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gang violence
A Warning From El Salvador
While President Trump is ever more desperately focused on the Middle East, maybe some of us should still be focusing on El Salvador, where President Bukele (elected democratically like Donald Trump) is following the same strongman handbook that Trump has been using.
May 06, 2026
Recently, I had the opportunity to stand in a friend’s kitchen eating pupusas, the Salvadoran national food, while listening to an update on conditions in Central America from Cristosal’s Noah Bullock. Cristosal is a key Central American human rights organization engaged in legal advocacy, forensic investigation, and amplifying the voices of people who are experiencing—and resisting—repression in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Noah offered considerable detail on the conditions in those countries, but his basic message for us living so far away was simple: No matter how dark the road gets, we keep on walking. We know the sun will rise again.
So, while most of the world (and the media) is all too reasonably focused on the ever-evolving, increasingly disastrous conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, I found myself instead thinking about the countries to our south.
Benign Neglect?
During the years when our main political work involved opposing US aggression in Latin America, my partner and I used to believe that the whole region would be better off if the imperial eye were focused on other parts of the world. Most Central American countries may be poor, but they’re more likely to prosper during times when Washington isn’t treating them as backyard gold mines, or pawns in a global conflict.
Take Nicaragua, for example. US Marines first occupied that country early in the last century and, by the 1920s, had helped establish a dynastic dictatorship there that would last until 1979. During that time, US companies profited endlessly from various forms of resource extraction, including the gold of the Las Minas (The Mines) area, comprised of the towns of Siuna, Rosita, and Bonanza; lumber from various parts of the country; and palm oil from its Atlantic coast.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States used its Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union as a pretext for directly meddling in the lives and politics of countries across Latin America. Bogus threats of a communist takeover, for instance, excused the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Carlos Castillo Armas was then installed as president, the first of a long series of dictators, much to the satisfaction of that US commercial giant, the United Fruit Company, which proceeded to treat the country as its own private orchard.
When Chilean President Salvador Allende supported nationalizing his country’s two biggest copper mines, their US owners benefited from a 1973 CIA-backed coup that overthrew him. The newly installed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet then launched a campaign of terror, torture, disappearances, and the murder of tens of thousands of Chileans over his 17 years in power.
Similarly, the United States supported right-wing, repressive governments in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, and Uruguay during those Cold War decades. However, beginning with the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, most of those countries managed to rid themselves of their repressive rulers in the last two decades of the 20th century.
After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States began to push Latin America aside and focus elsewhere, sending its “Harvard boys” off to Russia and points east. Like the Chicago Boys of the 1970s, who remade Chile’s economy as a model of laissez-faire capitalism, those young Harvard economists sought to offer similar “benefits” to the benighted former Soviet Socialist Republics. Their efforts led to a fire sale of state industries and birthed a class of oligarchs whose successors still rule Russia and various former Soviet republics.
Then, beginning with the first Gulf War against Iraq (also in 1991), and especially after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, the US acquired a new, if amorphous, “enemy” and launched the Global War on Terror. Washington’s geographic focus then turned to Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa, as the US began what would prove to be disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now (with as-yet-unknown consequences) in Iran. Meanwhile, Latin America experienced a bit of what (in entirely different circumstances) President Richard Nixon’s adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan once termed “benign neglect.”
An Evil Harvest
As it happened, however, during the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change. While Mexico’s gangs are largely homegrown affairs, those in El Salvador began as US imports. During the dictatorships and guerrilla wars of the 1980s, numerous Salvadorans, fleeing government repression, sought asylum in the United States. Thousands would settle in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Once the war in El Salvador ended in 1992, many of them headed home again, some bringing the gang culture of California with them, including Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) and the 18th Street gang, both from the Los Angeles area. I got a glimpse of that form of migration in 1993, when I spent a few days in El Salvador. On a wall in the capital city, San Salvador, I saw the tag of a gang from my very own neighborhood in San Francisco, the XXII-B, or “Twenty-two-B” crew. That stood for the corner of 22nd and Bryant streets, the very corner of San Francisco where my partner and I were then living. We’d watched them grow up on our block. They were never a big deal in San Francisco, nor did they really become so in El Salvador, unlike MS-13 and the 18th Street crew.
As for climate change, we obviously can’t pin all the blame for that on the United States alone, although our current president is doing his best to drive us in that direction. (Fond as he is of fake awards, perhaps someday he’ll get one for the World’s Most Devastating Climate Changer.) Until 20 years ago, however, the US was the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and, though now leapfrogged by China, it remains historically by far the world’s largest user of fossil fuels.
One result of the intensifying global climate emergency is a series of devastating droughts in Central America, which lies within the “Dry Corridor,” running from southern Mexico to Panama. That region, inhabited in many places by subsistence farmers, has historically experienced cycles of wetness and drought, corresponding in part to the El Niño oscillation, which periodically warms the Pacific Ocean’s surface, bringing fierce rainfall to the West Coast of the United States and severe drought further south. In recent decades, climate change has been lengthening the drought periods and multiplying their effects. Increased heat reduces soil moisture, while rising seas contaminate estuaries and aquifers, leaving less water available for farming. A new round of droughts began in 2014 and, in 2018 and 2019, farmers across Central America would lose 75% to 100% of their main food crop, corn.
Worse yet, on our ever-hotter planet in this era of ever-more-intense climate change, the strongest El Niño in 140 years is predicted to begin later this year.
It turns out that not only has the US historically treated Central America terribly, but its neglect of the region in our era has hardly been benign. Under such circumstances, it shouldn’t be a surprise that, by the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the combination of US “exports”—murderous gang violence, political repression, and drought—had led record numbers of migrants to our southern border, desperately seeking asylum in this country. And that brings us to Donald J. Trump, and his new best friend, Nayib Bukele.
In El Salvador: Trump’s BFF Nayib Bukele
President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.” He’s young, handsome, and extremely popular in his own country. Originally a man of the left, while mayor of the capital, San Salvador, from 2015 to 2019, he succeeded in reducing the murder rate there not through repression but by mending the “tejido social”—the social fabric. He rebuilt the city center, providing streetlights and surveillance cameras, thereby creating a safer central area for street vendors. He also opened up educational and recreational opportunities for the city’s youth. In addition, he made cosmetic changes symbolic of progressive politics like renaming Roberto D’Aubuisson Street, so-called in honor of a death-squad leader.
