culanth.org Revolution Betrayed — Cultural Anthropology by Jon Carter 13-16 minutes ( Con traducción al español) In 2006, I took a bus from Tegucigalpa in Honduras to Managua, Nicaragua. As the bus departed, a woman dropped her bag onto the seat beside me. We started talking, and she said that she was a graduate student from Spain. I told her I was also a graduate student, from the United States. “What do you study?” she asked. I cringed. I hated this question, inevitable though it was. I was doing research on gangs, mainly the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13), and I did not want to come across as a romantic. Gangs were a deadly reality for many. Mentioning the MS13 so early in a conversation with a stranger was not ideal. But that day, on the bus, it came out like a Freudian slip, and instead of recoiling, the woman leaned forward. She was also interested in the gangs. In fact, she had come to Honduras with a team of graduate students. Their advisor’s method was to introduce sociological concepts to gangs and then assess the results. “The goal is to find out if these techniques can transform them into a revolutionary vanguard,” she told me. It had not gone well. “We give the gang leadership different things to read, but they don’t read it,” she said. “None of them care about social