
(2011): 421.

37 Nagle, Criminal Gangs in Latin America, 11.


38 Fogelbach, Gangs, Violence, and Victims, 421.
39 Nagle, Criminal Gangs in Latin America, 12.
40 Mo Hume, Mano Dura: El Salvador Responds to Gangs, Development in Practice 17 no. 6 (2007): 739.

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socio-political and economic gripes that initially spurred the guerrillas to take up arms in the first
place. In addition, new threats have emerged within many barrios as gangs perform violent acts
and a culture of violence runs rampant. Given the sense of disillusionment in post-war El
Salvador, we would expect youth to remove themselves from criminality to make sense of and
combat the grievances that persisted in the aftermath of the peace accords. Instead, youth are
drawn towards the gangs and in turn exasperate the violence that has manifested disillusionment
and established El Salvador as one of the regions deadliest states. Why do youth continue to
engage in violence notwithstanding the wide social and political approbation of gangs?
Hypothesis
This thesis intends to argue that violence is a ritual of gang life, entrenched in historical
narratives from the civil war, that appeal to youth shunned by the Catholic Church and state
apparatuses because it provides cobijo protection and shelter. Hence, gang life serves as
refugio asylum even though it creates the heightened fear within the country that justify the
FMLN governments continued depictions of them as others to maintain their own power.41 The
manifestation of disillusionment has recreated the cobijo provided to guerrillas during the war,
legitimized by the discourse of martyrdom, among a youth population considered subjected to
multiple marginalities low socioeconomic status, street socialization and enculturation, and
an often ill-perceived formation of self-identity.42
An alternative hypothesis to understand the phenomenon is that such actions are caused
by systematic violence and state terror. Violent cultural patterns throughout Salvadoran society
are thereby evident because deterioration of social networks, unemployment, school attendance,
urban overcrowding, public housing deficits and poverty are closely related factors that link
41 Linda Buckley Green, Fear as a Way of Life: Mayan Widows in Rural Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 60.
42 James Diego Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 13.

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directly to social violence, specifically family and youth poverty.43 Bourgois argues political
terror becomes so embedded within daily interactions that everyday violence is inherently
normalized within the state even in times of peace.44 The idea of structural violence assumes
violence that lacks a clear subject-object relationship, like continued youth involvement with
gangs, is inherently built into structure and continually expressed despite lack of concrete actors.
Thus, whereas personal violence, like the war, displayed fluctuation over time based on the
overall toll of group conflict, structural violence retains stability over extensive time frames.45
Bourdieu acknowledges that these structuring structures are historically constituted forms
based on events like la matanza and continued political and social upheaval in its aftermath
with incorporation of social structures within group dynamics reinforced through state actions.46
A second hypothesis flouted by scholars is that youth engagement with violence is caused
by the rise of neoliberal economic structures under the ARENA government in the post-war
society. 47 Disillusionment within El Salvador became apparent through the populations
experiences with neoliberal policies and consequent encounters with violence. Specifically in the
1990s, despite national indicators of economic growth, the majority of Salvadorans continued
to live in poverty due to uneven capitalistic development.48 In the uncertain years following the
civil war, violence was perceived as a temporal marker that established a shared sense of
meaning among a disillusioned population jilted by economic policies that exasperated poverty
and social inequalities.49 Despite policies of economic liberalization supported throughout the
43 Joaquin M. Chvez, An Anatomy of Violence in El Salvador, Report on Nicaragua and El Salvador 37 no. 6 (2004): 32-26.
44 Philippe Bourgois, The Power of Violence in War and Peace, Ethnography 2 no. 1 (2001): 29.
45 Johan Galtung, Violence, Peace, and Peace Research, Journal of Peace Research 6 no. 3 (1969): 173.
46 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000),172.
47 Privatization, tariff reductions, regressive value-added tax (IVA), introduction of the dollar as currency, and participation in the Central
American Free Trade Agreement

48 Silber, Mothers/Fighters/Citizens, 562.


49 Monique Skidmore, Darker than Midnight: Fear, Vulnerability, and Terror Making in Urban Burma (Myanmar), American Ethnologist 30
no. 1 (2003): 7.

