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.

Central American governments have also used their highly publicized crackdowns on youth gangs to avoid action on another urgent priority: strengthening local democratic institutions. Since the end of the Central American civil wars in the early 1990s, judicial, legislative, and social reforms have stalled amid partisan infighting, and local political debates remain split along the same left-right fault lines that caused bloodshed two decades ago.

Corruption also remains a persistent scourge and has helped prevent a more effective antigang strategy from emerging. In Guatemala, the Anti-Narcotics Operations Department (the local equivalent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration) had to be dismantled in November 2002 after investigators found that 320 of its officials were in the pay of local criminals. Guatemala's parliament has also refused a UN offer to help it fight organized crime, rejecting the establishment of a UN-appointed investigative commission. It is no coincidence that many criminal syndicates there are run by retired military officers with political connections.

The United States needs to help Central America craft a multilevel and multicountry approach to its gang problem. In January 2005, the U.S. Justice Department quietly created an FBI task force to deal with MS-13. The new group will coordinate activities with immigration officials, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, as well as local law enforcement agencies. In a positive first step, the task force has introduced new regulations that will permit U.S. officials to inform their counterparts in Central America about the criminal backgrounds of future deportees. Other signs, however, are less promising. The top-heavy task force has only focused on law enforcement so far. To be successful, the group must be made more international and have its ambit expanded to include helping strengthen Central American institutions. To ensure that the strategy is comprehensive, the gang task force should also include representatives from educational and social services departments.

Regional options effective in one country should be replicated in others. El Salvador's national police, for example, have benefited from reforms suggested and training provided by the U.S. Justice Department's International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP). In the last five years, ICITAP has helped El Salvador focus on community policing and improve internal and external communications. As a result, El Salvador is now the only country in the region with a working national emergency police response system, a computerized crime analysis and deployment network similar to that used by the New York City Police Department, and an Intranet that connects the precincts internally. Emphasizing such functions was a departure for ICITAP, which usually focuses on intelligence gathering. But it helped El Salvador's police force learn how to serve the community -- a lesson the police badly needed. ICITAP also helped El Salvador tighten controls on petty corruption, which had bled budgets, and set up an internal affairs department, which removed 5,000 corrupt cops in three years. Similar tactics should be used in neighboring countries.

The region should also implement a three-pronged approach to gangs, one that includes prevention, suppression, and intervention. Prison systems must be transformed so that they no longer serve as training grounds for new gang members. In California, police now avoid placing competing gangs in the same facilities. Central America should do the same, to avoid the sort of clashes that recently occurred in Honduras and El Salvador when M-18 and MS-13 members were thrown into the same prisons.

School programs should also be developed to prevent young people from joining gangs in the first place. To help pay for them, the United States can teach Central America to harness its business sector to fund after-school programs and job training for low-income youth. In El Salvador, the government has already convinced private groups to fund witness protection programs and jobs for former gang members who choose to join the mainstream. Such efforts should be promoted at a regional level.

To facilitate suppression, police should focus heavily on hard-core gang members who refuse to give up their criminal lives. Central American legislators should introduce antigang and antidrug measures that make it a felony to engage in related activities within a mile radius of schools, which are currently prime recruiting grounds for the maras. Probation officers should also be brought into the circle of active antigang officials, since keeping close tabs on gang members after they leave prison is important. U.S. and Central American law enforcement agencies should also exchange information on people smugglers. And Central American leaders should offer reassurances that they will prosecute those caught bringing illegal immigrants to the United States.

Washington should also help Central America's various police forces establish an integrated computer system that tracks criminals across borders, incorporating data on people smugglers as well. And U.S. immigration policies must be formally changed to provide information on the criminal records of all deportees. Some observers have even suggested that the United States could help bear the brunt of the gang problem by having Central American gang members serve their prison terms in the United States.

Together, such tactics have a chance of stemming the onslaught of Central America's maras. The reforms should be instituted as quickly as possible, however. With every day that governments wait, the gangs grow in strength and the danger they pose becomes greater. If Central America hopes to escape the chaos of its past and finally make the transition to stable, democratic governance, it needs to act fast to tackle the maras. And the United States must help.