Bukele claimed that such measures alone had produced a genuine decline in the city’s disturbing murder rate. But investigations have since shown that he also followed in the footsteps of previous Salvadoran presidents by making pacts with the gangs to reduce visible violence. (For an exploration of Bukele’s agreements with them and later with Donald Trump, don’t miss the PBS Frontline film on the subject.)
In his eagerness to play the strongman, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator—and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
His 2019 election to the presidency began his full-scale shift to the right and toward what has now become full-on authoritarian rule. In 2020, he ordered soldiers into El Salvador’s congress to force it to accept a $103 million loan from the United States to underwrite the US-El Salvador anti-gang Plan Vulcan, which involved the massive incarceration of accused gang members (along with many innocents). At the same time, Bukele made an agreement with MS-13 to spare some of its key members in return for a reduction in the capital’s murder rate, which did indeed drop steeply during the first years of his first term as president. But in 2022, some MS-13 members who were supposed to be protected were mistakenly caught up in a sweep and, in retribution, murders spiked once again. As Cristosal’s Noah Bullock explained in that talk I listened to recently, the gangs have the power to dial visible street violence up or down. They use violence as a way to communicate with both El Salvador’s citizenry and its government. A display of corpses on street corners is a way of sending messages to both of them.
In 2021, having captured a majority in the legislature, President Bukele took control of the judiciary, too, by ordering an increasingly supine congress to oust the five members of the Supreme Court of Justice. Then, following a landslide reelection victory in 2024, he rewrote the constitution so that he could serve consecutive terms as president ad infinitum, while also building the now-notorious CECOT “terrorism confinement” prison, where torture and sexual abuse have become daily occurrences.
When Bukele met with President Trump at the White House during his first term, it was clear that the admiration was mutual. Trump could, of course, only dream of exercising the kind of control Bukele by then wielded over all three branches of the Salvadoran government. In 2025, after Trump’s second inauguration, he and Bukele met again and struck a deal: The United States would pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison 250 mostly Venezuelan immigrants to this country in the CECOT mega prison. The transfer of those men (over the objections of a US federal judge) was chronicled in carefully-produced videos of Salvadoran soldiers frog-marching their shackled captives into CECOT, pushing them to their knees, and forcibly shaving their heads.
As investigations would later reveal, those men were not, as claimed by the Trump administration, members of Venezuela’s quasi-gang Tren de Aragua, but ordinary citizens caught up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups. Except for a few Salvadoran citizens, who remain in CECOT to this day, they were eventually freed. Those who were released, however, described weeks of torture and sexual abuse in, among other places, a CBS "60 Minutes" report that was, for a time, spiked by the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Trump admirer Bari Weiss.
In truth, though, $6 million was chump change to a Salvadoran government used to hundreds of millions of dollars of largesse from Washington. In this case, however, Bukele got something he wanted a lot more than money. The US was holding a group of nine extradited MS-13 leaders, and MS-13 wanted them returned to El Salvador. Hoping to keep the retributive killing in his country down, Bukele wanted them back, too. There was, as The Washington Post reported in October 2025, only one problem: Some of those prisoners were US informants, who had assisted the FBI in disrupting MS-13 activity in this country. Federal law prohibited turning them over to El Salvador, but Trump assigned Secretary of State Marco Rubio to work things out with Bukele. According to the Post:
To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.
Rubio’s extraordinary pledge illustrates the extent to which the Trump administration was willing to meet Bukele’s demands as it negotiated what would become one of the signature agreements of President Donald Trump’s early months in office.
Not surprisingly, repression against the press and civil society continues in El Salvador to this day. Many opposition journalists have had to flee the country. In May 2025, human rights attorney Ruth López Alfaro, head of Cristosal’s Anti-Corruption and Justice unit, was arrested. She remains in prison as of this writing. Shortly after that, Cristosal made the difficult decision to move its offices to Guatemala in order to continue its human rights work in greater safety.
Eyes on El Salvador
These days, it’s all eyes on Iran. But while President Trump is ever more desperately focused on the Middle East, maybe some of us should still be focusing on El Salvador. President Bukele (elected democratically like Donald Trump) is following the same strongman handbook that Trump has been using. The steps are the same for aspiring autocrats around the world, whether in Hungary, Russia, or the United States. Here are a few bits of guidance from that metaphorical manual:
- Attack the judiciary, as Trump & Company have done every time they get an adverse federal ruling;
- Capture the legislature and make it do your will, whatever gerrymandering or electoral finagling it takes in Trump’s case;
- Attack the press and civil society organizations, labeling them, as Trump has, “enemies of the people” and “domestic terrorists”; and
- Plan to rule indefinitely, as Trump repeatedly hints he’d like to do.
Oh, and it doesn’t matter how evil your partners in crime turn out to be, whether it’s Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, or Nayib Bukele. In his eagerness to play the strongman, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator—and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.
But, as Noah from Cristosal told our little gathering the other day, we have to keep on walking through the dark, knowing that every act of solidarity and resistance brings the dawn that much closer.
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Trump Admin Terminating TPS for Haitians Slammed as Potential 'Death Sentence'
"Ending TPS for Haitians is cruel and dangerous, and a continuation of President Trump's racist and anti-immigrant practices," said Amnesty International USA.
Jun 28, 2025
Outrage over U.S. President Donald Trump's administration terminating Temporary Protected Status for around half a million Haitians, despite dire conditions in the Caribbean country, continued to mount on Saturday, with critics decrying the decision as harsh and hazardous.
"This is not just cruel—it's state-sanctioned endangerment," declared Haitian Bridge Alliance executive director Guerline Jozef.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said that the Trump administration "just decided to send thousands of innocent people who have been living and working here legally into imminent danger in Haiti. Trump will tear apart families, rip up communities, and leave businesses and nursing homes shorthanded. And no one will be safer."
