Many young Salvadoran migrants who fled civil war and misery in the suburbs of Los Angeles, in the eighties, found other forms of shelter and care, unrelated to any national roots: the Maras. In the late nineties, the huge amounts of deportees from the process of criminalization and stigmatization of foreign otherness that inhabited the ghettos of North America were re stationed in the Central American ghettos and their prisions extensions. Today punitive policies and its media arm define Maras as “transnational criminal organization gangs.” This article will try to make a critical reading of the violence that is at the base of that interpretive framework; an attempt to dismantle that which that gaze makes invisible for it only sees what is suggested to fear and the opinion, participating in the reproduction of what it supposedly condemns: violence.