State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of Violence
About the Event
The real story behind El Salvador’s MS-13 gang and how they perpetuated three generations of conflict, leading scores of migrants to seek 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. 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, these countries share the world’s highest murder rates and account for 70 percent of migrants arriving at the Southern U.S. border.
Foreign correspondent William Wheeler tracks MS-13 from Los Angeles, 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. Drawing from his extensive reporting and inside look at one of the world’s most notorious international criminal gangs, Wheeler will share the tragic story of a brutal civil war that has yet to end.
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About the Speaker
William Wheeler is an award-winning journalist and producer who has reported on political affairs around Africa and the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Global Post, Playboy Magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly, TIME, USA Today and other outlets. Most recently, he worked on Ai Weiwei’s documentary, “Human Flow,” about the global refugee crisis. He hosts the podcast, “Detours: Conversations with Global Storytellers on Craft, the Road, and Bumps along the Way.” Wheeler holds graduate degrees in journalism and international affairs from Columbia University.