Warren's fellow Massachusetts Democrat, Sen. Ed Markey, also weighed in on social media Saturday, arguing that "the Trump administration knows Haiti is not safe. This is a callous and shameful political decision that will have devastating human consequences. Saving lives will always be in the national interest."
"This is a callous and shameful political decision that will have devastating human consequences."
TPS was initially granted after an earthquake hit Haiti in 2010. The designation expires August 3, and Trump's Department of Homeland Security announced in a Friday statement that the termination will be effective on September 2. A DHS spokesperson said that "this decision restores integrity in our immigration system and ensures that Temporary Protective Status is actually temporary."
"The environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home," the spokesperson added. "We encourage these individuals to take advantage of the department's resources in returning to Haiti, which can be arranged through the CBP Home app. Haitian nationals may pursue lawful status through other immigration benefit requests, if eligible."
While the DHS statement claims Haiti is safe, ignoring the deadly gang violence that has engulfed the country, the Trump administration's official notice has another focus, as some critics highlighted.
The notice states that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem "has determined that termination of TPS for Haiti is required because it is contrary to the national interest to permit Haitian nationals (or aliens having no nationality who last habitually resided in Haiti) to remain temporarily in the United States."
The Miami Herald reported that the U.S. Department of State currently "warns Americans not to travel to Haiti 'due to kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited healthcare.' This week, the agency also urged U.S. citizens to 'depart Haiti as soon as possible' or 'be prepared to shelter in place for an extended time period.'
According to the newspaper:
And just on Thursday, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau questioned the lack of action at the Organization of American States to address the crisis in Haiti.
"Armed gangs control the streets and ports of the capital city, and public order there has all but collapsed," he said. "While Haiti descends into chaos, the unfolding humanitarian, security, and governance crisis reverberates across the region."
The Miami Herald reached out to the State Department, asking the agency to explain its recommendations. A State Department spokesperson said the department does not comment on deliberations related to TPS determinations and referred questions to DHS.
"The administration is returning TPS to its original temporary intent," the spokesperson said. "TPS is a temporary protection, not a permanent benefit."
Noting the discrepancy between the two departments, Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.) denounced the termination as "a deliberate act of cruelty."
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said that "this is an act of policy violence that could literally be a death sentence. We should NOT be deporting anyone to a nation still dealing with a grave humanitarian crisis like Haiti. I stand with our Haitian neighbors and urge the Trump administration to reverse course."
Also urging the administration to "reverse this inhumane decision immediately," Amnesty International USA said that "ending TPS for Haitians is cruel and dangerous, and a continuation of President Trump's racist and anti-immigrant practices. Haitian TPS holders have built lives here—working, raising families, and contributing to their communities—all while fleeing unsafe situations in Haiti."
The termination came just two weeks after Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said that "at this time of untold suffering and fear, I reiterate my call to all states not to forcibly return anyone to Haiti, and to ensure that Haitians who have fled their country are protected against any kind of discrimination and stigmatization."
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'This Is Bad': Haiti Reportedly Hired Erik Prince to Help Kill Gang Members
"It's hard to overstate how badly wrong bringing in foreign mercenaries, such as those allied with Erik Prince, will likely go given the current security, social, and political dynamics," one journalist warned.
May 28, 2025
"What could possibly go wrong?"
That's a question New York Times readers sarcastically asked on social media Wednesday, after the newspaper reported that Erik Prince, founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater and a key ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, is working with Haiti's interim government "to conduct lethal operations against gangs that are terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital."
The newspaper noted that Prince declined to comment, and while Blackwater is now defunct, the former Navy SEAL "owns other private military entities." The reporting is based on unnamed American and Haitian officials and other security experts.
"Haiti's government has hired American contractors, including Mr. Prince, in recent months to work on a secret task force to deploy drones meant to kill gang members," who "have been killing civilians and seizing control of vast areas of territory" in the Caribbean country, the Times detailed.
"Mr. Prince's team has been operating the drones since March, but the authorities have yet to announce the death or capture of a single high-value target," according to the paper. Pierre Espérance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, said the drone attacks have killed more than 200 people.
American journalist Michael Deibert said on social media, "If this story is accurate, on what authority does Haiti's unelected, temporary interim [government] invite foreign forces into the country and by what means—with whose money—do they intend to pay them for their work there?"
The U.S. State Department has poured millions into Haiti's National Police but told the Times it is not paying Prince.
Deibert said that "as someone who has reported on Haiti's armed groups for 25 years, it's hard to overstate how badly wrong bringing in foreign mercenaries, such as those allied with Erik Prince, will likely go given the current security, social, and political dynamics in the country."
This is Bad. Like Capital B. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/u...
[image or embed]
— r: The Alignment Problem, Christian (@jacky.wtf) May 28, 2025 at 5:44 PM
Also weighing in on social media, Keanu Heydari, a history Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan, said: "A lot's going on here! A majority-Black nation, hollowed out by decades of foreign intervention, 'turning to' a white war profiteer to restore 'order.' That is not about logistics, this is about coloniality."
Heydari continued:
This isn't a story about drones and gangs. It's about how the world has made it structurally impossible for Haiti to govern itself—then offers mercenaries as a "solution." Haiti's sovereignty has been chipped away by debt, coups, U.N. missions, and now private warlords.
Why does Erik Prince show up where Black and Brown countries are in crisis? Because the global market rewards violence disguised as security, especially when it's sold by Westerners to postcolonial states. It's racial capitalism in full view.
The NYT missed the story: This isn't a desperate government making tough choices. It's a story of empire outsourcing control, where mercenaries profit from the very chaos empire helped produce. Haiti deserves justice, not occupation by other means.
The Times article follows The Economist's reporting earlier this month that Haiti's interim government, the Transitional Presidential Council, "is so desperate that it is exploring deals with private military contractors. It has been talking to Osprey Global Solutions, a firm based in North Carolina. The founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, visited Haiti in April to negotiate contracts to provide attack drones and training for an anti-gang task force. The council declined to comment."
