Posts tagged with politics
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![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8357954a602ab88be030f0c04aa162db/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/d3d62ff91f2ce7eae9dbeed42bc3411a/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/01af25aee213fea881549a2f884d4495/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o4_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/3af9f116e97346deeffc5f70c18e6caa/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/c016b601e6ea9a002306e928c6ee74b8/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o6_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/3acdd032197cae15de18b78b7e7680ae/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o7_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/8e42a4dc4cd229d9d641d8132c635938/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o9_r1_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://24.media.tumblr.com/5666274be185a9a08cf01d8442e20fe9/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o8_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/1e77a1ae858a4492d1b102f74bd03b9a/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o10_1280.jpg)
![In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
[[MORE]]
Last March, however, the country’s two most violent gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — suddenly declared a truce. In exchange for better prison conditions — and the transfer of gang leaders to a less-restrictive facility — the two armies agreed to halt the violence (for now). Since then, El Salvador’s official homicide rate has plummeted by more than 60 percent; in April, the country of six million saw its first day without a single murder in years. “This is an opening,” a former gang member said at the time, “part of a peace process that we have been pushing for years.”
And yet, one year into the truce, the reality of life in El Salvador isn’t quite so simple. Sure, the killings have abated, but extortion, theft, and drugs are rampant. Reports of missing persons have skyrocketed since the truce began, and mass graves have cropped up all over the countryside. On Tuesday, a prominent social worker, a former gang member who had helped broker the truce, was shot point blank in front of the social service center where he worked. For locals for whom gang warfare has become a routine part of daily life, the reality is clear. “We leave our home and don’t know if we are going to come back,” as one put it.
In partnership with Mother Jones, Tumblr commissioned a series of portraits from Juan Carlos to show what life is like on the ground in his home country. From inside overcrowded prisons to the plight of residents tortured daily by the disappeared, the images are perhaps the most comprehensive view of El Salvador’s gang truce to date. We spoke with the photographer about the project — called Truce In and Out — as well his newly launched blog and website.
You’ve documented the war in Iraq, the earthquake in Haiti, and New Orleans post-Katrina. Why go back to your home?
In my opinion, photography is a responsibility. There are so many stories here that aren’t told by mainstream media: gangs, violence, an area contaminated by lead by a factory that manufactured car batteries. I wanted to document my country and see what the postwar El Salvador was about. Were we better off? What did the war accomplish? Did we become a better country?
I take it the gangs were impossible to ignore in that equation.
It got to a point where it was just everywhere, all around you, so I decided to take a deeper step into documenting the violence. I’m from a small town in the western part of El Salvador, and in 2008, there were about eight killings in a single day — just in that town. In other places, when photographers document crime, they go on patrols with ambulances or police. But I would just walk down the street. I walked into a crime scene where a kid had just been shot in the head, right outside a bakery where I was buying bread. Another time, a cousin told me, “Hey, a guy just got shot in the park.” I went, and there was a bench full of blood. This kind of thing was happening all the time. I would be walking down the street and just boom. So it was all around me.
You were a child during the first years of El Salvador’s civil war. Is the experience of gang life similar?
You know, I was a small child during the war, but you’d wake up to the sound of gunshots. And the bodies. You’d wake up and there would be bodies on the road or the street — somebody killed the night before. It’s the same thing here: you still find bodies on the side of the road, mass graves and disappeared. History is repeating itself — but for very different reasons.
What’s it like being around all that death?
It’s troubling, because you are always in that mode that something could happen to you. And sadly enough, that’s how Salvadorans would wake up, thinking “I could die today,” just like saying, “I’ve got to brush my teeth.” Psychologically, it’s stressful. Because normal things like taking a walk in a park become difficult. The violence is all around you. Salvadorans will tell you, that’s always in their mind. They never know what’s going to happen. That’s the thing — this isn’t just physical violence, this is psychological violence. It’s this feeling that something is going to happen to you, or that you can’t defend yourself, because you’re going to end up dead.
