Some History of Central American Gangs

Gangs without borders
Violent Central American gangs were born in the USA, returned to their homeland and now migrate back and forth between here and there

Victor J. Blue
San Francisco Chronicle

In the aftermath of a prison riot in southern Guatemala, the eyes that peer out amid the tattoo of a skull covering half his face are contorted in pain as fellow inmates care for his bleeding shoulder. They are members of gangs, whose stories began in Los Angeles and then were exported to Central America. There the gangs grew, became even more violent, and now they are heading back to the United States.

Known as maras, the gangs were formed in the 1980s, when immigrants fleeing the brutal civil war in El Salvador settled in Los Angeles.

To protect themselves from already established L.A. street gangs, these immigrants banded together and formed their own. They began flooding back to Central America in 1996, when the United States began to deport immigrants convicted of felonies here. Many returned to a country they hardly knew. But in the chaos and desperation of post-war El Salvador, gangs found fertile ground, and their ranks swelled.

From there the gangs spread, following the stream of immigrants northward into neighboring Honduras and Guatemala, and into southern Mexico.

Now they can also be found across the United States. In February 2005, a nationwide sweep by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies netted 103 Central American gang members in several states. Another sweep in August made hundreds of more arrests. Estimates put the number of Central American gang members in the United States at more than 25,000 in as many as 33 states.

And gangs are blamed for much of the violence that plagues Central America.

The existence of the gangs and their facile migration back and forth across the southern U.S. border is a seldom considered aspect of the current immigration debate going on in this country, but the gangs carry ramifications for whatever legislation is eventually approved by Congress.

The head of U.S. Army Southern Command, Gen. Bantz Craddock , testified before Congress last year that there were an estimated 70,000 mareros (gangsters) in Central America. The two most feared maras (which take their name from the Spanish word for "army ants") are the 18th Street Gangsters, or Mara 18, and the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Comparable to the Crips and Bloods in this country, the 18th Street Gangsters and Mara Salvatrucha are bitter rivals.

They distinguish themselves from each other by their intricate and expansive tattoos and hand signs that signal their gang allegiance.

Gang members in Guatemala walk a thin line -- they are both killers and victims of the violence that plagues Central America.

Nearly 10 years after the signing of the peace accords that ended Guatemala's civil war, the country is mired in violence and desperation. The Guatemalan daily Siglo Veintiuno counted at least 1,966 killings in Guatemala from July 2004 to July 2005. The 2004 homicide rate in Guatemala was more than 34 per 100,000, according to the U.S. congressional report. The U.S. rate was less than 6 per 100,000. Gangs are blamed for much of Guatemala's violence.

The maras are a product of the meanest streets in Guatemala, a country in which 75 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. There is little employment, and almost no hope of finding it. The gangs make money by setting up extortion rackets that must be defended from rival gangs. Impuestos, or self-styled taxes, that they levy against bus drivers, shopkeepers, even homeowners, are their main source of income. Gangs have been known to levy "rape taxes" on the parents of young neighborhood girls. The payoffs are intended to ensure their daughters are not attacked.

The maras thrive in sprawling shantytowns like La Mezquital, which cling to the canyons surrounding Guatemala City. Most of these settlements started as squatter communities, and life here can be difficult, dangerous and short.

Sitting on the roof of a spare cinderblock house in La Mezquital as the sun sets and a distant volcano lets loose a plume of ash, two cousins in their early 20s talk about life in 18th Street Gangsters. They are members of the Solo Para Locos clique, a sort of mini-gang within the 18th Street Gangsters. They say they joined for protection from neighborhood thugs and gangsters from other neighborhoods. But in time, tensions between the gangs escalated and the violence spiraled out of control.

The clique had total control of its neighborhood when it was part of a larger network of loosely tied cliques that paid a portion of the "taxes" they collected to higher-ups. The cousins spoke of shadowy meetings on barren soccer fields at night where as many as 300 mareros would gather.
But times have changed. Police crackdowns have become brutal. The cousins say they are afraid to leave their homes at night. They say they would gladly work in any job if they could just find one. Rather than heartless tough guys, many of them seem confused and vulnerable.

