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July 11, 2006
TV Review
‘18 With a Bullet’: Exporting U.S. Gang Life to El Salvador
By ANITA GATES
The documentary “18 With a Bullet” suggests that crime doesn’t pay much. Young members of the 18 street gang in San Salvador, this Wide Angle special on PBS reports, earn about $60 a week selling marijuana. No wonder they have to shake down bus drivers for protection money too.

But the film has a larger, more disturbing point. Usually, when the United States is criticized for exporting American culture and values, the references are to fast food, sugary beverages, violent movies and inane television shows. Now “18 With a Bullet” illustrates the ways this country is exporting gang culture as well.

Salvadorans who emigrate to Los Angeles, for instance, sometimes become part of street gangs there. When these young criminals are deported to their home country, as many were after the civil war ended there in 1992, they just set up shop in the new location.

This film concentrates on 18 (begun as the 18th Street Gang in Los Angeles), which is determined to win its war with a rival gang, MS-13. An older member of 18, a 30-year-old veteran known as Slappy, allows himself to be filmed while hiding from the police, who are seeking him on a homicide charge. The cameras even follow him to a barber, where he gets a haircut that he hopes will make him less recognizable.

Slappy has a wife and three sons, and says he hopes for a better life for them. Now that he has children, he says, he feels sort of bad about having killed men who had children of their own.

The film isn’t always as shocking as it wants to be, if only because American viewers have been desensitized by so many news reports about gang violence. It isn’t big news, for instance, when one young man instructs his fellow gang members not to “sell crack to your homeboys” because “when you sell to homeboys, you’re killing them.” It is only moderately noteworthy that the local prison is said to be run by the gangs.

Even when one boy announces, “I love my gang more than my mother,” it is almost understandable. After all, she left him to move to the United States when he was 6 months old. His more portentous comment is a casual remark later that he hopes to live to be 37. Or maybe even 39.

And the sight of four young women knocking another young woman to the ground and kicking her hard for a predetermined number of seconds as part of an initiation is pretty brutal. (Male gang members are later shown doing the same thing to punish a member who broke a rule.)

The makers of “18 With a Bullet” don’t fully convey the extent of the crisis in El Salvador, where the homicide rate is said to be roughly seven times that of the United States. But the program does hint at the hopelessness when a young man explains why he kills.

“It’s for the cause,” he says.

What cause? Neither of the gangs appears to stand for anything in particular. As the boy also says, it’s just that it’s “either us or them.”

WIDE ANGLE

18 With a Bullet

On most PBS stations Tuesday night (check local listings).

Directed by Ricardo Pollack; Stephen Segaller, executive producer; Pamela Hogan, series producer; Andy Halper, senior producer. Produced by Thirteen/WNET New York.