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international community as an attempt at peace building, the post-war peace encountered
incomplete judicial reform, lack of accountability for past human rights, increased
authoritarianism, and political polarization.50 Increased poverty, which magnifies into violence,
was thus the offshoot of persistent socio-economic inequalities, especially as youth gangs are
largely comprised of young men from low-income communities.51
Another alternative hypothesis for the phenomenon is that entrenchment in poverty, influenced
by weak state institutions, created an environment that encouraged violence. While superficially
the 1992 peace accords aimed to limit violence, criminality expanded because of the lack of an
effective public-security agency. The civilian police apparatus particularly lacked real expertise
with crime and instead often engaged in corrupt activities and lost the trust of the masses.52
Against this backdrop of political turbulence, disintegration of social networks heightened
political and socio-economic polarization and in turn exasperated poverty, inequality, and
subsequent violence. Factors like citizen security, crime, youth and state weakness, and social
exclusion are thus linked to acts of violence53 and employed by communities that perceive state
institutions as unreliable.54 Due to lack of public support for its population, the state was also
unable to reintegrate the thousands of gang members who fled the civil war but were deported
back to the country due to the toughened U.S. immigration policies.55 These Americanized
deportees56 continued to engage in violence and attract youth, often with limited economic
opportunities, that lived in a society of exclusion and distrust.57 Despite the states toughened
50 Wade, El Salvador: Contradictions of Neoliberalism, 23.
51 Hume, Armed Violence and Poverty in El Salvador, 3.
52 Jos Miguel Cruz, Violence, Citizen Insecurity, and Elite Maneuvering in El Salvador, in Public Security and Police Reform in the
Americas, edited by John Bailey and Luca Dammert. (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2006), 153-160.

53 Hume, Armed Violence and Poverty in El Salvador, 7.


54 Berkman, Social Exclusion and Violence, 5.
55 Nagle, Criminal Gangs in Latin America, 11.
56 Fogelbach, Gangs, Violence, and Victims, 428.
57 Berkman, Social Exclusion and Violence, 5.

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anti-gang Mano Dura laws, these policies only increased fear among the population58 and
prompted gangs members to adopt organized crime characteristics and increase violence to
reduce threats to their security.59
These hypotheses all have merit in the close attention paid to the historical, socioeconomic, and political context and violence in El Salvador. However, a more nuanced
understanding of violence must appeal to the approaches that youth actively take to engage in
gangs and hold onto the associated practices. The ritualization of violence emerged in response
to a social problem in which the disillusionment of the population, as a given factor,
consequently led to economic woes and political instability. Yet, something else is driving youth
to engage in these rituals I argue that something is a need for cobijo among disenfranchised
Salvadoran youth in need of identity formation and who cannot rely on a figure to save them
from their situations like martyrs did for guerrillas throughout the civil war.
Based on the propagation of liberation theology, the Catholic Church provided an outlet
for guerrillas and peasants to make sense of the violence that consumed the country. While
martyrdom, especially in the post 9/11 era, is deemed extremist, these rituals created a sense of
meaning and reason to engage in political resistance60 justified because the living move on, and
do so accompanied by the martyred dead.61 In this context, religion became increasingly
politicized as social martyrs struggled to curb human rights violations to spur democratization,
demilitarization, and economic justice.62 Thus, martyrdom was not only about cobijo for
themselves but centered on protection for others who could use such sacrifice to create a society

58 Hume, Mano Dura: El Salvador Responds to Gangs, 744.


59 Wolf, Mara Salvatrucha, 66.
60 Anna Lisa Peterson, Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion: Progressive Catholicism in El Salvadors Civil War (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1997), 19.

61 Peterson & Peterson, Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory, 513.


62 Harold Recinos, Who Comes in the Name of the Lord?: Jesus at the Margins.

(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 97.

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worth fighting for. The efforts of the martyr established a culture of resistance that legitimized a
sense of collective identity, uniting people that may have otherwise hesitated to come together
for purely political reasons.63 While martyrdom narratives center on death the ultimate form of
sacrifice they are ironically based on life; based on the notion that it serves as the most
meaningful way to use their lives for the greater good.
The recent proliferation of Pentecostalism as an alternative religious domination that
appeals to youth has emerged out of desire to present a narrative of inclusion similar to that
provided by the Catholic Church to the guerrillas, but with different schemata.64 Both religious
narratives hence aim to provide a repository of narrative techniques to make sense of a life
surrounded by violence.65 Whereas Catholicism relied on the narrative of martyrdom,
Pentecostalism relies on a narrative of transformation as youth transformed from gangbangers
to Holy warriors who defend Gods turf. 66 However, the conditions of amnesty render the
religious narrative ineffective with the traces of war effectively eliminated. The loss of a
framework to make sense of violence serves as a driving source that underlies disillusionment
experienced by those displaced in the wars aftermath. I suspect gang life, and the violence
attendant upon it, is perpetuated in part as an attempt to redress this loss, and reconstitute a
narrative that offers a new paradigm for identity formation that also makes sense of violence.
While studies engaged in psychosocial practices show elevated levels of religious coping
and spirituality among youth are associated with lower levels of violence and indirectly

