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Counterinsurgency, Prisons, and Gang Truces in Los Angeles and El Salvador 1979-2017 Sarah L

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Counterinsurgency, Prisons, and Gang Truces in Los Angeles and El Salvador 1979-2017 Sarah L University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 4-15-2018 Reckoning with Violence: Counterinsurgency, Prisons, and Gang Truces in Los Angeles and El Salvador 1979-2017 Sarah L. Knopp Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Knopp, Sarah L.. "Reckoning with Violence: Counterinsurgency, Prisons, and Gang Truces in Los Angeles and El Salvador 1979-2017." (2018). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hist_etds/220 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in History ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Sarah L. Knopp____________________________________________________________ Candidate History____________________________________________________________________ Department This thesis is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the thesis committee: Dr. Kimberly Gauderman, Chairperson Dr. Barbara Reyes Dr. Larry D. Ball ii Reckoning with Violence: Counterinsurgency, Prisons, and Gang Truces in Los Angeles and El Salvador 1979-2017 by Sarah L. Knopp Bachelor of Arts in Political Science University of Wisconsin-Madison 1999 THESIS Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts of History The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May 2018 iii Acknowledgements I am profoundly grateful to the people of El Salvador who have battled to make their vision of justice and democratic control of resources a material reality in the Americas. I am grateful that they sent ambassadors and spokespeople to the United States to lecture, organize, tour, and analyze. Without them, I am not sure visions of socialism and a world worth fighting for would have survived the grey dawn of neoliberalism here in the North. I had the opportunity to teach many of the grandchildren of those who fled El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s, and to have lived in Salvadoran neighborhoods in Los Angeles. It was during my time teaching high school world history in Los Angeles Unified School District that I became familiar with gang peace activists. I discovered these peacemakers while working as an activist, alongside my students and compañeros, to stop the execution of Stan Tookie Williams. Tookie was a former Crip who, from prison, worked to negotiate gang peace agreements and wrote children’s books. He was executed by the state of California in 2005. I spent many nights at Bethel AME church on Western and 79th in South Central Los Angeles, down the street from the school where I taught, working in the movement to stop his execution. There I learned that there was a long legacy of gang peace negotiations, going back to at least 1991 (and arguably to the 1960s) on which we were building. Unfortunately we were unable to stop Tookie’s execution. The ideas of Alex Sanchez of Homies Unidos, a gang peace organization, have been crucial in the formation of this thesis. Specifically, he talked about his vision of “organic solutions” every time that I spoke with him. The gang truce in Los Angeles was one such example of a grassroots, homegrown, American solution. Wondering about organic solutions to violence guided the inquiry behind this work. I am also grateful to Alex for the work of the organization that he serves for the work that it (and he) has done in an attempt to bring peace, safety, and healing to Los Angeles and El Salvador. Another organization that played a crucial role in this work is the Southern California Library across the street from Manual Arts High School in South Central Los Angeles. For over fifty years, it has been chronicling the history of struggle in Los Angeles. The collection there honors and preserves the papers of Angelino activists who played a role in resisting connected issues like U.S. funding iv for the wars in Central America and the rise of the mass incarceration state in California. In fact, many of the same activists worked on both of these issues and acted in solidarity with each other. Michele Welsing and Yusef Omowale were insightful, infinitely helpful, and full of interesting ideas. They often pointed me in directions that I would not have thought of. The Library provides an invaluable service to subaltern Los Angeles. Further, I owe a debt of gratitude to the many people that made it possible for me to take the road less travelled, and to write a thesis for partial satisfaction of the requirements for a Masters Degree in History. The History department at the University of New Mexico is deeply committed to passing best historical practices to the next generation of scholars. Larry Durwood Ball is an amazing and meticulous editor. He also taught me to start and finish any historical discussion by interrogating the evidence used to support an argument, whether my own or that of another scholar. Barbara Reyes and I share an orientation on transnational frameworks, and on making scholarship matter to the quest for social justice. It was she who helped to frame this work by asking, early on, “where do prisons fit into this narrative?” And lastly, I am immensely grateful to Kimberly Gauderman, the chair of my committee, for the depth of her knowledge on the historical background that shapes the current context in Central America. She sets an amazing example of a scholar who “repurposes” her academic knowledge to serve the cause of justice and truth by serving as an expert witness in asylum cases. She, too, is informed by the quest for equality, and solidarity with Central America played no small part in her intellectual formation. Dr. Gauderman devoted endless precious hours to making sure that the specific details of this thesis were correct and informed by evidence. From her I learned the importance and usefulness of cross-checking the primary source material of other authors. I have learned how to write by working with these amazing scholars. Lastly, I am very fortunate to work for an organization that supported this thesis. Lannan Foundation, while I was a Program Director, encouraged me to finish this degree. They supported me with tuition fees, but much more importantly, they gave me the time and space to think and write. I work with people for whom intellectual curiosity, critical inquiry, and beautiful expression of ideas are valued above all else. The Lannan family learned from Eduardo Galeano and from native peoples across the Americas the meaning of the word solidarity. Many non-profit foundations are guided by a charitable spirit, but ours is guided by the principle of solidarity in people’s collective struggles for self-emancipation. I am fortunate to have the job that I do. v Reckoning with Violence: Counterinsurgency, Prisons, and Gang Truces in Los Angeles and El Salvador 1979-2017 Sarah L. Knopp Bachelor of Arts in Political Science University of Wisconsin-Madison 1999 Master of Arts in History University of New Mexico, Albuquerque 2018 ABSTRACT Mara Salvatrucha is a street gang that developed organizationally in California's prisons in the 1980s and was exported to El Salvador beginning in 1992. Convicted felons were deported to their native El Salvador just as the Peace Accords brought an end to the twelve-year civil war. Most of these convicted felons had come to California as children during the civil war, and many had been present for the seminal gang truce in Los Angeles in 1992 and 1993. Some of those same gang members were also present during the gang truce negotiated in El Salvador in 2012. The latter truce was less successful because of the different historical circumstances. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Reckoning with Violence: Counterinsurgency, Prisons, and Gang Truces in Los Angeles and El Salvador 1979-2017 ...................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Historical Background 1770-1970: Mass Incarceration and Counterinsurgency in Los Angeles and El Salvador ........................................................................................................12 Chapter Two: The Salvadoran Civil War, Street Gangs, and the Birth of Mara Salvatrucha in Los Angeles, 1979-1992 ..............................................................................................................42 Chapter Three: Policing Counterinsurgency, Gang Transformation, and the Gang Truce in Los Angeles, 1985-1996 .............................................................................................................................62 Chapter Four: Elite Transnationalism and Violence: State-to-State Collaboration, 2003-2016 ................................................................................................................................................88 Chapter Five: Two truces in El Salvador; the Impact of Prisons on Gang Structure and Organization, 1992-2016 .............................................................................................................................107 Conclusion: Reckoning with Violence ..................................................................................135 Primary Source List ...............................................................................................................143 Bibliography .........................................................................................................................149
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