http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/02/07/gang.s ... index.html

L.A. summit seeks to sever international gang ties
POSTED: 8:48 a.m. EST, February 7, 2007

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Los Angeles' pervasive and violent street gangs were once seen as a local problem and not part of an international criminal web, even though gangs such as MS-13 and 18th Street were oozing across borders into Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

A three-day summit beginning Wednesday in Los Angeles will reflect a new emphasis on international cooperation in fighting gangs. Top officials from several Central American and local U.S. police departments, along with the FBI, will focus on sharing information to stop gang members from bringing weapons, criminal plots, and rivalries across borders.

"Now it is most important to take advantage of technology, of our shared economic interests and of our information to find new ways to make sure these violent gangs don't continue to find ways of staying in the dark," said Rodrigo Avila Avilez, director general of El Salvador's national police.

He said Tuesday that the U.S. once regularly deported convicted gang members to their home countries in Central America without tipping off local police of their criminal past.

Earlier this week in El Salvador, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez announced an initiative to improve anti-gang cooperation between the two countries.

Avila Avilez estimated there were as many as 15,000 gang members in El Salvador, a country of about 6.8 million. There are about 6,000 gang members in Guatemala, a country of 12.3 million, said Ervin Johann Sperisen Vernon, director general of Guatemala's national police.

By comparison, police estimate Los Angeles County has about 40,000 gang members.

The spread of Los Angeles-style gangs to Central America is in part the result of mass deportations of young men indoctrinated in the city's violent streets after fleeing their home countries during the civil wars of the 1970s and '80s. In many cases, gang members raised in Los Angeles have more in common culturally with the city than their home countries, police officials said.

"In El Salvador, they speak Spanglish, or Spanish with a Mexican accent," Avila Avilez said. "It gives them a privileged status among fellow gang members."

Robert B. Loosle, who oversees the FBI's gang investigations in Los Angeles, said crimes committed by gangs in Central America serve as a bellwether for potential criminal enterprises in the U.S.

Particularly noteworthy, Loosle said, was a spike in extortion rackets committed by gangs in El Salvador. Armed members of MS-13 regularly shake down neighborhoods for protection money and demand taxes from bus and truck drivers passing through their turf.

"Since members of gangs travel freely across borders, we need to pay attention to new trends they bring with them," Loosle said.

Sperisen Vernon said gangs in Guatemala are increasingly recruiting young children to deal drugs, stash dirty money and even kill rivals.

"It's much more complicated to jail minors," he said.

He and Avila Avilez both mentioned another disturbing trend: the spread of gang recruitment from the disillusioned poor to children from good homes who are too afraid to remain unaffiliated.

"There is a saying in some El Salvador neighborhoods," Avila Avilez said. "It is, 'If you're not in a gang, then you're against gangs."