What about the police?
It became popular — gang members even write it on the wall — the saying: “See, Hear, Shut Up.” The culture has become that people don’t speak up, because they feel there’s no protection. You can’t even call the police, because there are informants in the police department. So there’s no trust. There’s nobody to turn to.
But has the truce helped?
The numbers have dropped. But in my opinion, a society that still has five or six murders per day is not a healthy society. Now you find more bodies on the side of the road in plastic bags; you find people just disappeared, or in mass graves. So what’s happening — or, at least, what many people believe is happening — is that the government is manipulating the numbers. They just found two girls who’d been missing since October chopped into pieces. Yeah, we have fewer murders. But you still have extortion, and gang leaders — every time they have a press conference — can’t give a straight answer about when they’re going to stop. The crime may be down, but the fear is still there.
It’s crazy to hear you say that gangs hold press conferences. How much power do gangs have?
They have more power than the authorities. If you want to have a business, you pay them. They infiltrate the police: gang members become policemen, and policemen become gang members. They have the power to stop people from doing the simplest things — like going to work — to make demands on the government. Pretty much they’re in charge.
What do you think it would take solve the problem?
People say, you know, just burn down the prisons — because that’s where all the gang leaders are housed. But that is not the answer. It’s more complicated. We’ve got to educate both sides. We’ve got to focus on prevention. The problem will never just go away. It’s like saying, “Let’s get rid of gangs in LA.” We’re not going to do that. But we can bring the numbers down. We can focus on prevention, and outreach to the new generations. Because all these young generations are growing up with all this violence, and what’s going to happen? Boom, they’re going to fall into that. That happens in any place where this is a problem, and it’s no different here.
— Photos by Juan Carlos; text by Jessica Bennett](http://25.media.tumblr.com/02fa6c531b51b275040e46a07abf3fc8/tumblr_mj7h8d9D8W1rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
In El Salvador, Gang Truce Can’t Stop the Violence
This story was produced in partnership with Mother Jones.
It began with a trip back home, to a small town in the country’s western valley, to visit his dying grandmother. More than a decade after El Salvador’s bloody civil war had ended, Juan Carlos, a 38-year-old photojournalist, wanted to see how life had changed. Was his country, one of the most violent in the Western Hemisphere, better off after 12 years of war? Sure, there were shiny new roads and malls, but was the country any safer?
Juan Carlos began by documenting infrastructure and families; education and health systems, traveling for long stretches between El Salvador, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he now lives. But it didn’t take long for a new focus to emerge: the gang culture, and accompanying terror, that had seeped into the fabric of everyday Salvadoran life. With an estimated 64,000 identified gang members, El Salvador’s street gangs — or maras, as they’re known to locals — operate like armies. They control traffic stops and neighborhoods. They hold press conferences. They are incestuously intertwined with the police. In other words, they call the shots — as well as fire them. In its peak, in 2009, the gangs were responsible for a homicide rate that reached 14 deaths per day.
View post 2,250 notes -
How a Gun Control Petition Went from Tumblr to Washington DC
I created the petition “Immediately address the issue of control through the introduction of legislation in Congress” as a knee-jerk reaction in mid-December of last year. It was a way of gaining control over a situation I had no control over. After the awful extent of the Sandy Hook shootings became clear, I felt disoriented. The mind tends to turn toward blame, but the murder of twenty children and six school officials was, and will always be, a hard thing to wrap my head around.
I knew that if there ever were a tipping point for effective gun control, this would be it. So, I wrote a petition. My primary goal was to appeal to both sides of the debate. Writing an incendiary, partisan petition benefits no one. The vast majority of gun owners are people who have the Constitutional right to own one, several, or many guns, and singling these people out was wrong. Simply put, the petition was intended to start a realistic dialogue about guns and their role in the United States. We have a gun problem, plain and simple.
