Las Pandillas: Women on the Run
In 2018, as an abnormally large number of migrants marched to the US border, they couldn’t have known the hell that would soon befall them. Now, in 2020, the issue has fallen to the background of US politics and out of the public consciousness. Though the so-called “crisis” on the border remains a major challenge to women’s rights on both sides of the line.
The vast majority of migrants on the border are women and minors coming up from the Northern Triangle, a notoriously fraught region. The NTCA refers to the three most tumultuous and low-income countries south of Mexico - El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Two of the most significant challenges to progress and development in these three nations are economic inequality and gang violence. These are harshest on the women in the region. Domestic violence is endemic, and recent years have seen gangs deliberately targeting women and children to extort further the communities they torment.
Artwork by Lucia Torres
To get a better picture of the current violence that is so widespread in the region, we need to understand a bit of history. The area has been rife with political, socioeconomic, and colonial conflicts for centuries. Military coups and a series of US interventions have kept the region unstable for decades. Long before the gangs, social and economic inequality manifested in all-out civil wars as the poor attempted to usurp their elitist oppressors. The tale of violent conflict within the region is a long and complex one, but the critical event that most informs the turmoil we are seeing today began in the late 1970s in the streets of El Salvador.
Socioeconomic divides that began brewing long before the nation’s independence spilled over into the 1900s and manifested in an attempted coup in 1930. The failure left the poor and wounded under the toe of a brutal military force controlled by the elite they sought to overthrow. Tensions continued to rise, and a string of attempted coups and assassinations came to a head in 1979 when a leftist military junta seized control of the country. After they failed to fulfill their promises to the working class, the five largest guerillas rose up to fight off their new oppressor. Under the National Liberation Front banner, these guerillas began a conflict that soon plunged the nation into civil war.
The war dragged on until 1992, and by then, the country had been decimated. The blood of 75,000 Salvadorans marred the empty streets as El Salvador attempted to rebuild with a crippled population, no government, and no clear way forward. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled during the 12-year long war, many of them leaving their children and seeking out better lives elsewhere. They most commonly arrived on the US border; many of them crossed illegally after failing to claim asylum.
The US had played a significant role in the war itself, providing arms and funds for the authoritarian regime who they chose to legitimize. It was with US sponsored arms and training that the regime would go on to commit 85% of the atrocities against their own people in the war. Though they fueled the most severe human rights violations they felt they owed nothing to the Salvadorans at the border. Their ignorance and ineptitude in dealing with the thousands of people flowing into the country left these refugees destitute. Forced into poor neighborhoods with no papers and no ability to get them, they fended for themselves in inner cities riddled with the kind of organized gang violence that plagues El Salvador today.
These Los Angeles neighborhoods were the birthplace of Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio Deciocho, gangs that now sprawl across the NTCA. They had innocent beginnings. They were a way for the Salvadoran community to defend themselves from the surrounding gangs that frequently harassed them. However, they soon became full-fledged drug trafficking operations, and while they continued to protect their community, the lucrative business was attractive for all these fresh and jobless refugees.
In the early 90s, the Clinton administration pushed for tighter restrictions on refugees arriving to and currently living in the US. This came with a wave of negative attention that soon saw many gang members deported back to a home with no infrastructure. Deportations began in 1993, with just dozens of gang members, but only two years later, the Clinton administration had forcibly removed 780 members from the country.
They arrived to an El Salvador with no ability or will to monitor and control them. Their operations flourished. The wave of migrant parents fleeing and leaving their children behind had created thousands of orphans, and with little else to occupy their time and no family that was fit to provide, the gangs became their refuge. The country was littered with weaponry that soon fell into the hands of the warring gangs that began to carve up the country. In lieu of a formal policing force and a well-established government, with thousands of lost children and abandoned artillery in their midst, Barrio 18 and MS-13 soon became the most notorious gangs in the region, spreading across borders and becoming a powerful economic and societal force.
El Salvador was brought to the brink of disaster in 2015 as its murder rate spiked to 104 per 100,000. That was a wake-up call for the government. After a series of trial and error policies, attempts to control and quell the swell of gang violence are finally yielding success. But as the war on the gangs in the NTCA continues to rage on, and even if the government wins, the seeds of future class struggle have already been sown. Like the nations surrounding it, the country is burdened with the lasting impact of colonial and imperialist oppression.
Economic inequality across the world is rising, but it poses even greater stress on women and girls in the global south. Burdened with all that femininity carries everywhere; caring for children, being economically viable partners, and being good homemakers. The weight of womanhood is extra heavy on women who are attempting to make lives in impoverished neighbourhoods plagued by violent crime.
