There is a dead comment pointing this out, but El Salvador gangs are not primarily drug gangs. The article goes into it further, but the short version is: the gangs there are/were focused more on extortion, with a consequence being that they are dramatically less wealthy than drug organizations in Colombia and Mexico.
I don't think the reason they were less wealthy was because they were primarily in extortion and not drugs, it was because they hadn't created a funnel for money from wealthier countries to enter their pockets.
I believe some Russian and North Korean gangs have figured out how to do this via extortion (cyber-crime), but the drug trade seems to be another popular way to do it.
I meant more in relation to other Latin American gangs, which are wealthy because of drugs. The El Salvador gangs are extorting low income people in El Salvador, so cyber crime is not really a lucrative thing.
The article goes in depth on this. Basically gangs exist on a spectrum of “business” vs “honor”. Business gangs (drug cartels, mafia etc) concerned with money and the goal is being rich and use illegal means to do so. Honor gangs are concerned with righteousness and respect, their goal is power/control/respect, examples are ms13 in El Salvador, Al qida/taliban,
Yes, I too read the article, though that was really only one part of the overall theory. The other parts being that poor gangsters engage in more risky behaviour because they don't have as much to lose, and that the overall economic reality of widespread poverty, along with relative incorruptibility of the police and the youth of the average gang member made it harder for them to get organized and accumulate wealth.
Overall, it seems like the gangs are victim of the same cycle that poor people everywhere are a victim of: Being poor makes it harder to make better decisions to not be poor. In other latin american countries which were perhaps somewhat wealthier (while still poor by the standards of developed countries), the gangs were better able to accumulate capital which allowed them to improve their organization and eventually get into higher-margin activities that required that organization. In El Salvadore, the gangs were never able to "pick themselves up by their bootstrap" so to speak.
While new entrants to gangs in other latin american countries may also be poor, the ones who survive and avoid imprisonment long enough to move up in the ranks have the opportunity to accumulate a relatively considerable amount of wealth (with real compensation being very top-heavy, like any other organization), and the overall higher wealth of those gangs allows for better organization.
The profit/honor dichotomy being reflected on isn't unrelated to the other issues.. the gangs which have nothing to lose in terms of wealth have only their honor (which is perhaps a type of perceived or coerced power, even it is primarily over their also-poor neighbours). The theory presented by the author is that the gangs couldn't move towards the profit-focused side of the dichotomy, because they were too poor to have those opportunities in the first place.
The fact that they were extorting their poor neighbours is a reflection of the gangs themselves being poor and poorly organized, but the point I was making above is that being in extortion isn't intrinsically the cause of them being less wealthy, the cause was targeting other poor El Salvadorans due to disorganization, rather than extracting money from wealthier pockets (whether that be from drugs, or yes, also extortion)
