http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?id=14715

Street gangs, a transnational security threat

By Sam Logan and Ben Bain for ISN Security Watch (07/2/06)


On 1 February, Michael Lopez-Garcia pleaded guilty to brutally murdering an 82-year-old man with a machete in Corpus Christi, Texas last year. He was high on cocaine when he stabbed his elderly friend, according to prosecutors. But what really earned the case more attention from the US authorities was the MS-13 tattoo on Lopez-Garcia’s back - a tattoo signaling membership in and loyalty to one of the US’ most ruthless street gangs, Mara Salvatruchas.

Lopez-Garcia is one of many thousands who since the early 1990s have participated in a cycle of immigration, gang membership, and deportation, the downward spiral of which has led to a real public security problem in Central America and an alarming street gang presence in many US cities.

Lopez-Garcia, a 22-year-old undocumented immigrant, pleaded guilty this month and was sentenced to 50 years in prison, but his legal status leaves no doubt that he will be deported to his home country once his jail term has been served, though he will be over 70 years old by that time.

The Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang and its rival, the 18th Street gang (M-1, consist of loosely connected groups of disaffected youths banded together for protection and support. The dowry for entering this transnational family often involves murder, extortion, and drug smuggling, and its bloody tracks can be seen from Texas to Tegucigalpa.

US deportation policies aggressively send undocumented gang members back to their Central American home countries, where they eventually join up with the increasing number of MS-13 gang members there. The growth of these gangs in Central America is in part a result of convicts like Lopez-Garcia who are sent back to their home countries of Honduras, El Salvador, or Guatemala to which they have little or no connection and where they find solace and company in jails or on the street with other unemployable, tattooed outcasts.

Street gangs have become a top cause of insecurity in Central America, exacerbating pre-existing problems with clandestine death squads, organized crime, high rates of unemployment, and rampant corruption. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is actively seeking solutions to break this 20-year cycle, but the US authorities and their Central American colleagues face a difficult game of catch-up.

US roots
The civil wars that ravaged Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador in the 1980s displaced tens of thousands of Central Americans from their homes into Mexico and the US. Many of those families settled in US cities close to the Mexican border. Cities such as Los Angeles absorbed large communities of Central Americans who sought to carve out a space in poor neighborhoods that had been controlled by Mexican street gangs since as early as the 1950s.

According to Paul Vernon, a former Los Angeles Police Department street cop who worked with gangs, Central American immigrants formed the MS-13 in the 1980s in response to the M-18 gang that was made up of Mexican immigrants who had already established themselves in Los Angeles.

Because the M-18 only allowed full-blooded Mexican immigrants into their group, the Central American immigrants formed their own gang and were soon engaged in theft, extortion, drug dealing, and other criminal activities that centered on a profit motive.

Vernon told ISN Security Watch that the MS chose the number 13 because it is the number of the letter “mâ€