Gangs are a symbol of fear for every member of society, but women have been uniquely made targets of their brutal acts. Gender-based violence has become just another weapon in the toolbox, and the victimization of women has become imperative to territorial control and power.
Women have been forced into hiding. They barricade themselves in their homes, avoid public life, and are still expected to provide for their children. The obstacles are continuing to mount. Femicide rates in the NTCA, particularly in Honduras and El Salvador, are the worst in the world. In 2018, 6.8 of 100,00 women in El Salvador died - the highest femicide rate in the world at the time. In that same year, Honduras topped out at 5.1, while Guatemala saw 2 per 100,000 women die because of their gender. These crimes are ruthless. The thousands of women who were found to be victims of femicide were mutilated and often found to have experienced some form of sexual violence before their death.
Artwork by Lucia Torres
The UN has made many reports that cite gang violence as a key factor in these crimes. Yet, a culture of machismo that glorifies the oppression of women prevents the police and the government from addressing these issues in earnest. As these governments wrestle with gang violence, women’s causes routinely fall between the cracks. Their policies fail to intervene in the places women need community and government support.
Femicide is just the tip of the iceberg. The gangs have taken up a policy of forcibly “recruiting” women by making them “novias de la pandilla (girlfriends of the gang).” These relationships have been referred to as modern slavery, marked by sexual and physical violence. Las pandillas in the NTCA have been known to extort families by threatening to take their daughters. They often kidnap these girls with or without the money, making these young girls bargaining chips in this sick game of chance. In this unique context, women have become more than products; they are a currency that ensures community submission to gang rule.
The options are simple - flee or pay and hope for the best. As the economic situation worsens in the region, and governments remain incapable of containing, punishing, or even rehabilitating gang members, the second is no longer feasible.
Again, all eyes turn to the United States. A country whose increasingly limited and nationalistic rhetoric continues to shut the door in their faces. Migrants coming up from the NTCA know this. They are well aware of the politics at play in the US and the many challenges on their long journey. They are conscious that this path is laced with violence and their success (or lack thereof) is up to fate. Still, they leave not out of any genuinely independent will but out of necessity. Economic hardship, widespread gang violence, and the overwhelming sense that change will never have spurred them into action.
The journey northward is long and arduous. Migrants are guided by “coyotes,” people who have made it their life's work to smuggle hundreds of migrants each year from their nations to the US’s southern border. They charge thousands of USD to make you a part of their group and often raise the price at will. Many families save for years for the chance to send just one person to safety.
Millions of migrants make the trek each year from the NTCA to the US’s southern border. In 2019 it was projected that 1% of the population of Guatemala and Honduras would attempt to make it to the US border. Less than half of them will actually get asylum. The US government will repatriate the rest, but commonly migrants don’t get far enough to stake their claim.
Today, women and children are occupying the lion’s share of migrants showing up at the border. This is indicative of the violence they are facing at home and the many challenges they are facing to obtaining legal status in the US.
Under the Trump administration, both Mexico and the US have tightened their border security. As the US becomes more isolationist in its policies, it places increased pressure on its allies to do the same. The crackdowns on the Mexican border with Guatemala have forced refugees into even more perilous routes. In these areas, they face extortion from regional gangs, victimization by human traffickers that kidnap these women and girls for sexual and domestic servitude.
There isn’t enough being done to protect these women, and this isn’t work they can push for alone. This unique trap has been constructed around them for decades, and escaping won’t be easy. Both international and national efforts to protect these women have to be focused on them - not on the gangs, not on money, or immigration. It has to center on the women who are dying and being enslaved because it is only through giving them justice; we can show them that there is hope.
The situation in the NTCA is getting better, but the gangs are also getting smarter, and unlike the general public, they are watching every move the government makes. Whether it be more lax immigration policies or harsher anti-gang patrols - they are preparing for it. And that preparation only puts more stress on these women and their families.
What a woman has to be is constantly changing, but in the NTCA, it is unclear if womanhood will ever not be tied to victimhood. There is so much more to being a woman in a society primed and accepting of the violence it enacts against you. It requires a fortification of self, a bravery that is unfathomable to most. These women’s stories may never be told in full, but their experiences represent what most of us can see so clearly - there is no justice without care for women’s rights.
Hayley is an emerging writer and journalist who works hard to create work that is fiercely feminist, anti racist and anti oppression on a whole. You can check out more of her work and content on her instagram @hayley.headley