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The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that it will eliminate the Temporary Protection Status<\/a> that gave provisional U.S. residency to Salvadoran migrants after a 2001 earthquake. Some 200,000 Salvadorans now have until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States, obtain a green card or be deported.<\/p>\n According to a Jan. 8 DHS statement<\/a>, the decision was made \u201cafter a review of the disaster-related conditions upon which the country\u2019s original designation was based,\u201d which determined that they \u201cno longer exist.\u201d<\/p>\n Immigration advocates have condemned the move, saying it overlooks El Salvador\u2019s extreme violence<\/a>, which has surged since the Bush administration first offered Salvadorans protective status. With 81.2 murders per 100,000 people in 2016, El Salvador is the deadliest place in the world that\u2019s not a war zone<\/a>. More than 5,200 people were killed there in 2016.<\/p>\n How did El Salvador become so violent? These four articles shed some light on the country\u2019s complex crime problem. Spoiler: It\u2019s not just about the gangs.<\/p>\n 1. It all started in the U.S.<\/strong><\/p>\n President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions often claim that lax immigration policies allowed fearsome Central American gangs like MS-13 to spread from El Salvador into the U.S.<\/p>\n The truth is quite the opposite<\/a>, writes Florida International University professor Jos\u00e9 Miguel Cruz.<\/p>\n \u201cThe street gang Mara Salvatrucha 13, commonly known as MS-13, was born in the United States,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n Formed in Los Angeles in the early 1980s by the children of Salvadoran immigrants who\u2019d fled that country\u2019s civil war, MS-13 was at first just \u201ckids who met hanging out on street corners,\u201d writes Cruz.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until the early 2000s that the group spread into Central America. There, it has brutally deployed extortion, human smuggling and drug trafficking, terrorizing neighborhoods and helping to turn the so-called Northern Triangle \u2013 El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras \u2013 into the world\u2019s deadliest place.<\/p>\n 2. It\u2019s not just El Salvador<\/strong><\/p>\n El Salvador may be particularly dangerous, but it isn\u2019t the only Latin American country facing a homicide epidemic<\/a>, writes Robert Muggah, a Brazilian crime researcher.<\/p>\n As a whole, \u201cLatin America is where the most murders in the world happen,\u201d Muggah writes. Home to just 8 percent of the world\u2019s population, the region sees over 38 percent of global homicides. Every day some 400 Latin Americans are killed.<\/p>\n Many factors contribute to this homicide epidemic, according to Muggah, including \u201cthe war on drugs, abundant unlicensed firearms, persistently unequal gender relations and, in Mexico and Central America, thousands of marginalized, uprooted, and sometimes convicted U.S. deportees.\u201d<\/p>\n Governments have responded to rising violence by sinking money into police forces, prosecutors and prisons. It hasn\u2019t worked, Muggah writes. Only 20 percent of murders in Latin America results in conviction. And in San Salvador, El Salvador \u2013 last year the seventh-deadliest city in the world \u2013 just 10 percent do.<\/p>\n 3. Women can be targets<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cCriminal violence, while potent, is just part of a dangerous cocktail\u201d of crime in Central America, writes Ariadna Est\u00e9vez of Mexico\u2019s National Autonomous University<\/a>.<\/p>\n For example, in 2015, Honduras had the highest rate of feminicide \u2013 or female murder \u2013 in the world. Environmental advocates who stand up to illegal mining and other kinds of resource exploitation in Central America are also frequent targets of violence.<\/p>\n Those two facts are not unrelated, Est\u00e9vez warns. \u201cIt\u2019s a common mistake to consider violence against women a private, non-political act. But women are often on the front lines of activism\u201d she writes, because they tend to fight against activities that are \u201charmful to their children, homes and communities.\u201d<\/p>\n 4. El Salvador\u2019s government isn\u2019t helping<\/strong><\/p>\n Jos\u00e9 Miguel Cruz agrees that gangs like MS-13 are not the sole cause of crime in Central America. Rather, he contends, they are \u201clargely a symptom of a far more critical issue plaguing the region \u2013 namely, corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Cruz, groups like MS-13 have grown and thrived in El Salvador because the political class protects them<\/a>. In August, prosecutors there showed that the country\u2019s two main political parties had colluded with MS-13 and other gangs, paying more than US$300,000 for help winning the 2014 presidential election.<\/p>\n The same nexus between government and organized crime has been exposed across Central America, where political institutions routinely shield gangs in exchange for economic support and political backing in the barrios they control. Few are ever prosecuted for this crime, Cruz says.<\/p>\n Catesby Holmes<\/a>, Global Affairs Editor, The Conversation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Department of Homeland Security has confirmed that it will eliminate the Temporary Protection Status that gave provisional U.S. residency to Salvadoran migrants after a 2001 earthquake. Some 200,000 Salvadorans now have until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the United States, obtain a green card or be deported. According to a Jan. 8 DHS statement,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":7209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/mainnews.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/file-20180109-36025-gecw9t.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security-public-safety"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6434"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6437,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6434\/revisions\/6437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/counter.theconversation.com\/content\/89904\/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic\")
That erodes Central Americans\u2019 belief in the rule of law, which, in turn, makes it harder to fight violence. \u201cRoot out corruption in the Central American ruling class,\u201d he wagers, \u201cand the gangs and crooks will go down with it.\u201d<\/p>\n