The Most Dangerous Gang in America?
The signs of a new threat in northern Virginia emerged ominously in blood-spattered urban streets and rural scrub. Two summers ago the body of a young woman who had informed against her former gang associates was found on the banks of the Shenandoah River, repeatedly stabbed and her head nearly severed. Last May in Alexandria, gang members armed with machetes hacked away at a member of the South Side Locos, slicing off some of his fingers and leaving others dangling by a shred of skin. Only a week later in Herndon, a member of the 18th Street gang was pumped full of .38-caliber bullets, while his female companion, who tried to flee, was shot in the back. The assailant, according to a witness, had a large tattoo emblazoned on his forehead. It read MS, for Mara Salvatrucha, the gang allegedly responsible for all these attacks.
At the nearby headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents—many of whom live in these communities—fielded the reports with mounting alarm. But Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, wasn’t terrifying just northern Virginia. “They were popping up everywhere,” says Chris Swecker, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division. “It seemed like we were hearing more and more about MS-13.” Then one day last fall, FBI Director Robert Mueller called Swecker into his office. “You have a mandate to go out and address this gang,” Mueller told him. Mueller declared MS-13 the top priority of the bureau’s criminal-enterprise branch—which targets organized crime—and authorized the creation of a new national task force to combat it. The task force, which includes agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), aims to take on MS-13 much as the FBI once tackled the Mafia.
Composed of mostly Salvadorans and other Central Americans—many of them undocumented—the gang has a uniquely international profile, with an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members in 33 states in the United States (out of more than 700,000 gang members overall), and tens of thousands more in Central America. It’s considered the fastest-growing, most violent and least understood of the nation’s street gangs—in part because U.S. law enforcement has not been watching as closely as it might have. As authorities have focused their attention on the war against terrorism, MS-13 has proliferated. In the FBI’s D.C. field office, the number of agents dedicated to gang investigations declined by 50 percent. “There was a definite shift in resources post-9/11 toward terrorism,” says Michael Mason, assistant director in charge of that office. “As a result, we had fewer resources to focus on gangs,” though he adds that the bureau made up for any shortfall by leveraging resources from other agencies. In recent weeks, authorities have made strides against MS-13: a gang leader accused of orchestrating a December bus bombing in Honduras that killed 28 people was arrested in Texas in February, and a recent seven-city sweep by ICE netted more than 100 reputed MS-13 members. But Robert Clifford, head of the new national task force, says “no single law-enforcement action is really going to deal the type of blow” necessary to dismantle the gang. No one is more interested in busting up MS-13 than leaders of the Latino community, who live with the fear and fallout of the gang’s savage actions.
MS-13 got started in Los Angeles in the 1980s by Salvadorans fleeing a civil war. Many of the kids grew up surrounded by violence. Del Hendrixson of Bajito Onda, a gang-outreach program, remembers an MS-13 member who recounted one of his earliest memories: guarding the family’s crops at the age of 4, armed with a machete, alone at night. When he and others reached the mean streets of the L.A. ghetto, Mexican gangs preyed on them. The newcomers’ response: to band together in a mara, or “posse,” composed of salvatruchas, or “street-tough Salvadorans” (the “13” is a gang number associated with southern California). Over time, the gang’s ranks grew, adding former paramilitaries with weapons training and a taste for atrocity. MS-13 eventually adopted a variety of rackets, from extortion to drug trafficking. When law enforcement cracked down and deported planeloads of members, the deportees quickly created MS-13 outposts in El Salvador and neighboring countries like Honduras and Guatemala.
Flush with new recruits from Central America, whether fleeing the law or accompanying parents seeking work along the immigrant trail, MS-13 members have set up cliques—geographically defined subgroups—in such remote redoubts as Boise, Idaho, and Omaha, Neb. In these new settings, gang culture often morphs. “Everything gets bastardized as it leaves the center,” says Wes McBride, president of the California Gang Investigators Association. While machete attacks might occur on the East Coast, they’re rare on the West Coast. While car thefts and drug trafficking might be big in North Carolina, gang-on-gang violence predominates in Virginia. It’s that decentralized nature of MS-13—with no clear hierarchy or structure—that makes it so vexing to authorities. “Taking out the heart of the leadership is very hard if there is no definitive leadership,” says one federal law-enforcement official.
