The Daily - Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018

Episode Date: January 9, 2018

In 2001, the United States granted Temporary Protected Status to people from El Salvador, after two deadly earthquakes ravaged their country. Nearly 20 years later, that protection seemed to be permanent. And then he Trump administration announced that the rights would end. Guest: Azam Ahmed, the New York Times bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. In 2001, the U.S. granted temporary protected status to the people of El Salvador after a pair of deadly earthquakes ravaged the country. Almost 20 years later, that temporary status seemed permanent until the Trump administration announced it wasn't. It's Tuesday, January 9th.

In the 1980s, El Salvador was facing a civil war. Basically, leftist guerrillas, or people who were sort of considered leftist guerrillas, were fighting against a military-controlled government. Azam Ahmed reports on Central America for The Times. It was a really brutal civil war. We're talking 75,000 people killed over the course of 12 years, during which

time the U.S. provided a substantial sum of money to the government slash military of El Salvador to fight this war. At the end of it, the United Nations did a report on what they found, and they found that 95% of the killings were the responsibility of the U.S.-backed government. Too many have thought of Central America as just that place way down below Mexico that can't possibly constitute a threat to our well-being. The U.S. was looking at the examples of Nicaragua and Cuba, and the Salvadoran government was very skilled at positing the leftists as communists. And so not wanting to see another domino fall, the U.S.-backed government, including Jimmy

Carter, the Democratic president at the time, began giving money. Of course, that money got ramped up under Reagan. Central America's problems do directly affect the security and the well-being of our own people. And Central America is much closer to the United States than many of the world's trouble spots that concern us. So we work to restore our own economy. We cannot afford to lose sight of our neighbors to the south. El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts. Nicaragua is just as close to Miami, San Antonio, San Diego, and Tucson

as those cities are to Washington, where we're gathered tonight. So the U.S. saw this as a battle in the Cold War. Exactly. And it chose the side of the Salvadoran government against what it saw as a potential communist enemy claiming yet another country in Latin America. Precisely. And it cost the American taxpayer $5 billion,

money invested to ensure that the Salvadoran regime would triumph over the guerrillas. But a new study for the Pentagon says American policy was based on false assumptions and failed. So how did it come to be that so many Salvadorans were allowed to come to the United States during this time? So one of the interesting dynamics that was playing out amid the Civil War was the United States passed the Immigration Act of 1990. Provision of that was TPS, this temporary protected status. And El Salvador was one of the first beneficiaries of that. People from 1990 ultimately through 1994 were able to flee the country

and come in under that temporary protected status. Some get jobs, start families, prosper. Others who are trapped in sort of a cycle of poverty find themselves face to face with other minorities, sort of trapped on the edges of the American dream. And they found that they had to defend themselves. In El Salvador, they fight against each other. But in Los Angeles, they stand side by side on street corners hoping to find a day's work. Veterans of the Salvadoran military and supporters of leftist rebels seeking to overthrow the government,

forced together by circumstances. All refugees who've managed to leave their country and its nine-year-old civil war behind. You know, many of these communities settled around L.A., and at that time there was a gang problem in L.A., so the Salvadoran community, the youth, formed these groups of gangs to defend themselves from other minority groups.

I got shot through this side, and it came out through this side, and it messed up my bone and my veins. I can't even walk the streets now because if you're going to walk the streets, you're going to carry something with you. I don't think, you know, that I'll live to see 23. As the years progressed, these groups became increasingly violent and criminalized. And in fact, MS-13 and Barrio de Siocho, or the 18th Street Gang formed in Los Angeles. You got to fight for your vato. Sometimes you got to kill for your vato.

Just to keep up your reputation. Raise your right arm. U.S. immigration officials inspect and photograph the elaborate tattoos of Amara Salvatrucha gang member. He's one of 582 men arrested in recent days, 26 in Los Angeles alone. It's all part of a continuing crackdown by U.S. Homeland Security forces targeting illegal immigrants

from violent street gangs like Mara Salvatrucha. So during the 90s, as the gangs in Los Angeles, the Salvadoran gangs in Los Angeles are sort of growing into broader organized criminal enterprises. The United States starts arresting and convicting many of these guys and finding out, oh, these guys aren't even American.

