Alma Guillermoprieto profiles El Salvador and its struggles with the “maras” in this piece from the New York Review of Books. The maras are “ferocious gangs that are El Salvador’s own contribution to the drug trade and the world of transnational crime in which it takes place,” as Guillermoprieto puts it. There’s the Mara Salvatrucha, the better known of the maras with its shortened nickname, MS-13, whose horrifying crimes here in the U.S. has put it on the law enforcement’s radar, as well as its powerful rival, Barrio 18, also known to U.S. authorities. Guillermoprieto, who has reported from Latin America for 30 years, peals back the curtain on post-civil war life in El Salvador to posit a possible explanation for the growth of the ‘maras’ over the past 30 years. Here’s an excerpt:

“There have been riots and also peaceful strikes by prisoners demanding better conditions, but the men are not high on anyone’s list of priorities. It’s just one of the many catastrophes in El Salvador, where, twenty years after the war that was supposed to save the country—from capitalism or from communism, depending on which side you were on—there are half a million single parents, mostly women, trying to bring up their children safely. The government is bankrupt, the poverty rate is 38 percent, and the economy, which rose slightly from a negative growth rate of–2 percent in 2008 thanks only to an increase in the price of coffee, seems paralyzed.

It would be easy to lay the blame for this social and economic disaster exclusively at the feet of the party founded by Roberto D’Aubuisson—the Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA, by its Spanish initials—which governed the country with evident if not single-minded interest in the well-being of the wealthy for twenty years after the peace accords were signed in 1992. (In 2009, Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the party founded by the former guerrillas, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, won the presidency.) But there is also the enormous fact of the war itself: the demolished roads and other infrastructure, the collapse of rural society, the rise of urban slums peopled by campesinos fleeing those remote areas of the country that were the war’s principal staging ground, the systematic practice of ruthlessness, the drastic increase in single-parent families, the loss of an educated elite, the huge stockpile of leftover weapons no one kept track of. None of this, however, adds up to a complete or satisfactory explanation for the proliferation of the maras, currently estimated to number some 25,000 members at large, with another 9,000 in prison.”