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

From Exodus to Exitus 13
El Salvador are the remittances, which are income sent home to their families by migrants
working abroad. In El Salvador in particular, remittances are hardly ever saved. Remittances
not only fundamentally reduce investments (Cáceres/Saca 2006: 881), but also the
supply and, at least in the longer term, because the attraction is no longer there to create
employment by investing locally, demand for employment in the Salvadorans own country.
Remittances support oligarchic structures, because they make it possible to be a consumer
without working or producing anything. In the following section I will show that in El Salvador
there is a causal connection between the high levels of migration and remittances –
the exodus and its economic consequences – and high homicide rates – the “exitus”.
4.2 Specific, highly significant causes of violence in El Salvador
4.2.1 Migration and remittances
In a first step I shall demonstrate the exceptionally high volume of Salvadoran migration
to the USA. Secondly, I shall illustrate the extremely high value of remittances within the
(socio)economic structure of El Salvador and the implication of this for the reduced importance
of local production and labour. A third step will confirm the particularly high
volume of remittances in El Salvador with the corresponding economic and social implications
in comparison with the rest of Central America. If this is successful, then it goes to
prove that there is a correlation – as El Salvador is also the country with the highest levels
of violence in the region. This correlation will then be confirmed in a fourth step using
comparison within El Salvador itself (between the departments and municipalities). A
fifth step will finally derive causality from these correlations.
Step 1: The exceptionally high volume of migration by Salvadorans to the USA –
in comparison with the rest of Central America
In 2004 2.5 million inhabitants emigrated from El Salvador, i.e. 20 % of the population
and almost seven times the global average, primarily to the USA and then to Mexico. This
is a real exodus. 90 % of these migrants are younger than 35 and 70 % younger than 26.
Viewed statistically, the Salvadoran migrants tend to be male rather than female, aged
between 18 and 44 years old, and from rural areas, with a slightly higher standard of living
and education than the average for those who do not migrate (Andrade-Eekhoff 2003:
16). Neither the two top quintiles nor the bottom quintile of the population migrate, but
instead the second and third quintiles from the lowest, who are better off in El Salvador
than their counterparts in Honduras and Nicaragua, but worse off than those in the USA.
In the USA the Salvadorans represented the largest number of Central American residents
with 1,201,002 in 2004. This is three times as many Salvadorans as Guatemalans and
Hondurans, and almost four times as many as Nicaraguans. 42 % of the Salvadorans who
migrated to the USA went to California. More than two thirds of them ended up in Los
Angeles, where the American mara street gangs had their origins. If one compares the
number of people deported from the USA, the rate for Nicaraguans is only a tenth of that
for Salvadorans and Hondurans, as illustrated in Figure 3.