And so they begin deporting them. This government video shows some of the arrestees getting on a plane, being deported, in this case, back to El Salvador, and leaving the plane free of handcuffs and leg chains. And remember, they're deporting them to a country that is in an extraordinarily fragile state. This country's just come out of the Civil War, so no one really has any idea what's in store for them when suddenly these guys who have been organized in the streets of L.A. land in a country that barely has a functioning government. And in Salvador, they begin to flourish. The national police estimate

some 60,000 gang members operate in the country. They were originally founded by returning deportees from Southern California, Salvadorans who had joined some of the notorious street gangs of Los Angeles and who started their own organizations when they were forced to return to their home country. There are a lot of orphaned children whose parents died during the war, who are living with their grandparents, kids who have no other source of support, and the gangs provide that for them. So they begin to slowly organize. And in El Salvador, there's a crisis. So this is fascinating. These gang members who have become gang members in the United States as a result of receiving this protected status from the United States because of the Civil War, they return to El Salvador and sort of fill a void of institutions and government left by the Civil War. Yeah, that's totally right. I mean, basically that problem got created in the United States

and then exported back to El Salvador. So you've spent a lot of time reporting in El Salvador. Can you describe for us what life has become like there as a result of these gangs being formed there? What sort of hold do these gangs have on the country? Largely, it is an economic chokehold. The gangs survive on extortion. What drug trade they do, it's small. And when you say extortion, what do you mean? So I mean, gang members will tell bus drivers, if you want to drive through our territory and drop people off, you have to pay us $5 a day, $10 a day, whatever

the extortion is, but it's small. They'll tell store owners, if you want to operate in our neighborhoods, you have to pay us $5 a day. They'll tell delivery truck drivers, oh, you want to sell Coke in our neighborhood, Coca-Cola, you're going to have to pay a fee. So at first, it's just like a bunch of kids hanging out. And then suddenly, they get more organized. And suddenly, they start extorting populations. And so the government begins what they call the mano dura. Mano, which means hand, dura, means the strong hand. But loosely we sort of translate it as the iron fist, which is a scorched earth policy.

They begin rounding up these guys in mass, hyper-violent tactics to try and clear the streets. And that crackdown actually forces the gangs to become more disciplined, better organized. And so into the 2000s, the government kind of continues with the same approach. And it did nothing but sort of fortify the gangs and their position in these marginal neighborhoods inside of El Salvador. So in many areas of El Salvador, are the gangs, it sounds like kind of the de facto government? They absolutely are. It's interesting in the parallels to an insurgency. If you go into an area controlled by insurgents, you often find the population, if not totally supportive of the insurgency, then at least of a mindset that it's the government

that's the enemy. Because it's the government that comes in and fires shots. The government that comes in and arrests people. It's the government that sort of lays down the law. And I found the same thing in El Salvador. I go into these neighborhoods and nobody loved the gangs. People tolerated the gangs. They offered some semblance of order. And if you didn't involve yourself with them, largely in some neighborhoods, at least you were okay. And instead what they viewed, especially during these various sort of iron fist moments that the government has exercised over the last 15 years, they feel like the police are the enemy. It seems El Salvador is headed to become the country of graves. According to police statistics, during the months of January and February,

one person has died of a violent crime almost every hour. What explains the fact that El Salvador now has this awful distinction of being the country with the highest homicide rate in the world? Is it gang violence? Is it government violence? Or is it some combination of the two? Increasingly, it's a combination of the two. What you've seen is the police have been given a very

free hand to attack and kill gang members. I mean, the Minister of Interior has said on the record, like, no police officer will be held to account for firing his weapon, essentially. It's open season on gang members. It's the police killing gang members. It's the gang members killing police. It's absolutely gang members fighting gang members for territory, for what little money these guys can pull together. It's a multi-front war. They're fighting each other. They're fighting the police. The police are fighting all of them, which ultimately creates these kinds of staggering statistics. And you're also talking about a small country. We're talking about a country that's a little over 6 million people. We're talking about tens of thousands of gang

members and many more tens of thousands of people who rely on the economics that that particular enterprise brings. What does it actually look like in a country with the highest homicide rate in the world? What is that violence like there day to day? The violence is sort of sudden and abrupt. I mean, there's parts of El Salvador where life goes on as normal. People still go to work, get married, have kids, celebrate on the weekends. And yet in certain pockets of it, almost every day, someone's being killed. Either it's a gang shooting in a market because a vendor didn't pay extortion payment,

or it is a shootout between rivals for territory, or it's a targeted assassination of a gang leader. These things are still diffuse. Certain neighborhoods heat up, and there's a lot of violence at once. But, I mean, you can go to El Salvador for a week and witness nothing. But there's a sense of menace in a lot of these communities. There's a sense of pervasive fear. So one night I'm hangingace in a lot of these communities. There's a sense of pervasive fear. So one night,

I'm hanging out in neighborhood, and we hear gunshots, and suddenly six kids run by carrying weapons. The next day, we find out there was a shootout just one block over because rival gangs had come over. Three weeks later, one of the kids we were talking to was shot dead by the police in the same place. It's a steady drumbeat of violence, but you don't quite know, especially as an outsider, where and when it's going to erupt. We'll be right back. So returning to this temporary protected status

that arguably helped cause this current violent state in El Salvador. What has happened with that program since the 1990s when it first started? That initial one was shut down. They stopped it, I believe, in 1994. And so refugees leaving from the war could no longer apply for temporary protected status in the United States. But as life evolved in El Salvador, more people were deported from the U.S., and the gangs gained more power on into the 2000s,

it remained a very dangerous place. And then in 2001, two earthquakes struck. USAID called the El Salvador earthquakes the worst disasters in the region in over 50 years. And it caused mass devastation through the country and several hundred deaths. And then the U.S. granted another round of temporary protective status. And those are the people we're talking about now. Over the years, they have accumulated to 200,000 people.