63 Jose Leonardo Santos, Symbols that Speak: Christ and His Word in El Salvador, in Symbols That Bind, Symbols That Divide: The
Semiotics of Peace and Conflict, edited by Scott L. Moeschberger and Rebekah A. Phillips DeZalia, 91-110. (Cham: Springer, 2014), 102.

64 Robert E. Brenneman, Homies and Hermanos: Gods and Gangs in Central America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49-62.
65 Daniel H. Levine, Reflections on the Mutual Impact of Violence and Religious Change in Latin America, Latin American Politics and
Society 52 no. 3 (2010): 141.

66 Ileana Gmez & Manuel Vsquez, Youth Gangs and Religion Among Salvadorans in Washington and El Salvador, in Christianity, Social
Change, and Globalization in the Americas, edited by Anna L. Peterson, Manuel A. Vsquez, and Philip J. Williams, 165-183. (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2001), 180.

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protective for youth violence among high-risk and gang-involved Salvadoran youth,67 lack of a
consistent religion narrative has normalized ritualization of gang practices among youth who
seek cobijo. Thus, potential members willingly engage in toughened gang induction
requirements and riskier initiation rites, like the physical elimination a rival gang member,68 and
a jumping-in ceremony called a bautizo (baptism). While the bautizo mimics the name of the
religious initiation into the church, it is instead a violent ritual where old members beat up the
new inductees their form of a welcome into the barrio and provide the rules of the gang.69
While the church existed as a place of refugio and asylum for guerrillas, the bautizo within gang
culture has likewise emerged as a mode of asylum and ritualized space for protection, but
legitimized through an aggressive physical act in which members sacrifice their wellbeing to
establish a sense of group belonging. Engagement with these violent rituals is thus motivated by
emotions,70 particularly the emotional desire to establish cobijo as a narrative to refashion
identity. Once initiated, youth gain this sense of identity through membership in local cliques, led
by the ranflero who oversees regional programs, and follow orders that oblige them to preclude
outsiders through verbal or physical intimidation. While these youth spatially confine themselves
to certain streets or barrios, where they are protected from rival groups, gang leaders likewise
lead the entire organization from the confines of prison, perceived as a space where they can still
maintain contact with the outside world through intimidation and bribery, but stay protected from
anti-gang policies and other threats.71 The spatial confinement of gang leaders in prison and

67 Christopher P. Salas-Wright, et al. Direct and Mediated Associations Between Religious Coping, Spirituality, and Youth Violence in El
Salvador, Pan American Journal of Public Health 34 no. 3 (2013): 188.

68 Wolf, Mara Salvatrucha, 72.


69 Brenneman, Homies and Hermanos, 68-95.
70 Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 47.
71 Wolf, Mara Salvatrucha, 73-80.

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members on the street demonstrate imagined boundaries and desire for asylum as legacy of the
obsoleteness of religion as a defining characteristic in Salvadorans lives.
Gang members and leaders overall desire for asylum through ritualization and
incarceration derives from the territorialization of fear established within Salvadoran barrios.
For instance, many gang members live based on the notion that rival gang members will kill
them if they venture to rival territory and as a result even non-imprisoned members remain
virtual prisoners within their own neighborhoods.72 In such heightened situations, fear
inadvertently becomes a way of life, the ultimate arbiter of power: invisible, indeterminant, and
silent as the routinization of fear undermines confidence in their interpretation the world an
obvious trend among youth who continue to engage in these rituals. Thus, the internalization of
fear within El Salvador perpetuates the militarization of the mind with violence considered the
only justifiable means to an end.73
In Archbishop Oscar Romeros last sermon, he preached to the crowd: In the name of
God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I
implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.74 The guerrillas
who engaged in violence were religiously motivated to turn Romeros words to action: stop the
repression. They had a figure to look up to and a cause worth fighting for and thus relied on each
other to take down the state apparatus they attributed as the cause for their suffering. The
guerrillas gained cobijo through the martyrdom narrative and in turn were willing to sacrifice
their bodies for each other their family. Disillusionment among youth today is manifested
through the desire for cobijio that influences continued reproduction of violence and gang rituals.
While the guerrillas had a figure to protect and fight for them, youth today join gangs because it
72 Scott Wallace, You Must Go Home Again: Deported L.A. Gangbangers Take Over El Salvador, Harper Magazine, Aug. 2000,
73 Green, Fear as a Way of Life, 63.
74 Archbishop Oscar Romero: The Last Sermon (March 1980), 377.