In response to that paragraph in the May 7 article, Jake Johnston, director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti, also asked, "What could possibly go wrong?"
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Support the Human Rights Defenders Opposing Bukele’s State of Exception
Since the Salvadorian leader began his war on gangs, easily 25,000 (and likely many more) innocent people have been arrested and held under inhumane conditions, including extreme overcrowding.
Dec 10, 2024
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had a huge (though controversial) electoral victory in February 2024. But a small, stubborn legal movement is challenging his popular, indiscriminate war against gangs.
Even as the reduction of gang violence brings relief to many Salvadorans, many low-income people see their law-abiding neighbors being swept up arbitrarily in Bukele’s war. Understandably, they fear the so-called security forces.
During a November 2024 tour in the United States, attorneys Ingrid Escobar and Óscar Rosales of Socorro Jurídico Humanitario (SJH or Humanitarian Legal Aid ) were clear: They do not oppose the legal arrest and incarceration of gang members. But they’re resisting a suspension of constitutional rights that’s proven to be capricious in practice, cruel, dangerous, and deadly.
Institutionalizing Brutality
MS-13 killed 87 people during the last weekend of March 2022. At Bukele’s direction, the Legislative Assembly implemented Article 29, resulting in an extraordinary emergency measure called a “state of exception.” With it, “the rights to freedom of association and assembly, and privacy in communications, as well as some due process protections” were temporarily suspended. “Temporarily” has become long-term.
Of the 83,000 who have been detained during Bukele’s war against gangs, SJH estimates that only 40% are actually gang members, another 30% have collaborated with gangs (often unwillingly and sometimes under threat of death), and the remaining 30% (most of them also charged with collaboration) are actually innocent of any gang affiliation at all.
The denial of the presumption of innocence and a lack of access to legal representation and family are harrowing for detainees, as well as their loved ones.
So, easily 25,000 (and likely many more) innocent people have been arrested and held under inhumane conditions, including extreme overcrowding. Some released prisoners report 150 detainees sharing a single toilet, multiple people sharing a single bed, and those who can’t access a bed sleeping on floors with excrement.
In mid-November, Bukele stated that 8,000 state-of-exception prisoners had been released. But, according to Escobar, hundreds of release orders have been ignored. Former detainee Melvin Ortiz had received 24 such orders but was only released after his case was taken to the United Nations.
SJH claims there were at least 330 deaths in detention between April 27, 2022 and the end of October 2024. About half were due to violence, 40% to medical neglect, and 10% to terminal illness. Notably, 94% of those 330 decedents did not belong to gangs.
Considering the cumulative institutional brutality, these deaths aren’t surprising. Some released prisoners report “welcome beatings” by prison guards upon incarceration, extreme malnutrition, dehydration (prisoners receive four ounces of water to drink daily), torture, and a lack of medications or medical care.
There is psychological trauma, too. The denial of the presumption of innocence and a lack of access to legal representation and family are harrowing for detainees, as well as their loved ones.
Arbitrary and Political Arrests
One government official told Leslie Schuld, director of Centro de Intercambio y Solidaridad: “We are throwing out nets to capture gang members and then we will release the innocent people caught in the nets.” But statistics from the past 32 months show that, once imprisoned, it’s easier to become entangled in those metaphorical nets than be released.
In practice, anyone—but it’s usually people in low-income neighborhoods—can be arrested under the state of exception. SJH reports that police and military personnel arrest arbitrarily to fulfill quotas. Allegations against persons can be made anonymously—which has proven handy for unscrupulous people with grudges, unwelcome competitors, or even romantic rivals. People are arrested for their tattoos (one young man was detained for having a rose tattoo honoring his mother, Rosa), for haircuts or clothing deemed suspicious, for having an old criminal record, or for having been deported from the United States.
“The fear we have is that we’ll be the next ones he arrests despite never having broken the law.”
Sandra Leticia Hernández fits several of these categories. After serving a sentence in Ilopango prison, she returned to Isla El Espíritu Santo where she lived with her lesbian life partner. Business competitors resented her thriving motorcycle-taxi service as well as her sexual orientation. Sandra was arrested first—and then her partner, Eidi Roxana Claros de Zaldaña, was detained when she made inquiries about her. Sandra was released eventually, while Eidi remains incarcerated.
Young Salvadorans are deeply affected by state-of-exception injustices. Human Rights Watch has observed that many children in low-income barrios are doubly traumatized: once preyed upon by gangs, they are now targeted by the police and state security forces. Over 3,000 children have been arrested; detainees as young as 12 years old can receive prison sentences of up to 10 years.
Additionally, both SJH and Columbia University’s Center for Mexico and Central America claim that, in El Salvador, “an estimated 100,000 children and adolescents had been effectively orphaned” after their parents disappeared into detention. SJH reports that many of these children lack basic necessities and some of them experience one or more of the following: depression, weight loss, eating disorders, nightmares, hyperactivity, aggressiveness, and fear and anger toward the military and police.
Finally, troublesome critics of corporations and the government—such as union members denouncing corruption, social activists, and human-rights defenders—are targeted. That includes the SJH. At a press conference, Escobar talked about the scrutiny they’re under: “These [investigatory] actions include surveillance and monitoring of our homes, workplaces, and the facilities of the Humanitarian Legal Aid. We have confirmed [this] through license plates on vehicles that are used solely for police purposes.”
Thirsting for Justice
But SJH isn’t deterred. In addition to providing full legal accompaniment to 100 innocent clients, SJH is rendering habeas corpus services to another 2,600. And because many of its clients were sole breadwinners, SJH provides material support to their families. So far, SJH has secured the release of 50 innocents, after taking some of their cases to international courts.
Escobar declares on her X page: “Tengo sed, sed de #Justicia.” She is thirsty for justice—but it’s risky. Elsewhere she’s acknowledged, “The fear we have is that we’ll be the next ones he arrests despite never having broken the law.”
SJH has a loud collective voice that carries far. It regularly denounces the Bukele administration’s violations of human rights in national and international settings. Surely these defenders of El Salvador’s hard-won but vulnerable democratic rights deserve our moral, political, and monetary support.
