How the Street Gangs Took Central America

Ana Arana

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005

Summary:  For a decade, the United States has exported its gang problem, sending Central American-born criminals back to their homelands -- without warning local governments. The result has been an explosive rise of vicious, transnational gangs that now threaten the stability of the region's fragile democracies. As Washington fiddles, the gangs are growing, spreading north into Mexico and back to the United States.

Ana Arana is an investigative journalist who has reported extensively on Latin America.

HOMEWARD BOUND

In Tapachula, a Mexican city on the Guatemalan border, the maras began to prey on poor immigrants heading north to enter the United States illegally. Maiming and killing these undocumented workers became a sort of marketing message for the gangs: it sent a warning that only those who paid gang-connected "coyotes" (who often charge $5,000 to $8,000 a head) to smuggle them into the United States would make it alive.

Meanwhile, MS-13 set up shop in seven Mexican states, from Chiapas, in the south, all the way up to Tamaulipas, on the U.S. border. According to the Mexican National Migration Institute, MS-13 quickly established working relationships with a number of new Mexican drug cartels, helping them wrest control of various U.S. drug markets from more established smuggling rings. As they expanded northward, meanwhile, the maras left in their wake what had become their traditional trademark: the tortured bodies of young women.

In the last two years, Central American members of MS-13 have begun to return to the United States itself. This time, however, they are appearing in nontraditional areas, ranging from New York City to suburban Maryland and Massachusetts -- anywhere there are significant Salvadoran populations. Local authorities are often unaware of the newcomers' actual identities, assuming that they come from Southern California. Once ensconced, the gangs grow quickly, using their connections to alien-smuggling rings to ensure a steady supply of recruits. Many of their new members are children who were left behind in Central America when their parents moved illegally to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. Now they are rejoining their parents -- but often after they have already been recruited by the maras in the rough neighborhoods where they grew up.

MS-13 may have originated in the United States during the early 1980s, but the gang that has recently returned to the country is much more dangerous than its original incarnation. The group has grown more sophisticated and developed a taste for (and skills with) more high-powered weaponry (AK-47s, left over from the recent civil wars, are easily obtained in Central America). At the same time, in the Washington, D.C., area, where MS-13 now has an estimated 5,000 members, it has begun using machetes (the traditional weapon of the Central American peasant) as a favorite killing tool.

Throughout the United States, the returning maras have quickly engaged in a variety of criminal enterprises. "They are not sophisticated enough to move into financial crime," said one U.S. official, "but they can earn a lot of money hauling people into the United States." The gangs engage in car theft and other types of robbery and traffic in stolen documents, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines, using children as couriers and to distract the police. "Having community kids dressing like them and organized in small cliques can deflect attention from the big guys," said Detective Tony Moreno of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Besides the usual problems caused by such activity, the maras have recently raised other, more specific security threats. In September 2004, U.S. officials grew concerned when Honduran authorities reported sighting in Tegucigalpa a known al Qaeda operative named Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, and rumors circulated of a meeting between the jihadists and the maras. Central American officials quickly denied that any such meeting had taken place. But the danger of such a link being established remains very real: "If they can smuggle people looking for a job [into the United States]," said Joe Torres, an immigration official, "they can smuggle people interested in terror."

BLAME GAME