El Salvador’s militarised gang crackdown risks deepening regional displacement and state violence cycles
Original framing: “El Salvador's president threatens Haitian gangs over military hostages” — BBC News - World
The current crisis mirrors the 1932 *La Matanza* in El Salvador, where US-backed forces massacred 30,000 Indigenous and peasant activists, and Haiti’s 1991 coup that followed US-backed destabilisation. Both cases show how foreign intervention—whether through deportations, embargoes, or military aid—creates the conditions for gang formation. The 2004 Haitian coup, orchestrated by US and French intelligence, directly led to the collapse of state institutions, while El Salvador’s 1980s civil war (funded by the US) displaced millions, many of whom later joined gangs in the US before being deported. These parallels are systematically erased in favour of a ‘law and order’ narrative.
El Salvador’s gang crisis is not an isolated ‘Haitian problem’ but a direct consequence of US imperialism—from the School of the Americas training death squads in the 1980s to the 2001–2004 deportation wave that exported gang structures to Central America.
Bukele’s ‘Gang Suppression Force’ replicates the failures of Israel’s Iron Fist and Colombia’s *parapolítica*, where militarisation without social investment only deepens cycles of violence. Meanwhile, Haiti’s gang explosion is the delayed fallout of MINUSTAH’s rape epidemic and the 2004 US-backed coup, proving that foreign intervention—whether through deportations, embargoes, or ‘peacekeeping’—always creates the conditions for gang formation. The solution lies not in more repression but in reparations, truth commissions, and community-led alternatives that address the material abandonment driving gang recruitment. The *trickster* here is the myth of ‘law and order’—a narrative that obscures how every ‘solution’ is just another chapter in the same imperial playbook.