Please call senators and representatives through the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Ask that U.S. aid for the Salvadoran armed forces be withheld until all innocents have been released and the prisons investigated independently.
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Support the Work of Haitian Feminists Amid Crises and Beyond
It’s necessary that the international community, especially the United States, works according to the needs emphasized by grassroots women’s organizations and civil society.
Dec 07, 2024
The recent waves of gang violence in Haiti, that have plagued the island since February 2024, have plunged it into another major humanitarian crisis. As reported by the United Nations Human Rights Council, the violence has been centered in Port-au-Prince and other areas in the Ouest and Artibonite Departments, but the reduced access to food, healthcare services, and general economic strain due to gang violence are being felt across the departments. With increasing armed violence events, 700,000 internally displaced people, almost 5 million people facing acute food insecurity, and only 28% of functioning healthcare services available, daily life and public safety continue to erode at a rapid pace. This is especially true for women and girls.
Lack of access to the formal economy, enduring threats of public violence, and lack of adequate protections from natural disasters make it exceedingly difficult for women and girls to safely navigate city and nation-wide emergencies. Such emergencies exacerbate the other substandard conditions of education, health, legal protections against gender-based violence, and political participation of Haitian women and girls. Historically, the Haitian women’s movement and feminist activists have provided essential educational resources, legal support services, and platforms for women’s stories to be heard and this political advocacy continues during the present violence.
Haitian women’s feminist groups developed the Policy Framework for an Effective and Equitable Transition. This document highlights the legal rights of Haitian women and girls established in the Haitian Constitution, the oppression Haitian women and girls endure in private and public life as well as recommendations on how the Presidential Transitional Council (TPC) should amend proposed harmful policies already set to be put in place. This Policy Framework is part of the rich legacy of political action taken by Haitian women and feminists since the emancipation of the island from French colonial rule. Haitian feminist activists and civil society leaders have time and time again shown up for their community on the ground during natural disasters and fighting against normalized gendered violence and discrimination. In this moment, they are pushing forward this Policy Framework to display the link between a successful democracy and gender equality.
The United States and other Western countries have a clear responsibility to materially support a locally-led stabilization of Haiti that effectively addresses the needs of all Haitian citizens.
Gang violence in Haiti isn’t a new phenomenon. Throughout the country’s history, the Haitian government relied on armed gangs to assert their authority and maintain power because there was no strong military or police presence. However, the type of armed brutality evident today is a result of the rapidly decaying relationship between Haitian politicians and armed gangs following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Moreover, the armed power of these gangs, which has continued to overpower the Haitian National Police and the MSS mission, is primarily sustained by U.S. weapons sales into the country. The transitional government’s attempts to regain control and establish a stable democracy are failing to address the needs of Haitian women, expressly in this current crisis.
On the Transitional Presidential Council, its Haitian women’s groups have reported that of the nine members only one is a woman and she is one of two members who are unable to vote. In the newly established commission on criminal reform, the same pattern emerges—one woman to eight male members. The intention to restrict women in positions of political authority is cemented by the fact that during the search for an interim prime minister, there were no women invited to interview.
These patterns are dangerous because they directly undermine standards of gender equality established explicitly in the Haitian Constitution, where women are assured to hold at least 30% of political positions. Moreover, the few women that are granted access to political positions in the new government are not representatives of the women’s movement, which threatens to conceal the most pressing issues of Haitian women and girls and thus fail to adequately protect them. This is concerning because It’s been reported that women’s representation as leaders in peace processes is vital in developing sustainable peace agreements and post-conflict stability that create more just futures for the entirety of civil society.
It’s necessary that the international community, especially the United States, works according to the needs emphasized by grassroots women’s organizations and civil society. Prior international efforts meant to ease hardship in Haiti have worked to only make it worse. Decades of violent U.S. occupation, the unjust imposition of international debt from France, careless and corrupt U.N. peacekeeper missions, the destabilization of rice productions and the resulting economic fragility, along with current arms sales from the U.S., have helped create the Haiti we see today.
Because of this history, the United States and other Western countries have a clear responsibility to materially support a locally-led stabilization of Haiti that effectively addresses the needs of all Haitian citizens. Supporting Haitian feminist’s efforts such as the Policy Framework is the first step to respecting the lived experiences of people at the center of conflict and in remedying this historic violence.
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America’s Ultimate Don Could Unleash a 21st Century Gangocracy
What’s happening in Haiti today could prefigure the future of the United States, too, if Donald Trump wins in November and continues to undermine the rule of law.
Apr 19, 2024
Haiti has descended into chaos. It’s had no president or parliament—and no elections either—for eight long years. Its unelected prime minister Ariel Henry resigned recently when gang violence at the airport in Port-au-Prince made it impossible for him to return to the country after a trip to Guyana.
Haiti is the poorest country in the region, its riches leached out by colonial overlords, American occupying forces, corporate predators, and home-grown autocrats. As if that weren’t enough, it’s also suffered an almost biblical succession of plagues in recent years. A coup deposed its first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, not once but twice—in 1991 and again in 2004. An earthquake in 2010 killed hundreds of thousands, leaving 1.5 million Haitians homeless, out of a population of less than 10 million. In the wake of that earthquake, nearly a million people contracted cholera, the worst outbreak in history, courtesy of a contingent of United Nations peacekeepers. To round out the catastrophes, in 2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall, pushing Haiti back even further.
And now the country has been overrun by gangs that emerged as practically the only groups capable of providing services, however meager, to Haiti’s long-suffering population. People have become the country’s largest export. Anyone who has money, connections, or sufficient courage has fled, even if those who somehow made it to the United States were all too often deported back into the maelstrom. Haiti doesn’t have the three things that might prevent the sort of vacuum into which gangs so eagerly rush: robust democratic governance, a strong civil society, and a sufficiently uncorrupt constabulary. As a result, it’s returned to what political theorist Thomas Hobbes once called a “war of all against all” in which violence and the urge for power prevail, as fist takes precedence over gavel—the perfect environment for gangs to flourish.
In place of the biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S. might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald Trump to go up in similar flames.