54.

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is all that they have. They engage in violence because they lack a cause to fight for and a figure
to fight for their wellbeing; youth today lack a martyr to protect them.
Literature Review
This research project correlates with the extensive field of study regarding the Salvadoran
post-civil war era, specifically the supposed peace established in the aftermath of the 1992
peace accords between the two main actors of the war the right-wing state, run by ARENA,
and the FMLN guerrilla forces. Yet, as Wade (2008), Garibay (2006), and Carlota Silber (2004)
note, while El Salvador has largely been viewed a success due to its peace building efforts,75 like
the establishment of a civilian police force known as the PNC and increased economic
liberalization promoted actively by ARENA,76 the neoliberal model instead largely exasperated
socio-economic inequalities while the state plunged into political polarization and heightened
violence.
As Moodie (2004) and Garibay (2007) suggest, peace, relied heavily on a distinct postwar identity, established through state and institutional discourses, bent on forgetting both the
victims and the combatants77 of the war. Such discourse thereby triggered disillusionment
among a population that believed that the state continued to operate largely in its own circles of
meaning.78 Despite the emergence of the FMLN as a viable political opponent to the right-wing
incumbents, Collins (2006) suggests they never seriously challenged the blanket amnesty given
to human rights perpetrators, as it too could protect their violations of international humanitarian
law.79 Consequently, Wolf (2009) notes that despite the faade of democracy, an electoral
authoritarian system persisted in the 1990s to endorse elite interests, like neoliberal policies and
75 Garibay, A Peace Built on Forgetting, 468.
76 Wade, El Salvador: Contradictions of Neoliberalism,17.
77 Garibay, A Peace Built on Forgetting, 467.
78 Moodie, El Capitn Cinchazo Blood and Meaning in Postwar El Salvador, 228.
79 Collins, Grounding Global Justice, 727.

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continued impunity, and legitimized through their use of mass media.80 Tilley (2005) backs such
assumptions in her discussion on post-war indigenous populations, specifically that state elites,
in their attempt to gain hegemonic power, commonly distill complex popular ideas into public
mantras in order to galvanize broad popular support for particular policies.81 In doing so,
Aretxaga (2003) questions the notion of the nation-state itself and argues that through an illusion
of such power the state has manifested itself as a social subject in everyday life.82
The continued presence of social inequalities and violence within El Salvador posed a
direct threat to the supposed goals of the guerrillas for a more equal society. As Peterson (2006)
notes, and despite improvements in material conditions, the general sense among the population
was that life had not improved as they had anticipated it would at the wars end, especially since
the major concession given by the FMLN to ARENA, to support implementation of free market
policies, made it impossible to meet the economic demands of the poor.83 Viterna (2012) and
Colburn & Cruz (2014)84 acknowledge that in the FMLNs attempt to deradicalize its public
image from guerrilla insurgency to political party it maintained support from the masses,85 with
the president viewed as a popular figurehead, but was unable to implement policies that could
lead to social change.86 Carlota Silber (2004) agrees when she suggests that despite the initial
wave of optimism among residents in the wars aftermath, by the late 1990s residents critiqued
the negotiated revolution through a language of disillusionment complaints of peor que antes,
being worse off than before the war.87 As Lessa & Druliolle (2011) suggest, and in line with
80 Sonja Wolf, Subverting Democracy: Elite Rule and the Limits to Political Participation in Post-War El Salvador, Journal of Latin
American Studies 41 no. 3 (2009): 440.

81 Virginia Tilley, Seeing Indians: A Study of Race, Nation, and Power in El Salvador (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005),
X.

