History was repeating itself with a different cast. The negotiators of the truce thought of it as a second coming of the Acuerdos de Paz, signed twenty years earlier between the guerrillas and the military. “We’re talking about an army of seventy thousand men,” one of them said, in reference to the gangs. “There’s no army in the region that can combat them.” Just like the old guerrillas, many of the gangsters agreed to hand over their weapons in public ceremonies; when they did, authorities found some of the M16s and a Claymore mine that the US government had given the Salvadoran military
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