For years, it seemed as though the maras operated unopposed across Central America, but they have begun to feel the pressure of societies tired of violence and crime.

El Salvador and Honduras have both passed tough anti-gang legislation, known as mano dura, or iron fist, laws. In Guatemala, police patrols round up suspected gang members with the help of army units.

The gangs face other pressures as well. In July, gang members en masse in the town of Palin in the province of Escuintla renounced their gang affiliations and joined a local evangelical congregation, The Church of Holiness and Power. Many of them became church members because they feared becoming victims of vigilante violence, as happened to three gang members in a nearby town. These mareros see born-again style Christian devotion as their only path out of the la vida loca and the first step toward redemption for their crimes.

Meanwhile, la vida loca continues.

On the morning of Aug. 15, at 10 minutes to 9, members of the Mara Salvatrucha threw three grenades into a dormitory housing members of the Mara 18 at the El Hoyon prison in Escuintla, Guatemala. They then walked in and shot or stabbed the survivors to death. It was the worst prison riot in Guatemala in years, part of a coordinated attack on the Mara 18 by the Mara Salvatrucha in five prisons across the country.

I interviewed gang members in the hospital who survived the attack. They accused the guards of taking bribes to sneak in a backpack containing the three grenades and seven pistols.

Eighteen were killed in the prison, and more than 50 injured, including the prisoner with the tattooed skull on his face, who was apparently wounded by shrapnel from one of the grenades.

By attacking the Mara 18, the Mara Salvatrucha ruptured a long-standing truce within the prison system. Known as the SUR, an acronym for Southern United Race, the pact stipulated that while the gangs would remain deadly rivals outside prison, on the inside they would live in peace. Afterward, the bitter rivals were separated in different facilities.

But gang violence on the street isn't stopped so readily. Far from the prison, Rolando Munoz negotiates the El Guarda market in Guatemala City, looking for a bus to take him across town to the internal affairs office of the National Police. As the father of a gang member, Rolando knows the violence that reaches beyond Guatemala's prisons.

When he finally finds the right bus, he pulls himself onto it and collapses into the last seat in the back. His eyes are red, his face lined, he looks exhausted. He has been to his local public ministry office and to a satellite office of the human rights commission. After a visit to the Police Office of Professional Responsibility, he will visit the city morgue to look over the unidentified corpses that arrive daily, many displaying signs of torture.

This has been his ritual every day for two weeks, since July 18, when his son Estuardo disappeared. According to eyewitnesses, a police patrol took Estuardo from the street in broad daylight. His family has heard nothing from him since. The police deny making the arrest and say they have no knowledge of him.

Each day, Rolando repeats his journey into the labyrinth of Guatemalan bureaucracy searching for information on his missing son. He comes home to his wife Marina, whose hope of finding their son wanes every day.

"I know I am poor, that I cannot read, that I cannot expect justice," she says. "I only want my son's body, to end the waiting."

Rolando's quest and Marina's suffering are sadly familiar in Guatemala. The killings and disappearances of gang members eerily resemble those that took place in the mid-1980s during Guatemala's civil war. More than 200,000 people were killed or "disappeared" by the government security forces, according to a United Nations report.

Rolando's neighbors show us around their tin shacks, pointing out bullet holes from high-caliber rounds that recently have pierced the thin walls.

There's not much sympathy for the maras in government offices. Guatemalan Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann summed up the government view, telling reporters: "The mareros are a bunch of delinquents, rapists and killers that impact the poorest of this country; they deserve nothing more than police and penal persecution."

The gangs are the most fearsome expression of desperation fostered at the margins of society and then shuttled back and forth between Central America and the United States. Little is likely to change, as a U.S. congressional report concluded, unless leaders here and there "attack the underlying factors of poverty and unemployment that have contributed to the rise in gang activity."

Failing that, no matter what new immigration policies are adopted by this country, there will be little to prevent the gangs from continuing to enlist new members in Central America and returning north to the United States, where they first formed. And the vicious cycle of gang activity north and south will almost certainly go on unchecked.

To hear Victor J. Blue talk about Central American gangs, download the podcast and view pictures at sfgate.com/blogs/podcasts

Victor Blue is a freelance writer and photographer based in San Francisco. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.