82 Begoa Aretxaga, Maddening States, Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (2003): 396.


83 Peterson, Remains Out Of Place, 167-169.
84 Forrest D. Colburn and Arturo S. Cruz, El Salvadors Beleauguered Democracy, Journal of Democracy 25 no. 3 (2014): 149-158.
85 Viterna, The Left and Life in El Salvdor, 248.
86 Colburn and Cruz, El Salvadors Beleauguered Democracy, 157.
87 Silber, Mothers/Fighters/Citizens, 566.

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Radstone & Schwarzs (2010) discussion on the politicization of memory and rift between the
past and present,88 memory of before provokes direct engagements with present-day social
inequalities and an active political struggle not only over the meaning of what took place in the
past but over the meaning of memory itself.89 Lauria-Santiago & Binford (2004) analyze how
current conditions of violence stem from such historical roots, with disillusionment caused by the
challenges of reconstruction in a society that ignored preexistent social structures.90
To account for youths draw to violence, scholars have specifically analyzed the lure
towards criminality and gang life. Bourdieu (2000) uses his law of the conservation of violence
to argue that inclination towards violence stems from early and constant exposure to it.91
Bourgois (2001) links such symbolic violence with the policies of economic liberalization that
normalized everyday violence as youth faced constant poverty,92 like limited access to social
services.93 Gmez and Vsquez (2001) note such poverty was influenced by the civil war, with
todays youth often forced to grow up in broken families that lacked a sense of community and
instead faced daily violence. Yet, as Nagle (2008) discusses, deported gang members from L.A.
also faced lack of community and engaged in violence because they arrived as pariahs in places
familiar or unknown to them, unwelcome, and with no basis of support to assimilate and to stay
out of trouble.94 Fogelbach (2011) and Wallace (2000) suggest Salvadoran youth were actually
drawn towards these deported gang members due to the MTV culture95 they brought back with
them. Cruz (2010) refers to the admiration towards deportees as mara clones, as Salvadoran
88 Radstone & Schwarz, Memory: Histories, Theories, and Debates, 2.
89 Francesca Lessa & Vincent Druliolle, The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 16.

90 Aldo Lauria-Santiago & Leigh Binford, Landscapes of Struggle (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2004): 1-11.
91 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 223.
92 Bourgois, The Power of Violence in War and Peace, 29.
93 Silber, Mothers/Fighters/Citizens, 562.
94 Nagle, Criminal Gangs in Latin America, 11.
95 Wallace, You Must Go Home Again, 53.

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youth gradually imitated and adopted the American gang identities and its associated behaviors,
norms, and values.96 Brenneman (2003) analyzes the psychological reasons behind this gang
appeal to argue poverty, familial problems, and school problems compelled youth to turn towards
gangs to project the shame caused by their past experiences onto others through violence the
only way to garner respect among members.97 Berkman (2007) contests social exclusion of
youth, who cannot depend on the state institutions created to protect them, thus created the
appeal towards gang life that subsequently trapped members in cycles of violence.98
In response to the rise of gang life as a means for deportees and marginalized youth to
cope with post-war disillusionment, Hume (2007) acknowledges such criminality transformed
into one of the states most feared and visible expressions of violence. She argues that everyday
construction of fear inherently others and dehumanizes gang members in a discourse in which
on one level, gangs are easily identifiable, fearful, and violent groups, yet on the other are
individuals who are sons/daughters. Targeted policies towards youth thereby increased
repression as authoritarian measures became legitimized and shifted focus away from embedded
societal violence.99 For instance, in another article, Hume (2007) correlates the rhetoric of Mano
Dura gang prevention policies with a politics of fear employed by state elites to protect their
interests and deflect attention from the broader weaknesses of government. 100 Yet, as Hume
and Nagle (2008) point out, the policies increased gang-related violence and diluted public
confidence in the PNC, which many even view as a human rights violator.101

96

Jos Miguel Cruz, Central American Maras: From Youth Street Gangs to Transnational Protection Rackets, Global Crime 11 no. 4
(2010): 386.

97 Brenneman, Homies and Hermanos, 93.


98 Berkman, Social Exclusion and Violence, 10.
99 Mo Hume. 2007. (Young) Men With Big Guns: Reflexive Encounters with Violence and Youth in El Salvador, Bulletin of Latin
American

Research 26 no. 4 (2007): 481-492.

