The Surreal Reasons Girls Are Disappearing in El Salvador: #15Girls

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/32792-the-surreal-reasons-girls-are-disappearing-in-el-salvador-15girls

If you were standing at the U.S.-Mexico border two summers ago during the so-called "surge" of unaccompanied minors trying to come to the U.S., you would have seen thousands of young girls from El Salvador.

If you had asked them why they came, they would have told you the answer is simple: gangs. Back in the 1980s, during El Salvador's civil war, many people migrated from El Salvador to the U.S. On the streets of cities like Los Angeles, they formed gangs.

Then, many of them were deported back to El Salvador. And they brought the gangs with them. Now, El Salvador's two main gangs — Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18 — control much of the country. There is so much violence in El Salvador that someone dies there, on average, every hour.

Much of the killing is over turf or revenge. And sometimes people are just caught in the middle. Many times, those caught in the middle are girls.

We went to El Salvador to talk to these girls, to understand why they would want to make the perilous journey to the U.S., why they would ever want to leave home.

This is the story of four of those girls. In most cases, we're not using last names; to bring any attention to them would make them a target of the gangs.

[Octafish]

1. Heartbreaking.

Victims of the War on communism, socialism, democracy...Dulles Brothers through Reagan and two Bush administrations.

Those in power in the US, El Salvador and other nations who look and turn away are heartless.

[Zorra]

2. +1 nt

[Octafish]

3. This is the real immigration problem: Organized violence against children.

GOP capitalizes politically on their own unlimited hypocrisy. And the turds and toadies of the US press corpse go along, slurping up what their masters dish out.

BTW: The OP should have 1,000 recs.

[MisterP]

4. it was so bad that a 60s Boy Scout troop became a death squad the next generation

the Salvadoran elites didn't think too highly of their US patrons, neither: they were irked that we had these things called "elections" where policy could change somewhat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizaci%C3%B3n_Democr%C3%A1tica_Nacionalista