During the armed conflicts of the 70s and 80s, more than 1 million people emigrated as a result of the bloody wars in Central America, where the United States played a key role in the financing of mercenary groups (let’s remember the Contra) used to prevent the taking of power, or the consolidation of power in the case of Nicaragua, of alternative governments. This is the main factor determining much of the contemporary history of Central America, where the violence of the 70s and 80s comes together in the same trajectory, in the same way, and under the same plan as the terrible wave of violence that currently plagues Nicaragua.
Returning to forced emigration, those who took as their destination the north of the American continent were there forced underground and trained in the practices of common crime, vandalism and drug trafficking as a survival response to everyday violence. In 1996 the United States implemented the massive deportation of immigrants. As a result, 200,000 people, a quarter of them imprisoned for being related to the gang culture, were transferred to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
There begins the transnationalization of the Maras (gangs), one of the most famous social manifestations of a broad spectrum of criminality. Violent groups absorbed local gangs and imported codes of a more organized level of criminal violence, with the addition of a flow of illegally acquired weapons in the border states of the United States.