100 Hume, Mano Dura: El Salvador Responds to Gangs, 747.


101 Nagle, Criminal Gangs in Latin America, 15.

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The deployment of violence as a coping mechanism for youth disillusionment is
analogous to the function of religion as a sense-making mechanism for wartime guerrillas. In
Petersons (1997) analysis of politics of religion, she examines the radicalization of religion and
draw towards the concept of martyrdom specifically as a way to create an ethical code for living
and to understand political killings as an as re-enactments of the passion of Jesus and the deaths
of later martyrs, with essentially the same causes and consequences. Santos (2014) claims much
of Salvadoran progressive Catholic thought and action is derived from the symbolic role of the
martyr, with death perceived as proof of the nobility of their cause.102 Peterson and Peterson
(2008) suggest these narratives were influential for the masses to locate individual and
collective experiences of suffering and injustice within a particular historicity and were
especially pertinent because of the countrys deep religiosity. Further, attachment to the deceased
influenced continued activism and emotional support among the living.103 As such, Smith (1991)
describes how for many liberation theology leaders, the prospect of martyrdom only made the
project more serious104 as they advocated for the poor.105 Based on the notion of martyrdom as
moral justification for collective political struggle, Smith-Nonini (2010) uses the cultural
discourse of body politics to argue:
The breach in zones of war during the 1980s was far more profound because civilians
perceived their own government as intent on their destruction. Combined with liberation
theologys assertion that poverty was not Gods will but a product of injustice, the
suffering body shifted from a symbol of normalized, generic poverty to an icon of
political struggle.106
Yet, and despite the major influence of Catholicism on the suffering Salvadoran body, Gmez &
Vsqeuz (2001) show that in its aftermath, the church has been reluctant to deal with youth who
102 Santos, Symbols that Speak, 101.
103 Peterson & Peterson, Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory, 513.
104 Christian Smith. The Emergence of Liberation Theology, 22.
105 Peterson & Peterson, Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory, 513.
106 Nonini-Smith, Healing the Body Politic, 18.

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join gangs due to renewed concerns for orthodoxy, fear of politicization of the faith, and an
overall cut from their 1970s and 1980s social activism.107
In response to the Catholic Churchs averseness towards todays gangs, Gmez &
Vsqeuz further discuss the emergence of Pentecostalism as a new and rapidly growing
alternative religious denomination for youth to break from cycles of violence.108 Brenneman
(2012) analyzes the structural similarities between Pentecostal churches and youth gangs, like
both organizations transnational ties to the U.S. Further, both gang homies and evangelical
homies are a known social group within their communities. However, while gang life promotes
reckless behavior, Pentecostalism stresses values like sobriety, modesty, and domesticity.109
Vasquez (2003) discusses the strict guidelines of the denomination, based on notions of selfsurveillance under God, and links these tenets to the panoptical society created by the military
during the civil war.110 Gmez & Vsqeuz thereby acknowledge that while Pentecostalism does
domesticate and curb violence among youth, it continues to perpetuate a culture of domination
and subordination. Within this context, youth continue to symbolically engage with violence
based on the rhetoric of spiritual warfare against Satan.111
Zilberg (2007) uses psychoanalytic theory and the idea of doble cara, a key trope in
Salvadoran political folklore that means, double/two faced, to analyze the U.S. and Salvadoran
relationship as a transnational means of production first by war and migration and now through
democratization and neoliberalism. In doing so, she argues a dialectical image has been created
that links guerrillas to the gangs, with deported youth a, packed and displaced sign for the
trauma of post-civil war violence, the failed promise of peace, and ongoing entanglements
107 Gmez and Vsquez, Youth Gangs and Religion Among Salvadorans, 180-182.
108 IBID, 183.
109 Brenneman, Homies and Hermanos, 61-62.
110 Vsquez, Saving Souls Transnationally, 21.
111 Gmez & Vsquez Youth Gangs and Religion Among Salvadorans, 180-184.

