From Exodus to Exitus Causes of post-war violence in El ... - eDoc

8 Heidrun Zinecker
which generally amounts to murder. Police agents would be detected at this point, if not
earlier. Women are no longer admitted into this mara. Gang members are now forbidden
from taking drugs, with the exception of marijuana. Theft not sanctioned by the leader is
punished. The general meetings of the clicas, the mirins (now known as misas), are now
held only by telephone. The casas “destroyer”, or safe houses used by mareros for meetings
and sometime also to live in, have been abandoned. Nowadays, it is mainly penal institutions
that are used specifically to provide structure and potential recruits to the maras.
Violence has an even greater role to play for the maras than it did before, and is exercised
increasingly forcefully on the civilian population as well. All these changes have made the
maras more disciplined and flexible in the face of government strategy.
Other than might generally be expected, mareros do not come either from the poorest
strata of society or the most marginalized parts of town, instead they come from working
class or lower middle class backgrounds, i.e. from sections of the population classified as
the second and third income quintiles (from the bottom). They are not street children;
they generally have a home, located in urban barrios with a high population density and
most commonly in a rented house with a large number of inhabitants. Mareros are also
not war orphans. They do not come from asocial families. Their parents have an income,
and are often being sent remittances from family members working abroad. Mareros are
educated to a higher level than the average Salvadoran. Mareros either left school early, or
were unemployed or working in insecure part-time jobs before they joined the maras (Carranza
2006). 75 % of mareros are unemployed. When asked what they would most like to
have, the majority of mareros questioned replied: work (Homies Unidos 1998: 39, 113).
3. Model
The following causal analysis of Salvadoran post-war violence – and also, although not exclusively,
of the maras – adopts an aetiological sociostructural (macro-)approach as used in
criminology. This approach is based on the hypothesis that there are “conspicuous” societal
structures which, in certain life situations, exert a social pressure leading to deviant behaviour
(Albrecht 2002: 31–33, 37–39). In the context of this theory I have elsewhere differentiated
between enabling and preventive structures (Zinecker 2006 a: 20-39). Enabling structures
offer fertile ground for (violent) crime. Preventive structures can act to ensure that
there are no outbreaks of (violent) crime even where enabling structures are present.
Where preventive structures are absent or poorly functioning, this makes the effects of the
enabling structures stronger. I make the claim here that, in cases of intensive violence, well
developed enabling structures are working hand in hand with poorly functioning preventive
structures.
Enabling structures can be political and economic in nature. A political enabling structure
which particularly benefits violence (and not only war) is semi-democracy, which I
describe as regime hybridity, because this term is more precise and gives a better indication
that the regimes in question, while not authoritarian, are also simply not democratic.