Review of Elana Zilberg's Spaces of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis...

I recently had a review of Elana Zilberg's Spaces of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis Between Los Angeles and San Salvador published in The Latin Americanist. In her book, Zilberg explains how the MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs became the objects of local, national, and international concern, eventually coming to symbolize the “gang crime-terrorism continuum” following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Zilberg argues that gang abatement strategies adopted in the United States during the 1990s that emphasized mass incarceration and increased deportation contributed to escalating gang violence in both the United States and El Salvador. These policies have actively promoted transnational linkages between gangs that had not existed prior to the strong fist approach. Following the 1992 Los Angeles riots, thousands of young men and women who had been raised in the United States were forcibly repatriated to El Salvador, a country with which they were barely familiar. They were sent back to a government which saw most, if not all of them, as criminal deportees who were a threat to society.

El Salvador was just emerging from a bloody civil war where their return would “combine with the flourishing of organized crime, the incomplete disarmament of a highly militarized society, the reemergence of the extralegal social cleansing practices of the death squads of the 1980s, the uneven progress of police and of judicial reforms, and finally, the adaptation of the zero-tolerance abatement strategies used in the United States. Together these elements would provide fertile ground for the reproduction and articulation of the patterns of violence of both El Salvador and the United States” (152).

It's a good book and I recommend it.