Neoliberal Securityscapes Introduction

neoliberal seCuriTysCapes introDuction It’s the most violent gang in America . It has 10,000 foot soldiers in the U.S., spreading its brutal ways across 33 states . And now it’s going international, fueled by migration across the Western hemisphere, leaving its bloody mark from Central [America] to the American heartland . Police in a half- dozen countries struggle to crack its code and decipher its methods. —World’s Most Dangerous Gang (documentary) On February 5, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales of the United States and President Elias Antonio Saca of El Salvador announced a new collabora- tive effort to combat the gang La Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and the 18th Street Gang. This effort, named the Transnational Anti- Gang Unit (TAG), would be made up of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of State, and El Salvador’s National Civil Police, along with an “embedded” prosecu- tor from the Salvadoran attorney general’s office. It would also facilitate the efficient implementation of CAFÉ (the Central American Fingerprinting Ex- ploitation initiative). The day after TAG was announced, the chiefs of police for El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize met in Los Angeles to draft a proposal for the third annual International Gang Conference in San Salva- dor. The same year, the federal Interagency Task Force on Gangs (comprised of governmental officials from five agencies including the departments of Homeland Security, Defense, State, and Justice, together with the United Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/646089/9780822392804-001.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 08 November 2020 States Agency for International Development) launched its program titled United States Strategy to Combat Criminal Gangs from Mexico and Cen- tral America. These transnational security agreements derive their logic and form from the premise that these gangs operate as sophisticated transnational criminal organizations with elaborate communication systems and networks that span Central America, Mexico, and the United States (if not beyond). In this book I examine the current obsession with the so- called transnational youth gang crisis from the vantage point of the political history that constitutes the very ground that obsession works to obscure: namely, the ongoing participation of the United States in the production and reproduc- tion of violence in El Salvador. During the twelve- year Salvadoran civil war, intervention by the United States thoroughly penetrated and transformed Salvadoran society and was crucial to the Salvadoran government’s ability to stave off a triumph by the leftist revolutionary force the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The strategy used by the United States of low- intensity warfare, developed in the wake of the defeats in Korea and Vietnam, involved a counterinsurgency war by Salvadoran proxy under the guidance of the U.S. military rather than through the direct introduction of troops.1 In the postwar period, the United States exported and extended to El Salvador its War on Crime, first through the deportation of immigrant youth associated with gangs based in Los Angeles, then through the exportation of its zero- tolerance policing strategies, and now through the development of transnational security agreements.2 In this sense, I consider the contemporary gang crisis to be a product of a long- standing regional political struc- ture and pattern between Latin America and the United States—or in the words of Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríquez, the “U.S.–Latin American interstate regime.”3 The circulation of Salvadoran (immigrant) youth gangs and of U.S. zero- tolerance policing models between the United States and El Salvador is embedded within dense transnational networks of communication and uneven flows of labor, goods, money, information, and ideas between the United States and El Salvador. It is, therefore, part and parcel of the underlying cir- culatory patterns of globalization in which the United States and El Salvador are enmeshed “from above” (the state, corporations, multilateral agencies and international nongovernmental organizations) and “from below” (immigrants and their families, small- time tradesmen and women, and grass- roots organizations and activists). So while Salvadoran immigration and 2 inTroduCTion Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/646089/9780822392804-001.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 08 November 2020 gangs are arguably at the heart of this book, neither gangs nor immigrants are ultimately the objects of this study. Rather, they are the lens through which I examine the production of and contestation over the contemporary manifestation of long- standing “securityscapes” through and in which both the United States and El Salvador are linked and complicit. The concept of the securityscape was first introduced by Hugh Gusterson as a “polite corrective” to Arjun Appadurai’s “globalscapes.” The term has previously been deployed by anthropologists to argue that national security policy is also an important part of transnational or local life, and to bring the profound influence of militarism on our lives back into focus.4 I extend this concept beyond the overtly militaristic to include the patterns of circulation that result from the effort of states to police and control the mobility of sub- jects considered to be dangerous, in this case gang youth and immigrants. The securityscape here is the transnational space produced at the nexus of youth, migration, and violence between the United States and El Salvador. This expanded concept offers a way of understanding the spatial patterns of policing, immigration, deportation, and reentry into the United States that connect Los Angeles and its Salvadoran immigrant community to El Salva- dor, and to see how gangs and immigrants have been woven into these ongoing entanglements. A Dialectics of (Im)Mobility My focus on the policing, incarceration, and deportation of Salvadoran (immigrant) youth is primarily concerned with the “friction” in these transnational flows.5 The figures of transnational gangs and transnational police and the securityscapes in which they are embedded push us beyond that now much maligned metaphor of mobility, “flows,” and its tendency to obscure, naturalize, harmonize, homogenize, and as such serve as the official legiti- mizing language of globalization.6 Clearly, the deportee reveals that these flows are not unimpeded, and that globalization is better characterized by a dialectic of mobility and immobility. While my argument does draw from and elevate the phenomenon of mobility, it does not focus on the categories of mobility routinely used to define a globalizing world—namely, the flows of finance, technology, media, and goods. Instead, it traces the effects that ensue from judicial, immigration, urban development, and penal technologies; how discourses, institutional forms, and practices themselves migrate between countries; and how fea- neoliberal seCuriTysCapes 3 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/646089/9780822392804-001.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user on 08 November 2020 tures of the security state are imbricated with political subjectivities and spatializing practices. But policing and deportation also work in the obverse direction, and this is one of my key arguments. These securityscapes, thought to entrench the nation- state and to arrest flows, also enable the globalization of violence, in this case through the formation of transnational gangs and the globalization of U.S.- style zero- tolerance policing strategies. In other words, securityscapes not only constrain but also fuel mobility—legal and illegal, licit and illicit.7 Deportation as a disciplinary practice can act very differ- ently, therefore, from its overt logic. Deportation is configured as a preemi- nent means of defending, enacting, and thus verifying state sovereignty, by defining who is disposable and who is not and rendering them immobile.8 But my ethnographic rendering of deportation through a study of the experi- ences of a specific category of criminal deportee suggests otherwise. When a deportee is forcibly repatriated after incarceration, or when Salvadoran youth are made refugees by the combined effects of gang and state violence in El Salvador, these “flows” are induced by nationalism and the entrench- ment or policing of national boundaries. This study is, therefore, concerned with the mobilities induced by such friction and the ways in which security policies and neoliberal trade agreements both rest upon and provoke flows across borders. This view in turn asks us to examine the relationship between neoliberalism and security policies. Neoliberalism While rooted in a longer history of United States–Latin American security re- lations, the transnational gang crisis and the securityscapes that produced it emerged during a period characterized by the consolidation of “neoliberal” structural adjustment programs in both countries.9 Neoliberalism is a multi- valent term used variously to describe an economic model, a political philosophy, and a mode of personal conduct.10 As an economic model, neoliberalism promotes free trade, deregulation of the market, and the privatization of functions previously carried out by the state. As a political philosophy, it promotes the freedom of the individual over the power of the state, and pri- vate goods over public goods.11 As a discipline or mode

Load more