Fragile assets: Street gangs and the extortion business

Abstract

This study examines how El Salvadoran street gangs make assets fragile and, hence, amenable to extortion in the territories that they control. Starting from prior Foucauldian inspired accounting research and the literature on stationary bandits, we propose that social actors and their assets are simultaneously enmeshed in relations of government and relations of sovereign power. Using longer-term participant observation data as well as interviews and archival data from El Salvador, the study shows how people and assets are placed into sovereign power relationships, thereby helping to make assets (and people) fragile and thus facilitate extortion. The study also suggests that it is the Salvadoran state, through its taxation practices and its failure to nurture marginal territories, that creates the conditions of possibility for the extortion business.