View post 1,738 notes -
This Month In Charts: November
Still recovering from their Thanksgiving food comas, the guys from I Love Charts bring you the month of November, charted.
Yes We Can!
Every four years, people all across America gather together for a ritual rich in metaphor for the American experience. From all walks of life, citizens join ranks with their brothers and sisters to stand in line, battling outdated technology and undisguised voter suppression tactics for the privilege of casting their vote for President of the United States. From their homes, jobs, schools, posts they come and wait. And wait, and wait, and wait …
View post 182 notes -
![Meet the Mind Behind Barack Obama’s Online Persona
You’ve most definitely seen it by now. Michelle Obama, wearing a red-and-white checkered dress, stands with her back to the camera. Her arms are wrapped around her husband, the hints of a smile lingering on the edges of his lips. “Four more years,” reads the text, which was posted on the Obama campaign’s social media accounts around 11:15pm on election night‚ just as it became clear the president had won a second term.
The photo, taken by campaign photographer Scout Tufankjian just a few days into the job, pretty much won the internet: 816,000 retweets, the most likes ever on Facebook; thousands of reblogs on Tumblr. And yet it wasn’t chosen by the president’s press secretary, or even a senior-level operative, but by 31-year-old Laura Olin, a social media strategist who’d been up since 4am. For the first time since the campaign ended, she talked to Tumblr, in partnership with The Daily Beast, about what it’s like being the voice of the President — where millions of people, and a ravenous press, await your every grammatical error.
So how does it actually work, being the voice of the President? Who makes the decisions about what to post?
All of our decisions were made in-house — in Chicago, mostly — so we weren’t getting direct directives from the White House or anything. But we tried as much as possible to have voices for each account, so depending on the message — because we had all these channels — we had an appropriate place to put it. Obviously some stuff was sufficiently huge so that it went everywhere, but as much as possible we tried to tailor the message for the channel and the audience.
It must be daunting.
It was kind of terrifying, actually. My team ran the Barack Obama Twitter handle, which I think was probably most susceptible to really embarrassing and silly mistakes. We didn’t ever really have one, which I still can’t believe we pulled off.
Was it pretty much constant terror?
It was choosing people for the team who not only were creative — and knew their social media shit — but were really kind of fanatical about fact checking and accuracy. It was getting people that understood there had to be serious fear of God before posting anything. It got to be exhausting, but I’m really proud we avoided a really embarrassing “Amercia” situation.
Did you have any close calls?
Not anything too terrible but just embarrassing typos. But not anything as bad as Amercia. Because that’s pretty damn bad.
Do you think Republicans are more tone deaf when it comes to social media than Democrats?
I think they’re a little more tone deaf generally, but I’m sure there are people that get it. I think one of the great things about our campaign is that they recognized that digital was going to be a huge part of it. They put a lot of trust in my boss, [Obama for America Digital Director] Teddy Goff, and he in turn put a lot of trust in us, that we knew what we were doing, and to follow our gut, they just need to be brave enough to just let people who know their shit do what they do. But I’m perfectly content if they don’t figure that out for a while.
How did you guys decide what voice to speak in? Was it more casual than real life?
One thing I was really proud of was we always tried to be really human, like speak to people like we’d like to be spoken to, and never go into, you know, “speechiness.” We actually had a list of banned words — like, don’t use words that only politicians use in speeches, don’t be a douchebag, stuff like that.
It was nice to see you guys embrace the GIF on Tumblr. Was that a conscious decision?
We recognized early on that when we put up a GIF or reblogged a GIF it would have a better reach than just a static image. It’s just another way to speak in the terms of the community — and make things more fun. This isn’t rocket science at all, but I think something that we discovered — or tried to implement — was that if you put things in terms that people actually want to share, they will share them. Political campaigns historically haven’t totally gotten it.
Tell me what election night was like for your team.