Political scientists often label places like Haiti “failed states.” With the breakdown of order, everything from political institutions to border controls disintegrates. In a comparable fashion, clans contested for power in Somalia in the 1990s and paramilitaries battled each other in the Democratic Republic of Congo during its repeated wars, while rebels and jihadis targeted the Syrian government beginning in 2011. In the end, such diverse groups seem to boil down to one thing: guys with guns.
In Haiti, the gangocracy is organized along the classic lines of criminal enterprises like the gangs that ruled New York City in the mid-19th century (immortalized in the film The Gangs of New York) or the Chinese tongs that warred over San Franciscan turf in the years after the Civil War (featured in the current Netflix series Warrior). The two major Haitian gangs in the capital city Port-au-Prince, GPep and the G9 Family, have similarly hierarchical structures, roots in particular neighborhoods, and flamboyant leaders like the former police officer and current G9 head Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier.
But gangs aren’t simply criminal syndicates. The Haitian gangs have close connections to political parties and align themselves with business interests (or run businesses of their own). Sometimes such gangs even begin as anti-gangs, neighborhood self-defense groups meant to help locals survive in an era of lawlessness.
Their mischaracterization resembles the overly narrow understanding of “terrorists.” Hamas, for instance, is on the U.S. terrorism list, but it’s not just a bunch of guys with guns and a predilection for violence. It’s also been a political party, a government, and a service organization that provided food, healthcare, and other necessities to underserved communities in Gaza.
Don’t make the mistake of associating gangs like Haiti’s with a “primitive” stage of political development or only with countries on the geopolitical margins. What’s happening there today could prefigure the future of the United States, too. In place of the biblical succession of plagues that swept through Haiti, the U.S. might only need the tinder of climate change and the flint of Donald Trump to go up in similar flames.
Gangs R U.S.
Today, Americans associate “gangs” with the Crips and Bloods, who developed a murderous rivalry in the Los Angeles area in the 1970s or, more recently, Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, a gang of young Salvadoran transplants to Los Angeles initially focused on protecting its members from other gangs.
But shouldn’t we be more catholic in our definitions? After all, what are right-wing paramilitary forces, from the Three Percenters to the Proud Boys, if not gangs? They have their rituals, worldviews, indifference to the rule of law, even their own “Barbecues.” The gangs associated with far-right ideology and white supremacy today could claim a lineage stretching back to the European settlers of this continent who routinely engaged in the extrajudicial murder of Indigenous peoples while expanding westward, or the vigilante mobs that administered “rough justice” to “disobedient” slaves before the Civil War, or even the Ku Klux Klan. As for real-world impact, the Crips or MS-13 never had the audacity to force their way into the U.S. Capitol and trash the place, as Donald Trump’s informal gang did on January 6, 2021.
But why stop there? The Pinkerton detective agency once functioned like a gang in its attacks on the labor movement. The Central Intelligence Agency developed distinctly gang-like behavior overseas with its assassinations, coups, and outright criminal activities. And what about all the deaths associated with corporate gangs like Philip Morris and ExxonMobil? These institutions of “normal” society have had a much higher kill count and a more debilitating effect on the rule of law than the institutions of organized crime.
When it comes to starting fires in the American system, Trump is distinctly the Barbecue type.
When it comes to gang-like activities, much depends on geopolitics. The emergence of the “Washington consensus” and the birth of neoliberalism in the 1970s was an inflection point when it came to encouraging gang-like behavior. Previously, at least in advanced industrial countries, the state had been gradually assuming ever greater economic responsibility through the New Deal and its successors in the U.S. and the development of Europe’s market socialism. Neoliberalism, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in England and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, sought to roll back the power of the state through the defunding, deregulation, and privatization of government services.
That sustained attack on state functions ensured an increase in poverty and painful budget crises for institutions like school systems and hospitals, while corporate misconduct proliferated. In poorer countries, where states were already more fragile, the impact was far more devastating.
In Haiti, after the state borrowed money in the 1970s and 1980s to feed corruption and sustain autocracy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) pushed subsequent democratic governments to privilege the free market, while opening ever more quickly to the global economy. Sensing opportunity, non-governmental organizations streamed into Haiti to provide food, housing, and healthcare, everything a cash-strapped government couldn’t do. The succession of catastrophes—coups, an earthquake, cholera, hurricanes—only strengthened the humanitarian sector but at the expense of effective government. In this century, the situation had become so dire that all too many parents were giving their children up to orphanages run by foreign charities. In other words, the road to Haiti’s hell was, in part, paved by good intentions.
Or take the case of Jamaica where, from the late 1970s on, similar IMF programs translated into disaster, especially in the capital, Kingston. Here, too, the state lost power as gang leaders, known as “dons,” expanded their territories. As Michelle Munroe and Damion Blake put it in Third World Quarterly: “Neoliberal policies not only paralyzed the state’s capacity to control and contain violence in the streets of Kingston, these changes also made dons and the gangs they command more lethal and powerful.”
Dons and the gangs they command: that language could soon seem all too eerily appropriate for the United States.
American Bloodbath
America’s ultimate Don is all too clear about what he expects come November, should he lose. “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath,” he told one of his rallies. According to that scenario, the crew that owes allegiance to Donald Trump—the right-wing militias, diehard conspiracy theorists, open-carry gun enthusiasts—will rise up in gang-like fashion in the face of another “stolen election.”
That, however, is an example of Trump’s magical thinking. The January 6 “insurrection” revealed the limits of his influence. What happened in Washington that day never came close to a coup d’état, thanks to the actions of the police and the National Guard, nor was it repeated, even in the reddest of states.
The real bloodbath would take place if Trump won the election. After all, he’s already promised violence as an organizing principle for his second term. As David Remnick has written in The New Yorker, Trump
makes no effort to conceal his bigotries, his lawlessness, his will to authoritarian power; to the contrary, he advertises it, and, most disturbing of all, this deepens his appeal. What’s more, there is no question that Trump has so normalized calls to violence as an instrument of politics that it has inflamed countless people to perverse action.
