The Gang Legacy of Central America\'s Wars

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Donna De Cesare had just walked into the AIDS ward at a public hospital in El Salvador one day in 1989 when a young voice greeted her.

“What's up?” she recalled hearing. “Finally, someone from my country!”

She was taken aback. The voice was in English, with the rhythmic cadence of Chicano Los Angeles, where the young man had once lived. His name was Franklin Torres. Though he was born in El Salvador, he had fled during its violent civil war to what his mother thought was the safety of Los Angeles. Instead, he found refuge in gangs and drugs. Gangs led to his deportation, and back in El Salvador, drugs would claim his life.

The unexpected encounter stayed with Ms. De Cesare, who had traveled to Central America to photograph the civil wars wracking the region. She would, in time, document the overlooked legacies of those bloody proxy wars, zeroing in on how witnessing unspeakable violence scarred young minds both in Central America and in the barrios of Los Angeles.

This month, Ms. De Cesare released “Unsettled/Desasosiego” (University of Texas Press), an urgent and moving work that chronicles those who grew up amid political wars, gang wars or both. It is a look back on lives that were lost, and some who triumphed, during her many years in the region. It is also, for her, a motivation to continue to examine these issues and to push for action through her bilingual Web site, Destiny's Children.

“We need to consider what we are doing as a society when we abandon so many children,” said Ms. De Cesare, who is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. “We need to see these young people as they truly are - children who have been burdened with so much that is painful from an early age and whose fragile hopes and dreams are being thwarted.”

In a picture from that first meeting, Franklin is thin, with just a few tattoos visible - a far cry from the current images of fierce, tattoo-covered members of La Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang. He told Ms. De Cesare that he had grown up in Usulután province, in a coffee-growing region that was the site of clashes between leftist guerrillas and the Salvadoran military.

A death squad had been active in that area, Ms. De Cesare said, and it was not uncommon for children like Franklin to see roadsides littered with the corpses of union activists, teachers or anyone thought to sympathize with the rebels. Some young people were forcibly conscripted.

Franklin's mother sought to protect him by moving to Los Angeles, where she dressed him in a starched white shirt and pressed pants. Other kids made fun of him.

“I heard that a lot from kids when I started doing this work in the 1990s,” Ms. De Cesare said. “They were treated as outcasts. When gangs dominated in the neighborhoods where they lived, there was some pressure to find some way of not being picked on.”

That was Franklin's introduction to the 18th Street Gang. After being arrested on drug and theft charges, he did time and was deported back to El Salvador - a harbinger of a flood of reverse exiles.

Donna De Cesare A man held a friend's daughter. He wanted a family of his own but said, “First I need a job and a house. I need a future.” San Salvador, 1997.

Franklin gave Ms. De Cesare contact information for his mother and some fellow gang members in Los Angeles. When Ms. De Cesare returned to the United States, she began to pay attention to how neighborhoods in cities like New York and Washington had attracted large communities of immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Life amid this diaspora intrigued her, even if New York-based editors did not share her enthusiasm.

“It was a story that was not being covered back then,” she said. “I tried to pitch stories, but there was resistance to the idea that anybody would really care. People instead were saying to me, because I had photographed the war in El Salvador, ‘Why don't you go to Bosnia?' Yes, I had photographed conflicts. But I don't see myself as a war photographer who was going to go around the globe from one war to the next. In the years I lived in El Salvador, I fell in love with the culture, and my abilities put me in a good position to be a good storyteller on the other issues.”

While other photographers chased conflicts across the globe, Ms. De Cesare was preoccupied with a different question: what happens when the war ends.

She looked at various aspects of the diaspora: the street peddlers; the soccer teams; the people who flew back and forth between the United States and El Salvador, selling items from home and bringing back packages and letters.

In 1993, she went to Los Angeles hoping to find Franklin's mother and his gang friends, but they had long since moved away. Instead, she teamed up with Luis J. Rodriguez, a poet and activist who knew about gangs, and they were awarded financing to begin a project.

Among the young people they encountered was Carlos Ingles, a former child soldier who had run away to Los Angeles with his brother. Ms. De Cesare followed him over the years as he tried to stay away from gang life and raise a family. Eventually, he was stopped while driving a cab, asked for papers and deported. That began a cycle in which he returned to the United States and was sent back to El Salvador several times. Then Ms. De Cesare stopped hearing from him.

A few years later, she got a call from Carlos's brother, Rogelio. Carlos had been killed in El Salvador. Though he had told his brother he was out of gangs, the truth may never be known. Gang violence had continued to take a wicked toll in El Salvador, even years after peace accords ended the civil war in 1992.

“It could have been anything,” Ms. De Cesare said. “He could have still been involved. He could have crossed somebody. It could have been a long-standing beef.”

Carlos's story was one of the reasons she decided to publish a book. People growing up in such violent conditions carry with them an emotional trauma that is seldom addressed, and it is difficult for them to escape gang life.

“We kind of write off these kids when they do come back,” she said. “And when they do, we make it so hard for them.”

While the best outcome might be for these young people to remake themselves and vanish into a new life in the United States, Central America is too small and too dangerous for that to happen in most cases. They end up in prisons, which can be like finishing schools for criminals, or they are killed by vigilante groups bent on “social cleansing.”

This is not to say that none escape the world of gangs. Ms. De Cesare has been following Carlos Perez, a young Guatemalan man who was a gang member growing up. A talented artist, he was able to leave Guatemala to study in Vienna, where he now lives.

Mr. Perez would like to return to Guatemala, Ms. De Cesare said, and work with other young people. But he does not feel comfortable working with former gang members. He might be a target.

That is why Ms. De Cesare plans to build on her book by developing a school curriculum and updating her Web site to provide resources for children looking for help and historical context to show how gangs emerged during civil wars.

“When people have other options, they expand their identity beyond the gang,” she said. “Their own homeboys respect that. That happens here. But down there, there are so few options that space is cut off.”

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