In recent years, the small Central American nation of El Salvador has become synonymous in the United States with gangs. One organization in particular, MS-13, has captured popular imagination, usually in racist media caricature. This is thanks in no small part to Donald Trump’s bigoted fearmongering. But well before Trump, the US government was at work fomenting the conditions for the gang’s rise and inflating its international profile.

Jimmy Carter ignored Archbishop Oscar Romero’s plaintive request to sever aid to the Salvadoran military dictatorship in 1980, shortly before Romero’s assassination by US-trained death squads. Ronald Reagan escalated and sustained the bloody civil war that ensued, in which US-backed security forces were responsible for over 85 percent of the seventy thousand deaths and ten thousand disappearances suffered during the twelve-year conflict with the leftist insurgency. It was the Clinton administration that escalated the incarceration and deportation of Salvadoran refugees, many of whom adapted to local gang culture in working-class California neighborhoods and prisons, and approved the draconian 1996 immigration reforms that created the foundations for today’s mass deportation machine.

Bush Jr signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which further subordinated the region’s labor and natural resources to the demands of US capital, ravaging local economies and spurring US-bound migration beyond even wartime levels. And in 2012, the Obama administration designated MS-13 an international criminal organization on par with the Italian Camorra, Mexico’s Zetas, or the Japanese Yakuza, all while accelerating the detention and deportation of migrants to unprecedented levels.