Trump has also promised a thorough purge of his enemies in the government and beyond, as well as the weaponization of the Justice Department to wage war on all MAGA opponents. As in his first term, he would destroy as many federal agencies as possible. Meanwhile, he would promote drilling über alles and roll back every Biden administration effort to create an industrial policy to guide the United States away from fossil fuels.
What Trump proposes is fundamentally different from the now shopworn Republican strategy of reducing the federal government to the size of something that can be “drowned in the bathtub” (as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist once so memorably put it) in favor of “states’ rights.” Trump has nothing but contempt for the politics that advance such a perspective. Like the gang leader he is, he’d rather concentrate federal power in his own hands as an instrument of personal vengeance emphasizing loyalty above all. Instead of the empowerment of state legislatures, Trump prefers chaos, for in fraught times people look to autocratic leaders.
When it comes to starting fires in the American system, Trump is distinctly the Barbecue type. He admires leaders who slaughter people indiscriminately (Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines), change the constitution multiple times to bypass legislative and judicial opposition (Viktor Orbán of Hungary), or kill their political opponents wherever they might live (Vladimir Putin of Russia). He likes the bad boys who have transformed their parties into gangs and their countries into fiefdoms. In short, he’s the ultimate gang leader.
In the MAGA echo chamber, complaints about witch-hunts targeting Trump should be considered just a preface, should he win this November, to a genuine witch-hunt that could make the Red Scare of the 1950s look like a garden party.
Of course, he won’t do it alone. There are plenty of true believers and opportunists to staff his administration and implement his whims, but that’s not enough. As his first term revealed, the guardrails of democracy—opposition politicians, bureaucrats, even certain Republicans who continue to have qualms—can still prevent the country from tumbling over a cliff.
This time around, Trump and those backing him hope to disable enough of the political infrastructure to create the space for non-state actors to do his work for him. In The Donald’s first term, the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as Trumpophile Steve Bannon so infamously put it, was a strategy meant to empower actors like corporations and religious institutions to grab power for themselves. Next time around, he’s likely to surround himself with advisers pulled from the think-tank crowd that produced the nightmarish Project 2025 blueprint in order to “free” all MAGA-oriented non-state and (often) anti-state actors to do their damnedest.
But even ruthless think tanks, corporations, and apocalyptic preachers aren’t likely to go far enough for Donald Trump, since they also remain the bedrock of America’s more traditional right wing, the coalition that put Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush into the White House. Trump needs genuine mayhem-makers. By removing restrictions on firearms, he aims to deputize every American citizen in his camp to MAGAfy the United States.
Trump’s repeated exhortations to violence—“lock her up,” “punch him in the face,” “be there, will be wild”—may well take a more specific form in a second term. Like McCarthyites at the height of the Cold War, Trumpists have imagined “Marxists” under every bed, even in the Pentagon. It’s not far-fetched to think that the reelected president might issue a coded call to his supporters to round them all up and dispatch them in some grim fashion.
Trump often accuses his opponents of exactly the sins—attempting to steal elections, having distinctly senior moments—of which he is supremely guilty. In the MAGA echo chamber, complaints about witch-hunts targeting Trump should be considered just a preface, should he win this November, to a genuine witch-hunt that could make the Red Scare of the 1950s look like a garden party.
After Autocracy
Haiti has no government, much less a strong-armed autocrat like Donald Trump. So, it might seem ludicrous to compare the crisis there with the prospective “bloodbath” Trump promises here. But remember: Haiti suffered under two ruthless dictators from 1957 to 1986: Papa Doc Duvalier and his son, Baby Doc. Between them, they ensured that Haiti would never easily establish democratic institutions.
Donald Trump is nearly 78 years old. He doesn’t have a long political future. Yes, were he to win in November, he would surely do what he could to destroy democracy. Still, the true nightmare scenario is likely to come later, as climate change sends yet more migrants surging toward U.S. borders, generates more fires that sweep across the land, and heats politics to the boiling point. That’s when future versions of the gangs Trump has encouraged to “stand back and stand by,” the insurrectionists he’s promised to amnesty, and the loyalists who have shared images of Joe Biden tied up in the back of a pickup truck could assault the citadels of power in an attempt to destroy once and for all the rule of law that Trump has spent his life undermining.
Cue the ominous music: From sea to shining sea, the war of all against all may be just around the corner.
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Groups Warn Gang Crackdown in El Salvador Has Led to Human Rights Crisis
"Reducing gang violence by replacing it with state violence cannot be a success," said one Amnesty International official.
Mar 27, 2024
Two years after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele declared a "state of exception" that was originally adopted for a 30-day period in response for a spate of apparent gang killings, the government is boasting that its policies have driven down the homicide rate by 70%—but international rights defenders on Wednesday warned the crackdown has plunged the country into a human rights crisis.
Amnesty International said that according to local victims' movements and human rights groups, El Salvador's former murder rate has been replaced by 327 cases of forced disappearances since March 2022, as well as 78,000 arbitrary detentions as police have raided neighborhoods, particularly in low-income areas.
"A total of approximately 102,000 people [are] now deprived of their freedom in the country—a situation of prison overcrowding of approximately 148% percent and at least 235 deaths in state custody," said Amnesty.
Bukele adopted the state of emergency after El Salvador reported its deadliest peak in apparent gang violence in recent history, with gangs blamed for 92 people's deaths over three days in March 2022.
Under the emergency order, authorities have suspended the right to privacy in communications, to be informed of the reason for one's arrest, and to be taken before a judge within 72 hours of an arrest. A report by Human Rights Watch in December 2022 also warned of "torture, or other cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment against people accused of crimes." Officers told people during arrests only that they were following "orders from the president," and in some cases, told people they were being taken to a police station for "questioning" when they were actually under arrest.
"The insistence of Nayib Bukele's government on maintaining the state of emergency, the adoption of disproportionate measures, and the denial, minimization, and concealment of reported serious human rights violations reflect the government's unwillingness to fulfill its duty to respect and promote human rights in the country," Ana Piquer, Amnesty International's Americas director, said Wednesday. "It also demonstrates its inability to design comprehensive long-term measures to address the root causes of violence and criminality without forcing the population to choose between security and freedom."