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between the USA and El Salvador. Yet, as Peterson & Peterson (2008) point out, while
Catholicism, specifically martyrdom, established guerrilla identity within a morally meaningful
religious narrative that emphasized collective struggle over the individual, post-war violence is
attributed to criminality and viewed as an arbitrary threat. Thus, unlike martyrs during the war,
those who die in these conditions do not knowingly choose a path whose likely end is death and
suffering is no longer viewed as a collective struggle against an identifiable oppressor.112
As seen through the literature, youth violence bears traces of the traumatic obsolescence of
religion as a sense-making mechanism within a disillusioned state. Through Heidenrys (2014)
analysis of post-amnesty murals, it can be inferred that graffiti created by youth represents the
consequences of this lack of a religious narrative. For instance, while murals created by former
guerrillas are often based on either portraitures from the official photographs of martyrs or
Catholic iconography, to create meaning and exude a temporal notion of a better tomorrow,
youth are disengaged with these styles and employ graffiti as a public expression of identity to
practice their own form of historical memory. Yet, while guerrillas too used the anonymity of
graffiti during the war to demand rights and proclaim injustice, in the post-war state youth
graffiti is often perceived as a subversive act that supposedly propagates violence and
incivility, unlike the murals which are widely celebrated. 113
Brighenti (2010) contests urban communication on a public space allows a continued
conversation of history,114 while Lynn & Lea (2005) agree that unauthorized writing is directly
related to the historical and cultural qualities of preexisting social structures.115 Based on
Carringtons (2009) claim that graffiti allows individuals to write themselves into existence and
112 Peterson & Peterson, Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory, 512-536.
113 Rachel Heidenry. 2014. The Murals of El Salvador: Reconstruction, Historical Memory and Whitewashing, Public Art Dialogue 4 no. 1
(2014): 122-136.

114 Andrea Mubi Brighenti, At the Wall: Graffiti Writers, Urban Territoriality, and the Public Domain, Space and Culture 13 no. 3 (2010):
315.

115 Nick Lynn & Susan J. Lea, Racist Graffiti: Text, Context, and Social Comment, Visual Communication 4 no. 1 (2005): 45.

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create a narrative of the self,116 the act of graffiti can be construed as a discourse generated by
overall absence of narrative tools, like the religious narrative, yet employed to establish
boundaries and refashion identity. Vigil (1988) and Cruz (2010) specifically analyze the
influence of symbols and language codes to shape gang culture and behavior, with the symbolic
presence of graffiti critical in the formation of a protective space for members, pertinent today
due to the rise of prison gangs where members do not physically control the streets but exert
dominance through graffiti.117 An analysis of these symbols within youth graffiti, viewed as a
subversive act that lacks a religious narrative unlike the murals created by guerrillas, may prove
useful to better understand ritualization of violence in response to perceived disillusionment.
Methodology
In order to test the claims of my hypothesis, this projects primary data source will be
graffiti created on the streets of San Salvador. Premised on my analyses and manifested in
Chmielewskas discourse of in situ, I will view graffiti, often created with aerosol spray, as a
surface manifestation positioned within a locally bounded system of references and the
surrounding discourse through inquiry into its linguistic and symbolic meaning. Graffiti can be
examined as both a visual phenomenon that manifests itself on the public walls of San Salvador,
the states capital and urban hub, as well as an authentic text to analyze the iconographic, spatiotemporal, and linguistic dimensions of wall writing in a specific locale. 118 I submit that an
analysis of graffiti can reveal the sociological motives behind perpetuation of gang participation
and ritualization as a form of expression that frames a particular socio-historical condition.
Graffiti thereby acts as a culturally meaningful activity119 that will be employed as a marker to
116 Victoria Carrington, I Write, Therefore I am: Texts in the City, Visual Communications 8 no. 4 (2009): 420.
117 Cruz, Central American Maras, 386.
118 Ella Chmielewska, Framing [Con]text: Graffiti and Place, Space and Culture 10 no. 2 (2007): 145-154.
119 M. Rowe & F. Hutton. 2012. Is your city pretty anyway? Perspectives on graffiti and the urban landscape, Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology 45 no. 1 (2012): 67-70.

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reterritorialize the citys barrios and youth engagement with violence due to lack of a martyrdom
narrative. My subject matter is 10 examples of San Salvadoran graffiti, displayed on public
walls, accessible through the online database The El Salvador Mural Archive.120
To test my hypothesis, I will conceptualize graffiti as a performative act of
territorialization to analyze its function as a mechanism that establishes boundaries of
expression. This analysis will thus reflect on the function of gang life as asylum for territorial
and religious displacement. Through this vein, the act of writing on a wall can be perceived as a
performance and basic operation of culture.121 Especially as the state continues to suppress gang
activity, graffiti is employed as resistance against a more powerful other usually a nonresponsive state apparatus like the state or Catholic Church,122 and acts as a performance of the
culture of violence manifested by the state through such actions. Paradoxically, however, while
youth use the act as an an aesthetic presentation of self in an art world, it is viewed by the
audience as an illegal act of defacement amongst a deviant subculture.123 Yet, this deviance is
the result of the displacement that spur youth to seek out cobijo and asylum in the first place.
Graffiti will hence be analyzed as an act marked by spatial containment within an urban
environment, with youth violence linked to the need to reclaim or preserve a particular space to
provide cobijo. Due to increased prison gangs within El Salvador, the symbolic presence of
graffiti acts to establish spatial boundaries within the barrios to enable identity formation. It is
then tied to violence in its physical demarcation of a protected space, evident by the distinct
coding used to understand certain messages,124 with the discursive features of self-containment

