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* The authors would like to thank Edgardo Amaya and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions. This article uses findings from various research projects that were funded by the Focus and Massa programme of Utrecht University, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and a grant to Wim Savenije from the Latin American Drugs, Security and Democracy Fellowship Program administered by the Social Science Research Council and the Universidad de Los Andes in cooperation with and with funds provided by the Open Society Foundations.
Introduction
Years after the region's civil wars ended, Central America continues to have extremely high levels of social violence. The phenomenon causing most fear and demanding most attention from the regional governments, the media and the general public is that of street gangs, especially in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The usual response of authorities to insecurity in these countries has been to resort to repressive measures, including deployment of the military and toughening of legislation.1In the same trend, the policies directed at the gangs have mostly been highly mediatised, zero-tolerance measures, labelled mano-durismo approaches. Under these approaches the military has assumed public security tasks and special anti-gang legislation has been adopted.2These policies are rarely complemented by more preventive measures and do not appear to be successful, as gang membership and levels of gang-related violence continue to rise.3
The main critique of the mano-durismo ('hard-handed') approaches to public security is that they do not take into account underlying causes of the gang problem, and that repression by itself cannot solve the problem.4This critique was shared by the new centre-left government in El Salvador, which took office in June 2009 and sought to reverse the mano-durismo approaches of the previous governments. This proved extremely difficult, however, and the new government soon resorted to reintroducing policies that were associated with mano-durismo. In November 2009, half a year after taking office, President Mauricio Funes decided to expand the role of the Salvadorean military and send them (back) to the streets. In May 2010, the military assumed the role of guarding the perimeters of and access to several prisons. In June 2010, after a horrific attack by a local gang on...