As further followup in regards to the Texas border problem:
EDCOUCH — The mid-April incident looked like a typical one for the Edcouch Police Department: two men caught and charged with multiple counts of aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon while committing a home invasion.
But something stood out to Police Chief Jose Perez as one of the suspects was being interviewed by his officers. The male suspect, who said he lived in the Elsa area but was really an undocumented Mexican citizen, said in Spanish to watch out for the Mara Salvatrucha-Treces, also known as the Maras or MS-13. The group has ties to Central America but began forming in Los Angeles in the 1980s among immigrants from El Salvador, according to national gang identification and training expert Robert Walker’s Gangs Or Us Web site.
Perez said the suspect was later interviewed by U.S. Border Patrol agents but took back his MS-13 threat.
"Since they are a more violent organization, their members are more apt to do their time than name other people and face the risk of they themselves being kidnapped and killed," he said.
But Perez said if there was one person claiming ties to the Maras, there could be others working in the area.
"I’m certain they are here and certain they are operating with the drug organizations," he said.
Legislation filed last week in Congress by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., called for denying people seeking entry into the United States paperwork if they were thought to have international gang ties. The bill also gives up to 10 years of prison time to those caught bringing gang members into the country. His bill, which amends a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, was read twice on the Senate floor and forwarded to the Committee on the Judiciary.
Staff members in Nelson’s Washington, D.C., office did not answer two requests The Monitor made last week seeking comments about the legislation.
But Nelson talked June 6 about the dangers of the Maras on the Senate floor. He said the group was involved in murders, drug trafficking, rape, robbery and other crimes, and was a problem in cities such as Baltimore, New York, Miami and Washington, D.C.
Nelson said there were between 8,000 to 10,000 MS-13 members in America now who might have ties to al-Qaida, the terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden and masterminds of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"The time to act to stop the spread of this gang is now, before they are able to spread their web of violence to more cities and areas within the United States," Nelson told senators.
The MS-13s garnered attention in February when its Honduran branch leader, Ebner Anibal Rivera-Paz, was stopped and arrested at the Border Patrol’s Falfurrias checkpoint in Brooks County. Rivera-Paz was connected to a bus shooting in Honduras on Dec. 23, 2004, in which 28 women and children were killed.
Roy Cervantes, spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector in McAllen, said agents training Honduran law enforcement people in technology received information about Rivera-Paz’s trip to the United States to avoid being arrested for the bus incident. The lead for them to look for was passed to Border Patrol agents in the United States him.
"Most of these gang members will make an illegal entry through the river," Cervantes said. "When he was arrested, he initially provided the name Franklin Jairo Rivera Hernandez, but through IAFIS (Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System) records check, even though he was proving an alias, the database clearly identified him as Ebner Rivera-Paz because he had an extensive criminal history in the United States."
Cervantes said 26 MS-13 members have been arrested and later prosecuted and deported throughout the sector during the 2004-2005 fiscal year. He said they were not armed when arrested. Border Patrol agents also had two "encounters" with MS-13 gang members that were identified as having gang ties, Cervantes said.
"The problem is that these hardened gang members don’t fear the police, they don’t fear the court system, but they do fear deportation," he said. "We get their attention with deportation because ultimately that sends them to their country of origin where they might be wanted for a serious crime, whether it is murder or robbery."
Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño said Nelson’s legislation sounded good, but law enforcement agencies would have to work harder to prove people were members of internationally-based gangs. He said some people do not wear the tattoos traditionally linked with membership in the Maras or local groups like the Tri-City Bombers or Mexican Mafia.
"You have to rely on foreign intelligence probably, which may be flawed," the sheriff said. "They say they are going to maximize the sentencing or punishment for the people’s smugglers. Well, that might be a good deal right there because they are creating a heck of a problem. If it helps, great."
Treviño said having more manpower working to gain the trust of residents in neighborhoods was a way to get additional information on illegal activities.
"If we could tap into just 10 percent of community knowledge of what is going on, we would be rocking and rolling," the sheriff said.
Treviño said Maras have not been specifically detected yet in the county. He said the group uses the county as a passage to get to larger cities, like Dallas and Houston.
McAllen Police Chief Victor Rodriguez said the drug trade typically follows the immigration routes for people seeking work in the United States. This is why the city has not had a problem with the Maras.
Rodriguez said creating tougher legislation was typically how Congress dealt with issues such as immigration and gang activities. He said he was not sure if Nelson’s proposed bill would curb these problems or not.