The digital campaign was divided into people who were responsible for putting out planned content — so, like, find your polling place — and a rapid-response team. We also did targeted posts and tweets encouraging people to stay in line, getting out information where their new polling place was, stuff like that. We actually went through a few dry runs in the weeks before election day to make sure that we had that entire process down.
And how’d the Four More Years photo come about?
We’d all been there since 4am or 6am, we’re exhausted, I refused to believe that we were actually winning, but we started thinking, around 8:30 or 9:00, “What do we do next?” One of my team members remembered an amazing photo of the president and first lady hugging at the president’s last campaign rally in Des Moines. It’s this really beautiful photo at night — the only thing was that Michelle was facing forward and the president was facing away from the camera, So my boss, Teddy Goff, made the very good point that we should see the president’s face. I remembered that our campaign photographer had taken a series of really great hug photographs at another Iowa rally, in the summer, and I went to our photo editor and she was like “Yes!” She found the photo, I wrote a couple captions, we went with “Four more years,” they called Iowa, I hit post, and then I closed my laptop and we jetted to the victory party. Actually, none of us looked at how the posts were doing until I opened my laptop the next morning.
And, of course, it had exploded.
I don’t think anyone on the team had a conception that we would break every record ever, it was crazy. I think it was just a combination of the moment, and just kinda lucking into a photo that people loved that I think showed the emotion and the relief, and obviously I think everyone loves the president and the first lady together especially, so it was sort of a confluence of factors. But, uh, yeah. It worked out.
— Brian Ries is the social media editor for Newsweek/The Daily Beast, who produced this story in partnership with Tumblr Storyboard. Photo by Scout Tufankjian for Obama for America.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdq33rdD8m1rrpm57o1_r1_1280.jpg)
Meet the Mind Behind Barack Obama’s Online Persona
You’ve most definitely seen it by now. Michelle Obama, wearing a red-and-white checkered dress, stands with her back to the camera. Her arms are wrapped around her husband, the hints of a smile lingering on the edges of his lips. “Four more years,” reads the text, which was posted on the Obama campaign’s social media accounts around 11:15pm on election night‚ just as it became clear the president had won a second term.
The photo, taken by campaign photographer Scout Tufankjian just a few days into the job, pretty much won the internet: 816,000 retweets, the most likes ever on Facebook; thousands of reblogs on Tumblr. And yet it wasn’t chosen by the president’s press secretary, or even a senior-level operative, but by 31-year-old Laura Olin, a social media strategist who’d been up since 4am. For the first time since the campaign ended, she talked to Tumblr, in partnership with The Daily Beast, about what it’s like being the voice of the President — where millions of people, and a ravenous press, await your every grammatical error.
So how does it actually work, being the voice of the President? Who makes the decisions about what to post?
All of our decisions were made in-house — in Chicago, mostly — so we weren’t getting direct directives from the White House or anything. But we tried as much as possible to have voices for each account, so depending on the message — because we had all these channels — we had an appropriate place to put it. Obviously some stuff was sufficiently huge so that it went everywhere, but as much as possible we tried to tailor the message for the channel and the audience.
It must be daunting.
It was kind of terrifying, actually. My team ran the Barack Obama Twitter handle, which I think was probably most susceptible to really embarrassing and silly mistakes. We didn’t ever really have one, which I still can’t believe we pulled off.
Was it pretty much constant terror?
It was choosing people for the team who not only were creative — and knew their social media shit — but were really kind of fanatical about fact checking and accuracy. It was getting people that understood there had to be serious fear of God before posting anything. It got to be exhausting, but I’m really proud we avoided a really embarrassing “Amercia” situation.
Did you have any close calls?
Not anything too terrible but just embarrassing typos. But not anything as bad as Amercia. Because that’s pretty damn bad.
Do you think Republicans are more tone deaf when it comes to social media than Democrats?
