To visit her father in the Sal-vadorian community of El Pepeto, Karla García used to run a fearsome gauntlet of gangs and guns.
The two streets separating their homes were a bullet-pocked no man’s land where members of the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18-Sureños groups fought deadly battles for control.
“It was really dangerous. They’d have shootouts just outside,” said the 40-year-old from Soyapango, a satellite city east of El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador.
Yet on a recent Saturday afternoon, García sat in front of her father’s greenhouse with her family and there was not a criminal to be seen, nor a gunshot to be heard.
“They’ve completely vanished,” she said of the street gangs who for years ruled the area with an iron fist. Nearby walls – once spattered with the black insignia of the crime bosses – had been painted white by the government to symboli se a new era of peace.
El Pepeto, a working class warren of single-storey homes, is far from the only mara-dominated neighbourhood in El Salvador to be experiencing once unthinkable days of calm.
After a highly controversial yearlong “war” against El Salvador’s notorious gangs waged by the country’s populist leader Nayib Bukele, similar scenes are playing out across a Central American country once considered one of the most violent places on Earth .
Even staunch government critics such as the trailblazing news outlet El Faro have conceded that Bukele’s crackdown – which has seen more than 64,000 people jailed and slashed the murder rate – has produced “extraordinary change” for Salvadorians .
This story is from the March 03, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the March 03, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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