Thread: U.S. SUFFERS FROM ITS OWN BRAND OF HOME-GROWN TERRORISM

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U.S. SUFFERS FROM ITS OWN BRAND OF HOME-GROWN TERRORISM
By Georgie Anne Geyer
Thu Sep 1, 6:21 PM ET



AT THE SAN YSIDRO BORDER CROSSING BETWEEN THE U.S. AND MEXICO AT SAN DIEGO -- Although many noteworthy events have happened in the world this summer, the season will essentially go down as the "Summer of the London Bombings."

Not only were the vicious attacks proof of home-grown terrorism in the Western world, but they stand as a terrifying warning of the way that foreign people and ideas can threaten even countries that have welcomed and aided them.

But that was Britain, most of the stories said. That was radical, fundamentalist, Salafist, Wahabi (so many names for it!) Islam, and despite 9/11, the United States still does not have anything equivalent to the European problem. Over and over, stories reiterated how in America, Muslims have so far better integrated.

There was only one problem: Those stories were missing the fact that America suffers violence from outside that is strikingly similar to Europe's with the Islamists. Central American and Mexican gangs are wreaking havoc across America. They were allowed to come here because of foolhardy American foreign policy decisions, and now they pose at least as serious a problem here as the Islamic terrorists do over there.

Let's go back a little bit, actually to about 1985. The nasty civil wars in Central America were tearing up that fragile, unjust world, particularly in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Young leftists, communists and Catholic reformers were fighting the ancient regimes of the landowners and parts of the middle classes. But tens of thousands of Latinos escaped the violence to the West Coast of America, in particular Los Angeles, where new Central American gangs began fighting the already-established Mexican gangs.

When the gangs and their atrocities caught the attention of American immigration and other officials in the early '90s, authorities began to send them back to their homelands, thus consolidating the disaster.

"Local governments -- which were desperately trying to rebuild after a decade of civil strife -- had no idea who their new citizens really were," investigative reporter Ana Arana wrote in "How the Street Gangs Took Central America," a piece in Foreign Affairs published last spring. "The new U.S. immigration rules banned U.S. officials from disclosing the criminal backgrounds of the deportees. The result, predictably, was a disaster."

Within only a few years, the returnees -- with their gang tattoos, their broken English, their anti-authoritarian attitudes, their crack cocaine, their immigrant smuggling and their violent macho practices of (like the Islamists in Iraq) beheading their enemies -- were thriving. "In El Salvador (a country of 6.5 million people)," Arana went on, "the gangs now boast 10,000 core members and 20,000 young associates; in Honduras (with a population of 6.8 million), the authorities estimate the gang population at 40,000. Today, the gangs regularly battle each other and the police for control of working-class neighborhoods and even entire cities." But their presence is no less dangerous in American cities today.

Trying to keep up with these Latin gangs in America, who increasingly resemble mafia gangs in their organization and tactics (they even have similar secretive big meetings, where they hide away from the "fuzz"), is not easy. Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record), who is sponsoring one of a number of urgent bills to control them that are coming to the fore this summer, has estimated that there are 840,000 active gang members in the United States, operating in every state and in 90 percent of the major cities. They are hierarchical "corporations" that recruit children as young as 7 and kill seven times as many people as organized crime outfits, she says.

Other estimates of gang membership range from 25,000 to 50,000. But everyone agrees that the situation is growing swiftly into a serious problem. The most vicious gang of them all, the Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, is mostly Salvadorans who have sunk their roots particularly into the D.C. and Northern Virginia area, where they recently shot up four people at a very public Target store in Westfield Shoppingtown Wheaton in broad daylight.

There is a lot to say about police work in this new threat to America, but let's leave that for others. Think for a moment about how all of this ties in to America's foreign policy of recent years.

The United States went into the Central American civil wars in the 1980s not with an agile touch and a tough-minded, but flexible, mind-set, but with a blunderbuss that eschewed real concerns about human rights (the horrible massacres of nuns in El Salvador by the military, for instance) or what the region would mean to American immigration. We did little to stop the military-run "death squads" in El Salvador and Honduras, and we backed a questionable group of anti-Marxist, anti-Sandinista guerrillas, the famous "contras," in Nicaragua.

The wars were finally settled mostly by exhaustion with all the killing, and today Nicaragua is very close to being back under the Marxist Sandinistas; El Salvador is so insanely overcrowded that it can produce gang members until kingdom come; and Honduras has made little progress on any level. Yet, ironically, the same radical American neocons who gave us the Iraq war gave us our meddling in Central America in the '80s -- and they are using El Salvador as an example for Iraq.

One does not have to look too far to find some striking similarities between England and the Islamist terrorists and America and the Latino gangs: Both represent a modern tale of industrialized countries having meddled destructively in other cultures and then not protecting themselves from the violent invasions of the very specters they helped create there.

In the end, the deeper considerations that both the European Islamists and the American Latinos pose should be those of intervention by industrialized powers into other countries: It is no longer a possibility, but now an assurance, that they will strike back.

Central America has had civil wars for generations without doing this much destruction to the United States. For tis current crisis we can thank the so called Sanctuary Movement.