And it continued to be extended. And the argument, at least for the Obama administration, was, well, was, well, listen, we've got a country that is being torn apart by violence, that has an economy that is suffering. So we'll extend it. They sort of expanded the umbrella of what was permitted to keep these guys in the country because the earthquake ceased to be a factor. It was no longer that people couldn't return home because their homes were destroyed or because the country was no longer functioning after the earthquakes, but rather a different menace sort of inhibited them from going home. And that was the violence that we're talking about today. So the Obama administration was extending the temporary

protected status because of the violence there, which was, of course, not the original reason why that status was granted or why people were fleeing. Precisely. It was so severe at that point, and especially in the later years, it got so bad that thousands of unaccompanied children are risking their lives to enter the U.S. illegally. Children were showing up at the southern border with the United States. Whole families were showing up at the southern border trying to escape from the gang violence. The stream of people seems endless. Some of the youngest border crossers come with their families, others by themselves. So these people who arrive in the United States after the earthquakes in 2001, because the U.S. government has continued to

extend their protected status, in part because of the violence, most of them have never left the United States, right? No, they've built lives. They've built lives, built businesses, raised families, had children who are American citizens. They've sort of woven themselves into the fabric of the United States. I mean, 2001. We're now in 2018. We're looking at 17, 18 years of living in one place. And during that time, a whole lifetime is lived. How do you then take 18 years in one place

and go back to a country that, especially now, you may not even recognize? Right. But it's important to note that it's always been the case that this was a temporary status. Temporary, but renewed over and over again. It feels like an unusual situation where even though the status was temporary, it started to feel permanent. Yeah. Yeah. I think people feel it's somewhat cruel

to have extended it for so long and then suddenly stopped it. Whereas before, for instance, when they began in 1990 with Salvadorans, the Civil War, it ended four years later. So it was, in fact, temporary. Whereas in this case, the years have been allowed to collect.

And so, you know, if they'd never been given that, it might not hurt so much to have it taken away. But now that they have been given that to take it away is, I think, devastating for a lot of people. This is such a complicated situation, because it seems to me that, by definition, temporary protected status is designed to protect people during temporary periods of crises. And so, arguably, even though the situation in El Salvador has perhaps never been worse, and it feels like an unbelievable situation in which to send people back, it's not temporary, really, and therefore not the responsibility of the United States and this

program? I would argue it's not the responsibility of this particular program. I wouldn't let the United States off the hook so easily. I think the U.S. has a lot to answer for in El Salvador and in the state that it's in today, in the sort of funding of the Civil War, in the deportation of the people who became gang members in the United States. So while temporary protected status one could very easily and legitimately argue, it no longer applies because the damage from the earthquake no longer applies. It doesn't mean that the U.S. doesn't have a responsibility to address some of these issues. But there is a non-temporary nature to this.

You're not going to pull people out for three years. You can't create a new TPS to help the flood of refugees dealing with violence on the ground because by most accounts, the violence isn't going to stop in three or four years. And so there's nothing temporary about it. What you're describing is kind of a full circle here. The U.S.-backed Civil War arguably created this problem in El Salvador. Then once fleeing Salvadorians reached the United States, the U.S. nurtured gangs and then sent them back to El Salvador. And now we are sending people back to the worst realization of that thing we helped start back in the 1990s. Yeah, the tragedy is that El Salvador today is both an echo and a product of its past. I mean, I wouldn't say the U.S. fostered gangs, but the bottom line is the gangs were there. And these kids felt that the only option they had was to form those gangs. And then those kids went back to a country that could barely deal with the problems they were already facing.

And yeah, now you've got 200,000 more people who had fled El Salvador going back into the same kind of dire conditions at the behest of an American government. Thank you, Azam. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Azam. Thanks for having me. or other crises, whether they entered the United States legally or not. By ending the program for Salvadorans on Monday, the Trump administration will no longer protect members of the group from deportation as of September 2019. Here's what else you need to know today. The Times is reporting that special counsel Robert Mueller has told White House lawyers he will likely seek to interview the president,

though no formal request has been made and no date has been set. White House officials see the request as a sign that the investigation may be nearing an end and are expected to set ground rules for the interview or provide answers to written questions. If the president refuses to cooperate, Mueller could respond with a grand jury subpoena. And on Tuesday night, North Korea agreed to send athletes to the Winter Olympics in South Korea, a symbolic breakthrough after months of escalating tensions over the North's rapidly advancing nuclear and missile programs. rapidly advancing nuclear and missile programs. In talks held in a border village, North Korea is reported to have quickly accepted the South's request that they send a large delegation to the Games,

marking the first time in eight years that North Korea will have participated in the Winter Olympics. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.