State of War

MS-13 and El Salvador's World of Violence

By: William Wheeler

Narrated by: William Wheeler

The real story behind El Salvador's MS-13 gang and how they have perpetuated three generations of conflict and led to scores of migrants seeking a new life in the United States.

Born in Los Angeles, the gang MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a civil war stoked by American foreign policy. But the gang found its way home a decade later, as the U.S. began deporting thousands of convicts each year back to the Northern Triangle--El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Today, those countries share the world's highest murder rates, and account for 70 percent of the migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border.

Foreign correspondent William Wheeler tracks MS-13 from L.A., where he meets the founders of the gang, to El Salvador, where three generations of Salvadorans have been drawn into an escalating cycle of conflict. State of War tells the tragic story of a brutal civil war that has never ended.

Raw and eye-opening

I was moved, humbled and sobered by the stories revealed in this book. Mr. Wheeler’s calm tone and direct prose accent the cutting cyclical causality of a problem we often cruelly and lazily label as bad apple criminals. An important read, not only to understand this specific tragic situation, but the counter-effectiveness of archaic iron fist policies to solve complex issues in an increasingly inequitable modern world. Thank you for your courage in learning and sharing these stories.

An account of failed policies

To stop gang violence with violence is a recipe for disaster. As a gang member mentioned in this book and who got involved in the beginning stages of the gang. We never intended to have our gang be a transnational threat.
When you neglect our children and then complain they misbehave and treat them as animals, they will bite.

What US voters don’t know about the race to leave C & S America migration North.

This book gives details of the US’ unwitting and willful involvement in causing Mexico, Central, and South America, an El Salvador to be the explosive cause of humanitarian migration to North America simply to survive. Generations of exploitation of Latin America by US businesses and misguided government policy have overwhelmed US politics, right wing honesty, and maybe even humanity to accept responsibility for what Neoliberalism of the Republican party and many Democrats have cumulatively caused, ignored, and cast point blame with three fingers point back to indicate the true culprits of US greed and self aggrandizement for decades to a century and more of bad policies.

Great insight!

Wheeler does a great job in selecting his resources, the story itself is all true. Great book to try to understand what was like to live in El Salvador this past 3 decades.
Big thank Mr. Wheeler from a 28 years old Salvadoran living in USA since 2015.

Great analysis of El Salvador

A great deep dive into the socioeconomic issues that have plagued El Salvador. This book does an awesome job of tying together the power struggles and giving us the grim reality of the Salvadoran power structure and the hold that ms-13 and various other criminal organizations have on the country, in stride with the corrupt state.