I think they’re a little more tone deaf generally, but I’m sure there are people that get it. I think one of the great things about our campaign is that they recognized that digital was going to be a huge part of it. They put a lot of trust in my boss, [Obama for America Digital Director] Teddy Goff, and he in turn put a lot of trust in us, that we knew what we were doing, and to follow our gut, they just need to be brave enough to just let people who know their shit do what they do. But I’m perfectly content if they don’t figure that out for a while.
How did you guys decide what voice to speak in? Was it more casual than real life?
One thing I was really proud of was we always tried to be really human, like speak to people like we’d like to be spoken to, and never go into, you know, “speechiness.” We actually had a list of banned words — like, don’t use words that only politicians use in speeches, don’t be a douchebag, stuff like that.
It was nice to see you guys embrace the GIF on Tumblr. Was that a conscious decision?
We recognized early on that when we put up a GIF or reblogged a GIF it would have a better reach than just a static image. It’s just another way to speak in the terms of the community — and make things more fun. This isn’t rocket science at all, but I think something that we discovered — or tried to implement — was that if you put things in terms that people actually want to share, they will share them. Political campaigns historically haven’t totally gotten it.
Tell me what election night was like for your team.
The digital campaign was divided into people who were responsible for putting out planned content — so, like, find your polling place — and a rapid-response team. We also did targeted posts and tweets encouraging people to stay in line, getting out information where their new polling place was, stuff like that. We actually went through a few dry runs in the weeks before election day to make sure that we had that entire process down.
And how’d the Four More Years photo come about?
We’d all been there since 4am or 6am, we’re exhausted, I refused to believe that we were actually winning, but we started thinking, around 8:30 or 9:00, “What do we do next?” One of my team members remembered an amazing photo of the president and first lady hugging at the president’s last campaign rally in Des Moines. It’s this really beautiful photo at night — the only thing was that Michelle was facing forward and the president was facing away from the camera, So my boss, Teddy Goff, made the very good point that we should see the president’s face. I remembered that our campaign photographer had taken a series of really great hug photographs at another Iowa rally, in the summer, and I went to our photo editor and she was like “Yes!” She found the photo, I wrote a couple captions, we went with “Four more years,” they called Iowa, I hit post, and then I closed my laptop and we jetted to the victory party. Actually, none of us looked at how the posts were doing until I opened my laptop the next morning.
And, of course, it had exploded.
I don’t think anyone on the team had a conception that we would break every record ever, it was crazy. I think it was just a combination of the moment, and just kinda lucking into a photo that people loved that I think showed the emotion and the relief, and obviously I think everyone loves the president and the first lady together especially, so it was sort of a confluence of factors. But, uh, yeah. It worked out.
View post 2,815 notes -
Grant Cornett for TIME
From Herman Cain’s cowboy hat and Stephen Colbert’s super-PAC fun pack to binders, Big Bird and bayonets, objects became the visual sound bites of the 2012 election. TIME presents 100 objects that made their debut during this election.
Pictured: Joe Biden Teeth — Since 2008, comedian Jason Sudeikis has played Joe Biden on Saturday Night Live. Sudeikis has been helped by this prosthesis, molded on his teeth and painted by makeup artist Louie Zakarian to match the Vice President’s smile. Biden—or Big Daddy Joe, as he’s called on SNL—likes to talk, and his gaffes (when he jumped the gun on the President’s supportive statement about same-sex marriage, for example) have been a trademark of his time in office. His teeth, however, took the spotlight after the VP debate on Oct. 11, when he smirked and laughed so often at Paul Ryan that his smile took on, in critics’ eyes, an aggressive, condescending life of its own.
This is great.
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In Storm-Ravaged Rockaways, Voting — Against All Odds
At 6:45 a.m. the line was already a dozen deep as the polling super site in Far Rockaway, Queens, struggled to open. The gas for the electric generators, lights and six port-a-johns provided by FEMA had been stolen overnight. Poll workers fumbled with flashlights to set up the polling stations.
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