Drug Violence and Education

Schoolchildren and Teachers Under Fire
in El Salvador

By Edgardo Ayala

Inter-Press Service (IPS)

March 13, 2012

Citation: http://tinyurl.com/6n7yux7

Wilber Geovany Hernández was gunned down as he left his night classes at a school in the capital of El Salvador. He was the 11th murder victim among the country's schoolchildren since the school year began on Jan. 23.

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Drug and gang related violence has a new target: schools and teachers. In El Salvador, students and teachers live in fear, and are victims of crimes such as extortion, theft, and murder. The presence of violence is not only impacting student learning, but it also has significant consequences for the personal lives of students and tampers with their social development. Additionally, since teachers are constantly in fear of being murdered, many are requesting transfers, which also impacts student learning. The educational situation in El Salvador is already dire; dropout rates in schools that are most affected by the violence have reached 20 percent. There are two million student attending 5,000 schools in El Salvador. Of those schools, 340 schools have been labeled as dangerous and 161 schools are at high risk due to violence. El Salvador has one of the lowest rates of school attendance in Latin America. Nationally, there is 10% illiteracy, but that figure jumps to 22% in rural areas. Children's education is being affected by the drug and gang related violence; they are learning in a less than ideal environment full of oppression and alarm. El Salvador not only needs to work on improving resources for schooling, but also on addressing the affects of crime and violence on schooling. MINED will unlikely meet its target to lower illiteracy rates to 4% by 2014 because of the impact of gang violence on Salvadoran students. Last year alone, 139 students and six teachers were murdered, most of the deaths occurring near schools. Not only do gangs cause most of this violence, but the recruit school children in violent sections of the city, introducing them to the world of drug trafficking and crime. In fact, drug trafficking and consumption are already present in many schools, and sometimes parents manipulate their children and use them to sell. Despite an agreement signed by the Ministry of Education to implement a prevention and protection strategy for schools, the situation continue to deteriorate.

Make no mistake: the education situation in El Salvador is what I like to call a train-wreck. Too often, we hear about the murders and unspeakable crimes that occur due to drug and gang violence in Latin America. What we fail to understand is how the drug wars and subsequent gang violence affect education in Latin America. Of all we've written about thus far, we've mostly skirted over the biggest example of interconnectedness in Latin America: drugs. This is without a doubt the most negative example of interconnectedness, but it is a huge factor. After all, the drug trafficking business links several Latin American countries, from producers in Colombia to traffickers throughout Central America, to Mexican drug cartels operating on the boarder, to the buyers in the United States. As this article highlights, this dark and dangerous 'business,' fraught with violence, corruption, and fear, is taking a very real toll on the quality of education for primary and secondary school aged children across Central America. For El Salvador, drug and gang related violence seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back. The country's education system is already in dire straights, with high dropout rates, rural illiteracy, and abysmal attendance rates. Yet, the influence of drug and gang related violence is only fueling these educational challenges, in addition to creating new barriers in the fight to provide accessible and quality education in El Salvador.

This article raises several questions for me. The first is, why are students and teachers being targeted by gangs in the first place? It seems to me that students may be looked upon as an easily influenced and susceptible population, attracting drug gang recruiters. Given this mentality, it is easy to account for the high dropout rates in places where drug and gang violence is high: gangs are recruiting new members. I have witnessed this first hand during my most recent research trip to Nicaragua. While in an isolated and mountainous rural community in northern Nicaragua, I spoke with many students who talked about issues the community was having with a bunch of disgruntled youth who formed a pandilla (gang) and were essentially terrorizing the town. The gang even broke into the SAT school building to steal food that is used in the primary school feeding program. Current SAT students who I spoke with indicated that these gangs posed a big impediment to education in this region of Nicaragua. After all, gang recruitment leads to school dropouts, which leads to a less educated population that is engaging in more violence. Drug gang recruitment from schools is not only a dangerous problem; it is a vicious cycle! However, SAT students in Nicaragua also believed that education could be used as a means to get these gang members back on track. In fact, a teacher in the community was attempting to rehabilitate gang members through education, with some success, which I think speaks to the power of education and teacher devotion to learning. While I'm not sure that such an initiative would work in El Salvador, where over 20,000 people belong to one of two major gangs in the country, I think it is an important point to consider.

Now, I'd like to move to the matter of teacher extortion in El Salvador. The article touches on the 'protection payments' that teachers have to pay in exchange for their safety, but the article never gets into why teachers are being singled out by these gangs. Moreover, I think that in terms of quality of education, excessive teacher transfers will obviously have a negative impact on student learning. After all, teachers don't want to remain at one school for a long time because they fear extortion, violence and death at the hands of these merciless gangs.

Finally, I want to touch on two points that I found upsetting. The first is the fact that schools have seen parents using their children to sell drugs. I cannot even imagine this experience. Obviously, desperation drives people to do unimaginable things, and this is certainly one of them. Furthermore, the article highlights how the Ministry of Education and the police force of San Salvador were attempting to address the effects of drug and gang violence in schools. One of their methods was sending groups of school children to prisons to scare them into avoiding a life of crime, which was a highly criticized move. This does not seem to me to be an effective strategy to prevent children from entering into this violent but potentially lucrative business. Rather, education can potentially play a key role in keeping students out of gangs and away from the drug trafficking scene. I hope that the Salvadoran government, as well as Ministries of Education across Latin America that are experiencing the affects of the drug trade on education, can begin to investigate education's role in helping to solve this country-wide problem.