evidence: Those 4000 deportees, and we’ll move quickly now in our timeline, have now become 60,000 gang members. They are now present in all 14 states of El Salvador. After years of disregarding the problem, and hard line measures taken since 2003 to address it (when repression was thought to be the avenue to a solution, though each year only proved to show that repression increased gang violence in terms of homicides and gang numbers), these failed policies left El Salvador with the highest murder rate in the world by 2009. The rate was of 71 homicides per 100,000 people. [...] Of course, this primarily affects the young in the rural areas. The marginalized are dominated by the gangs. 50 to 60 percent of Salvadorans live in these areas. The people in these areas are facing a war. The young, those between 9 and 17 years old that aren’t involved in gangs, are caught in the crossfire. The police see them as gang members and treat them as such. There have been cases of extra-judicial executions of people that weren’t gang members. Then also, there are the pressures and threats from the gang itself to join. These young people live between two powerful and violent forces. They have no choice but to resign themselves to a hard life of uncertainty, closed off inside their homes, with miserable wages—or try to flee the country in search of a better life.