El Salvador: two cheers for democracy?

Carr, Matthew

doi:10.1177/030639689403600101

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In the early 1990s, thousands of youth were in the streets begging for food and money. 52 In 1991, 33 per cent of the urban population lived in extreme poverty, while another third lived in moderate poverty. In rural El Salvador, the poverty rate was 71 per cent.…”

Section: The Production Of a Transnational Moral Panicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transnational moral panic: neoliberalism and the spectre of MS-13

Osuna¹

2020

Race & Class

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Since the election of Donald Trump, MS-13, the Salvadoran street gang, has become a national security and foreign policy concern for his administration. Due to the violence of street gangs like MS-13, El Salvador has become a country with the highest rates of homicides, alongside forced migration. Like much of the mainstream media and personal accounts of asylum seekers, the arguments about violence emerging from street gangs in El Salvador from the Trump administration are based on actual material conditions, but what is often missing are the root causes. This article argues that the production of a moral panic over MS-13 has been transnationalised between the United States and El Salvador to displace the contradictions of global capitalism in El Salvador to a local and deported relative surplus population. It argues that the spectre of MS-13 in El Salvador and throughout US cities must be placed within the limits of a Salvadoran revolution, the insertion of the Salvadoran political economy into the global capitalist system in the 1980s, the development of a neoliberal Salvadoran state, and the US sponsoring of law-and-order polices in the country as a response to regulate a relative surplus population.

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Section: The Production Of a Transnational Moral Panicmentioning

confidence: 99%