120 Rachel Heidenry, The El Salvador Mural Archive, http://rachelheidenry.com/murals.php


121 Sonja Neef, Killing Kool: The Graffiti Museum, Art History 30 no. 3 (2007): 421.
122 Lisa K.Waldner, Graffiti as a Form of Contentious Political Participation, Sociology Compass 7 no. 5 (2013): 383.
123 Rachel Holmes. 2010. Risky Pleasures: Using the Work of Graffiti Writers to Theorize the Act of Ethnography, Qualitative Inquiry 16
no. 10 (2010): 871-872.

124 James Diego Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 115.

Einbinder22
employed to create asylum. In this regard, spatial containment via reterritorialization establishes
imagined communities that co-exist, often unhappily, with the powerful geographies of the
mainstream.125 These communities rely on the function of cultural tools graffiti to produce,
reproduce, and mark the community, and thereby performs the narrative function to establish
collective memory and refashion identity among members in response to the displacement of the
religious martyrdom narrative.126 However, reterritorialization conversely increases fear among
community members who lose the opportunity to control and contain the violence produced by
the gangs 127 as youth continue to be stigmatized and the overall culture of violence persists.
I expect to find spatial containment encoded in aesthetic components of graffiti, which
include consideration of the location where it was performed, especially the public wall, as well
as lexical and imagistic symbols constitutive of spatial expression. In post-war El Salvador,
mural art on public walls became a crucial object for propagating memory, political ideology,
and national identity as contested sites for the population to regain a sense of shared cultural
identity and spatial awareness. The public wall is an interesting spatial phenomenon as a site
connected to a buildings function and purpose but also, through art, permeated by local
identities and connected to politics.128 Within this space, tropes of self-containment, like
spatialized words and specific marks or tracings, can have cultural significance that unpack why
youth choose to engage in this illegal act, which provides a similar function as murals did for
guerillas, and establish explicit boundaries to create cobijo. An understanding of gang symbols
and language codes is thus pertinent as a mechanism that shapes gang culture and young peoples
behavior, especially as young people from different backgrounds, places, and countries were
125 Carrington, I Write, Therefore I am, 412.
126 James V. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 30-66.
127 Cruz, Central American Maras, 388-396.
128 Heidenry. The Murals of El Salvador, 122-125.

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able to recognize each other as part of the same gang franchise129 and feel safe among their
homies who communicate with the same symbols. These symbols thereby act as an, interaction
ritual chain130 that gives voice and emotion to the spatial asylum afforded by gang member
affiliation.
To test my claim, I will subject graffiti to a close-reading analysis to find evidence of the
conjunction of schematic patterns related to religious narratives that contextualize the
performance of specific territorialization. Through this analysis, I expect to find a dialogic
interaction between religious memes and lexical items that aim to demarcate boundaries and
form a narrative of asylum for those disillusioned by the obsolescence of the martyr narrative as
a sense-making mechanism for perpetuated violence. Analysis of the physical location where the
graffiti was performed, such as public walls, barbed-wired walls, trashcans, and telephone polls,
will further contextualize how graffiti demarcates a protected space for gang members.
The collection of this data will take place over many months and will be grounded in the
wide berth of literature previously discussed in this proposal. Through an examination of youth
violence, I will use graffiti as a narrative of identity formation that provides agency to youth
engaged in these acts. Grounded in my analyses of tropes and authentic text, graffiti will support
the claim that ritualization of gang life and violence reterritorialize the barrios to establish selfcontainment for youth in search of cobijo due to displacement of the martyrdom narrative.

129 Cruz, Central American Maras, 388.


130 Based on Randall Collins theory of interaction ritual chains, everyday rituals are chained across time, with the emotional energy
gained from the experience incorporated into similar, future interactions that are actively sought out. Graffiti acts as an emotionally motivated act
that triggers continued performance of gang ritualization and consequent violence.

Einbinder24

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