El Salvador’s gangs call a cease-fire, but many doubt it will hold

SAN SALVADOR — One of the gangsters, a black bandanna over his mouth and two rosaries around his neck, tapped his clawlike fingernail on the table.

Inmates stand next to a police vehicle while being transferred to the Quezaltepeque prison in El Salvador on March 29. (Fred Ramos/For The Washington Post)

By Joshua Partlow and Sarah Esther Maslin-April 3

Next to him was a sworn enemy, a man with a black fisherman’s hat pulled down over rainbow-tinted sunglasses.

The two rivals, and their tens of thousands of followers in El Salvador’s dominant gangs, have called a halt, for the moment, to their street war with each other and the government. On March 25, Mara Salvatrucha and two factions of the 18th Street gang announced a cease-fire, a respite from the fighting that has made El Salvador one of the world’s deadliest countries.

“We’re not friends,” one of the gangsters, a spokesman for the 18th Street gang, said in a rare interview last week, alongside a Mara Salvatrucha representative. “But the three gangs are united in this effort to come together to stop the violence that’s assaulting our country.”

Gang leaders representing MS-13 and Barrio 18 sat down with The Washington Post to discuss a cease-fired announced March 25. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

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