{"id":19108,"date":"2018-10-19T16:22:45","date_gmt":"2018-10-19T16:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19108"},"modified":"2018-10-19T16:22:45","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T16:22:45","slug":"weaponised-wine-cellars-how-not-to-solve-the-us-gang-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=19108","title":{"rendered":"Weaponised wine cellars: How not to solve the US gang problem"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A recent <\/span>New York Post article<\/span> reports that the ultra-rich of the Hamptons – an elite swathe of territory on New York’s Long Island – are converting<\/a> their properties into luxury fortresses in order “to hide from MS-13”, the Mara Salvatrucha gang.<\/span><\/p>\n

MS-13 have been <\/span>described<\/span> by USA Today as the “favourite villain” of President Donald Trump, who has delighted in referring to the gang’s members as “<\/span>animals<\/span>“.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Post details the various security options available, for gigantic sums, to guard against the MS-13 “spectre”. Fortunately for the Hamptonites, there’s still plenty of room for entertainment, with panic rooms<\/span> “doubling as home theatres, wine cellars or even gun vaults”.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Billionaire John Catsimatidis is quoted endearingly: “I sleep with a gun underneath my pillow: a Walther PPK\/S, the same one James Bond carried”.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Never mind that vast socioeconomic inequality is, you know, a <\/span>driving force<\/a><\/span> behind crime in the first place. But the beauty of capitalism is that there are always loads of profitable non-solutions to exacerbate problems under the guise of fixing them.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the president of a company that installs bullet-proof windows and doors tells the Post: “<\/span>We get business when there is a tremendous amount of fear being generated”.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n“Built on corpses”<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Enter President Trump, whose goal in life is to turn the US itself into one giant fortified gun vault. In May of this year, the White House issued a brief <\/span>dispatch<\/span><\/a> titled “What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13”, in which the word “animals” was utilised no fewer than nine times – lest there be any doubt as to its spontaneous political correctness in official discourse.<\/span><\/p>\n

After reviewing a couple of particularly brutal murders attributed to MS-13, the White House announces that “<\/span>MS-13 gang leaders based in El Salvador have been sending representatives into the United States illegally to connect the leaders with local gang members\u2026 direct[ing] local members to become even more violent in an effort to control more territory”.<\/span><\/p>\n

And while this is certainly a convenient talking point in terms of justifying Trump’s fanatical border wall visions as well as anti-immigrant vitriol in general, it happens to obscure the fact that MS-13 is not some foreign invader but rather 100 percent Made in USA.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The gang formed in the 1980s in Los Angeles, where many <\/span>terrorised Salvadorans<\/span><\/a> had fled<\/a> to escape El Salvador’s gruesome civil war, and initially served as a means of communal protection against other, already established gangs. The outfit was only exported to Central America via a subsequent US deportation frenzy.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fair enough, you might say, but what did the US have to do with the Salvadoran civil war? As it turns out, quite a lot. As with elsewhere in Latin America, El Salvador<\/a> served as a Cold War battleground for right-wing US-backed forces valiantly fighting the evil demons of Communism, who wanted to do terrible things like feed and educate everybody for free.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

A 1998 <\/span>article<\/span><\/a> in The Atlantic put it bluntly: “[T]here<\/span> is no escaping the fact that the success of the US policy [in El Salvador] was built on a foundation of corpses”. More specifically, success was “based on 40,000 political murders”.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sounds pretty violent; perhaps even animalistic.<\/span><\/p>\n

What you actually need to know<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

In short, the characterisation of MS-13 members as uniquely vicious and subhuman creatures is a pretty audacious move coming from a country that has engaged in brutal violence and <\/span>torture<\/span><\/a> on a global scale.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just ask the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, <\/span>Yemen<\/span><\/a>, Palestine, or anywhere else the US has directly or <\/span>indirectly<\/span><\/a> massacred untold numbers<\/a> of civilians, and chances are they’ll have their own, more credible opinions on <\/span>“What You Need To Know About”.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hondurans, too, could presumably compile an impressive list of complaints on account of that country’s long-time service as US military base and imperialist lab experiment. Highlights of past decades have included a <\/span>CIA-trained elite death squad by the name of Battalion 316, which, as the Baltimore Sun <\/span>put it<\/span><\/a>, “stalked, kidnapped, tortured and murdered hundreds of Honduran men and women” – effectively “terroris[ing] Honduras for much of the 1980s”.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nowadays, lethal <\/span>US-backed state repression<\/span> is conducted with near-total impunity, while the blame for violence in Honduras is often chalked up to – what else? – gangs, including MS-13.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her book <\/span>Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras<\/span>, American University anthropologist Dr Adrienne Pine emphasises that, while it mustn’t be romanticised, “gang solidarity\u2026 is a form of resistance against a social structure that fails to offer employment opportunities, education, or public and social services to young men”. After all, how would capitalism thrive without a whole lot of have-nots?<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pine also notes that Honduras’ past attempt at an ostensible “war on crime” – in which “criminals” naturally included <\/a>\u00a0<\/span>street children with tattoos<\/span> but not state security forces engaged in extrajudicial assassinations –\u00a0“led to <\/span>increasing gang militarisation in a war of escalation, thus creating a real version of the monstrous creature that had formerly been largely a product of colonialist imagination”.<\/span><\/p>\n

It remains to be seen whether a similar achievement will accompany the Trumpian war on MS-13, but a February <\/span>PBS news segment<\/span> titled “Why Trump’s focus on MS-13 might be making them stronger” offers some reason to believe that luxury panic rooms and weaponised wine cellars won’t be a thing of the past anytime soon.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nThe real criminals<\/span><\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Appearing on the segment is The New Yorker magazine’s <\/span>Jonathan Blitzer<\/span>, who stresses that the fixation with MS-13 detracts from the reality that, in the US, “immigrant communities tend to see much lower levels of crime”.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, neither reality nor logic has ever factored heavily into Trump’s world view or policy prescriptions -hence a situation in which, as Blitzer articulates, Trump repeatedly invokes the awful fate of MS-13’s victims without acknowledging that many of these victims are themselves from the very immigrant community that Trump also demonises.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Immigrants are thus often afraid to report gang activity, “trapped” as they are “between the gang violence on the one hand and immigration enforcement on the other”.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

As for the apparently existential gang threat facing the Hamptons, it’s worth reviewing the <\/span>statistics<\/span> provided re Trump’s “favourite villain” by USA Today, which calculates that MS-13 – with an estimated 10,000 members – constitutes a mere 0.7 percent of the population of criminally active gang members in the US.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other, unimagined crimes on the contemporary US domestic scene might meanwhile include the obscenely unjust distribution of wealth, the <\/span>criminalisation<\/a> of poverty<\/span>, and the fact that a veritable <\/span>epidemic of homelessness<\/span><\/a> continues to rage<\/a> alongside the mansions of the filthy rich, who continue to panic – in style -over how to remain filthy rich.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first entry for “<\/span>gang<\/span>” in the Oxford dictionary is “An organised group of criminals”. Judging from its machinations at home and abroad, the US would appear to be as fearsome a gang as any.<\/span><\/p>\n

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent New York Post article reports that the ultra-rich of the Hamptons – an elite swathe of territory on New York’s Long Island – are converting their properties into luxury fortresses in order “to hide from MS-13”, the Mara Salvatrucha gang. MS-13 have been described by USA Today as the “favourite villain” of President…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":19109,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}