Amnesty's statement came a day after Justice and Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro said Bukele's government plans to continue its strategy to "eradicate this endemic evil."
"This war against these terrorists will continue," said Villatoro in a televised address.
Despite outcry from domestic and international human rights groups, Bukele won his reelection campaign in a landslide last month. El Faro reported that Bukele's government had violated some election rules including airing ads within three days of the election and campaigning on Election Day. Some poll workers also wore clothes identifying them as supporters of Bukele's Nueva Ideas party, and police allegedly blocked journalists from working near polling locations, prompting accusations of intimidation and harassment by the Association of Journalists of El Salvador.
The Due Process of Law Foundation released a report Tuesday warning that Bukele's government could be guilty of crimes against humanity as it continues its crackdown.
"Well over 76,000 people, including minors, have been detained under the state of exception, accused of having ties to gangs," wrote the group. "Many or most of these detentions appear to be occurring without any reasonable grounds for suspecting that the person may have committed a crime. Mere physical appearance—including having tattoos—seems to be enough to put people at risk of arrest, with young men from poor districts a particular target. Arrests of this nature are in themselves discriminatory, and may well qualify as arbitrary. According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, under customary
international law, 'The legal basis justifying... detention must be accessible, understandable, nonretroactive, and applied in a consistent and predictable way.'"
Amnesty noted on Wednesday that human rights defenders and dissidents also face "increased risk" under the state of emergency, "as they are criminalized." As Common Dreams reported this week, five water defenders are scheduled to stand trial on April 3 for allegedly killing a military informant, an accusation for which the government has produced no proof.
"In the absence of any kind of evaluation and checks and balances within the country, and with only a timid response from the international community, the false illusion has been created that President Bukele has found the magic formula to solve the very complex problems of violence and criminality in a seemingly simple way. But reducing gang violence by replacing it with state violence cannot be a success," said Piquer. "The authorities in El Salvador must focus the state response on comprehensive policies that respect human rights and seek long-term solutions."
"The international community," she added, "must respond in a robust, articulate and forceful manner, condemning any model of public security that is based on human rights violations."
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Students Rally Behind Their Teachers in Chicago
Sep 14, 2012
Marie Sklodowska Curie Metro High School is located in a hardscrabble neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side. A coal-burning power plant lies just to the north and various factories and warehouses stand on surrounding streets.
Gang violence is a serious problem in the area, and the economic crisis has hit many immigrant families hard.
Students and teachers describe the school as a safe haven, a place where, despite a severe lack of resources, teachers offer innovative lessons with real-world context and organize clubs and after-school programs on topics like literature, science, and the environment.
Curie students say they recognize the extra lengths their teachers go to in making sure they get a stimulating, top-flight education even in such trying circumstances. Hence many students and former students have spent the past few days on the picket lines with their teachers and former teachers.
"This is my family," said Nicolas Coronado, 19, a DePaul University political science student on the picket line with his former IB History teacher, Homero Penuelas. "I loved it here."
A student marching band has been helping to keep their teachers' spirits up on the picket line, and one student has even turned up each day in a hot dog costume with a sign saying "Mayor Emanuel Is a Weenie."
On Thursday morning, 2007 Curie graduate Jose Xavier Montenegro gave a younger student pointers on drumming.
"I wasn't the best student but I look up to these teachers," said Montenegro, who now works as a laborer with his own company and competes in power-lifting. "I know what it's like in those classrooms. It's jam-packed; in one class we had 42 students. One time a rat ran through the classroom. Teachers could do a lot more if they had more resources."
Students describe teachers regularly buying supplies out of their own pockets.
"It's like being in a factory and paying your own money for the parts you need to make a phone," said Curie senior Adam Cabanas, 17, standing on the picket line Thursday with senior Cheyenne Watkins. "I love my teachers. They are always there for you."
"They take money out of their own wallets for us," added Watkins, 17. "For teachers to be treated badly after they have put so much of their lives into this is not fair. [The administration] tries to make it look like teachers are hurting students. But students are hurting in the classrooms - there's no air conditioning. You have 38 students in one class."
Jazmin Gonzalez, a seventh-grader at Lindblom Elementary in the nearby Englewood neighborhood, joined her mother and Curie science teacher Maricruz Gonzalez outside the school, wearing a sign around her neck saying "CPS student and daughter of CPS teacher - Double Whammy."
"It's a little scary but this has to happen for teachers to get what they need to teach us effectively, they are some of the hardest working people I've ever met in my life," said Gonzalez about the strike, noting that in her overcrowded classes there are "people sharing desks and sitting at the teacher's desk."
Karina Alcorchas, a 2012 Curie graduate, credits Curie teachers with inspiring her to pursue chemical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "It's important to give back to the teachers who have given so much to us," said Alcorchas, who earlier in the week walked picket lines with her former elementary school teachers.
Curie highlights the main reasons the teachers union opposes standardized testing used to determine merit-based pay, which the school board has backed off on, and merit-based evaluations, which the board is still demanding. (After negotiations Wednesday, both the school board and union president Karen Lewis said progress was being made and students might be back in class on Friday).
"Merit pay works only in neighborhoods where you're not dealing with the kinds of things we're dealing with here," said Penuelas. "I have students who go to work after school and work until 1 in the morning, then we start school at 7:30 am. Many are the breadwinners in their families. We try our best to help our students but these are hard things to overcome."
Rosana Enriquez, Curie's only social worker, elaborated on the challenges facing students.
"Just last week I talked to three kids whose fathers are in jail, and one whose mother had been deported and she was living with relatives, and teen mothers. That's not to mention the foster kids we serve," she said, noting that more social workers in the schools are desperately needed. "Kids are living with depression and anxiety because of the violence in the neighborhood."
Teachers at Curie, as at many public schools, often incorporate the harsh realities that their students live with into their lesson plans, an approach Penuelas noted can also apply to the strike.
"This is as prime an example as any of a civics lesson," he said. "If parents are worried about their kids being at home not getting an education, they should bring them out here. It's a lesson in democracy and power in numbers."
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