How a group of metal heads in Los Angeles in the 1980s evolved into a gang that terrorises three countries is the subject of “MS-13” by Steven Dudley, founder of Insight Crime, a site that covers organised crime in Latin America. The story begins with El Salvador’s civil war, which between 1980 and 1992 left 75,000 people dead and over 1m displaced. Like the guns Ronald Reagan’s administration sent down for use against leftist guerrillas, the gang is an American export. Mara Salvatrucha (“Salva” for El Salvador, “trucha” for “savvy”) first referred to a group of refugees in Los Angeles with tastes for crack and heavy metal. When they took to wielding machetes, America started deporting them.

Back in El Salvador, MS-13 thrived on the same ingredients that drove the previous generation to take up arms (minus the ideology): poverty, impunity, a culture of violence, lots of young men and too few opportunities. Salvadoreans living under gang control call their teenage overlords los muchachos (“the boys”), a euphemism once used for the guerrillas. Acknowledging the parallel, Mr Dudley suggests that the term “insurgency” properly captures the gangs’ weaponry and political capital.

As with rebels of earlier decades, El Salvador’s response hardened the hoodlums. Consecutive presidents packed the prisons, but with virtually no rehabilitation they became gang training grounds. Then, in 2012, an ex-guerrilla forged a short-lived truce between gangs and the government that halved the murder rate but horrified elites and the American embassy (the mediator is now in jail). Still, it set a precedent. Deals continued in secret: support from MS-13 probably swayed the tight presidential election of 2014. Yet official policy reverted to all-out war against the gangs, fuelling a new exodus of migrants to the Mexican-American border, including numerous children. Mr Trump claimed, falsely, that many were gang members.

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