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Baggy jeans bought with stolen necklaces. An attitude, a tattoo and a supply of crack cocaine. Malvin Antario looks like a gang leader from Los Angeles. But his home in Soyapango, in El Salvador, is a far cry from even the most deprived LA housing estate.
The corrugated iron shacks have no running water. There are flies and rats. Sewage runs through the streets of this slum, which is separated from slightly better-off neighbourhoods by a graffiti-covered wall.
"I wanted to be able to get money for drugs and clothes. I wanted to fit in, I wanted something to do, so I joined the 18th Street," says Antario.
The 18th Street is one of several gangs in El Salvador with roots in LA, introduced when the United States started deporting legal and illegal Salvadorean immigrants with US criminal records, following the end of El Salvador's 12-year civil war in 1992.
In the last fiscal year the US deported 62,359 criminals, up from 37,000 three years earlier. But while the deportations are marginally lowering crime rates, freeing up prison space and saving taxpayers' money in the US, they are leading to a proliferation of US gang habits in El Salvador and other countries in Central America.
"Kids see deported gang members from LA who have nice clothes, who do things for money, like sell drugs and do tattoos, and they want to be like them. They don't want to be like their dad working in the fields or their mother washing clothes," says William Huezo, an LA deportee living in the capital, San Salvador.
The two main gangs in El Salvador are the 18th Street and Mara Salvatrucha, both exported from LA. The cities and even rural areas have been divided between these well-armed rival factions, who mark their territories with graffiti. As a result of their activity, crime has soared.
Gang members are thought to be responsible for 10% of El Salvador's staggering annual murder rate of 120 per 100,000 people (Britain has a rate of less than two per 100,000, the US eight per 100,000). Not only do they kill each other, but also passers-by caught in the crossfire. They rob backpackers, kidnap, steal cars, deal drugs and extort money from businesses.
"More than 300 deported Salvadoreans arrive in the country from the US every month. These are people who have not just been in jail but have often committed crimes after they have left jail. They are having a huge impact on the country," saysEduardo Alfonso Linares, head of San Salvador's police force.
But psychologists say the damage done by El Salvador's civil war is also responsible for the rise in membership of gangs. The war took the lives of more than 75,000 people.
As a result, many family units have been destroyed, leaving children in the care of people to whom they are only loosely related. Often these relatives cannot afford to send their children to school.
Meanwhile gang life gives young people something to do and a sense of belonging.
"The war has made people much more tolerant of violence. People tend to solve everyday disputes with violence. This has been passed down to the next generation," says Marcela Smutt, a consultant on gangs for a United Nations research project Violence in a Society in Transition.
El Salvador's congress is debating whether to try children as young as 14 in adult courts, and has agreed to fund more jails for juveniles. But organisations working with children say these are not the right answers.
"Gangs in big numbers are an expression of social exclusion. But what is the government doing? They're constructing more jails instead of providing schools and asking for more family responsibility," says Karla Hanania de Varela, child rights officer at Unicef.
Some government members say the heart of the problem lies with Washington's policy, and have complained to President Clinton.
"Many violent offences, like murder and kidnapping, are committed by young people who have been in the US and are sent back here with no warning. As these deportations increase, so do crime rates," says Milagro Hernandez, of the justice department.
But the signs from the US are that, rather than examine the knock-on criminal effect its policy is having abroad, it is going to step up its deportation of immigrants with criminal records.
• The Association of Journalists of El Salvador demanded last week that President Francisco Flores explain why a radio programme on a state-run station was cancelled because of its frequent criticism of the government.
"We are concerned at the fact that the station's director said she had orders from superiors to cancel the programme, because of dissatisfaction with the opinions it expressed, some critical of the government," the press association said in a statement.
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