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.

As the Central American gangs have grown, so has the argument over who is to blame for them. Some Central American government officials have accused the United States of inflicting the problem on them, comparing Washington's deportation of gang members to the 1980 Mariel boat lift, when Fidel Castro supposedly emptied his prisons and shipped the inhabitants north to Miami. Meanwhile, U.S. officials, including Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, think the Central Americans should shoulder the problem alone and favor continued deportations. Such mutual recriminations are typical of the debate over gang problems and help explain why the affected countries have yet to develop a united front to deal with them.

It is unrealistic, however, to expect any of the tiny Central American countries, with their fragile governments, to take the lead in organizing a multilateral approach; that role can only be played by the United States. Yet so far Washington has proved reluctant to take that job. Part of the problem is that for the last 15 years U.S. policy toward Central America has essentially been limited to immigration and drugs, and thus the gang problem has fallen through the administrative cracks, with no agency attempting to formulate or oversee an integrated approach. Responsibility for tracking gang activity domestically falls to several different parts of the U.S. government. The FBI has national oversight over any criminal activity associated with violent street gangs. But MS-13's involvement in alien smuggling has also brought it within the jurisdiction of the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, both divisions of the Department of Homeland Security that track crimes committed near or involving the border.

U.S. law enforcement agencies do all have access to the National Crime Information Center, a federal database that lists gang members who have served prison terms. But according to Wesley McBride, president of the California Gang Investigators Association, a more effective nationwide database of all gang members (convicted and unconvicted) is needed, as well as a standard definition of what gangs are and what constitute gang crimes. As McBride told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, "no federal agency collects or disseminates gang-crime statistics or demographics in order to establish the true picture of gangs." A national gang intelligence center, to be headed by the FBI, will be established at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., next year. But to be effective, such an operation would have to be able to coordinate information from across Central America.

In the meantime, different regions within the United States are tackling the mara problem differently, with varied results. A hard-line approach being pursued in Virginia has been criticized by gang experts because it focuses on suppression alone and does not include the two other elements necessary to stamp out gangs: intervention and prevention. "If you do not do the three at the same time, you lose the momentum," said Moreno of the LAPD. Maryland, on the other hand, is following a more effective process: police there have united with a community and educational task force to introduce a tough law enforcement program coupled with a strict intervention element. The Maryland program features both effective policing and after-school programs that can prevent young kids from joining gangs, as well as intervention programs that encourage members to leave their gangs and protect them from retaliation after they do.

Most experts agree, however, that today's most effective approach comes from Los Angeles -- the city where the maras originated (not to mention many other U.S. gangs, including the infamous Crips and Bloods). Los Angeles has experimented with every type of antigang effort. Prosecutors there were the first to launch a federal racketeering case against a gang (the 18th Street Gang) under the tough Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. California attorneys used the statute to send more than a dozen gang leaders to federal prison for life without parole and to dismantle the so-called Mexican Mafia. Police have also taken advantage of new laws that forbid gang members from congregating in known hangouts.

Los Angeles' current approach draws on more than just force. Bratton, the police chief, has warned other U.S. cities not to follow the strategy California used against the gangs in the 1990s, when it focused exclusively on law enforcement. "We think of prison as punishment, but in many instances we're just reinforcing their loyalty to the gang," Bratton said. "To them prison is like going to finishing school." This realization was brought home in 2002, when city crime statistics shot up after a wave of gang members who had been sent to jail in the early 1990s were suddenly released and hit the streets. Local law enforcement officers began to rethink their get-tough approach. "We still don't have enough money, but at least we all agree now that you have to focus on all angles at the same time," said Father Gregory Boyle, a community activist. "You use suppression today and intervention tomorrow and it won't work. It would be like saying, I will feed you today, but I won't clothe you."

As Los Angeles discovered, to be effective, law enforcement has to work with everyone in a community. Accordingly, in 2003, the city's police department created task forces called Community Impact Action Teams that paired local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies with citizen watchdog groups and clergymen, who best knew the neighborhoods. Probation and parole officers were also brought into the effort, as well as representatives from local school districts and city and state prosecutors. The program, which mimicked a similar effort in San Jose, has already had a dramatic impact: crime statistics in January 2005 were down 14 percent from a year earlier.

COME TOGETHER

So far, Central America has yet to adopt such a multifaceted approach, nor have the countries there learned to work together or with the United States -- despite the fact that the gang problem affects all of them. Instead, El Salvador and Honduras continue to pursue their mano dura policies. Meanwhile, the region's more deep-seated problems -- such as dysfunctional politics, rampant corruption, drug smuggling, intense urban poverty, and overpopulation -- remain untouched, and the mano dura campaigns are only taking attention and resources away from the fight against these larger ills.