Gazette - The Central American maras

COVER SECTION

Imported gang culture fuels violence

By Héctor Lombardo Morales Rodríguez
Assistant Prosecutor,
Public Prosecutor’s Office
Guatemala

At the beginning of the 1980s, most Central American countries were embroiled in civil wars fuelled by opposing political ideologies and foreign intervention. These conflicts resulted in thousands of deaths and the migration of large numbers of Central Americans to North America, primarily the United States, where they began to adopt western customs. Young migrants in particular began to identify with the music, culture and habits of North American youth.

Isabel Munoz
An MS 13 gang member displays a hand sign for his gang.

The subsequent forced return of significant numbers of these displaced persons to their more conservative, traditional home countries gave rise to groups of youths who appeared “alien” to ordinary Central American citizens, most of whom were preoccupied with the harsh social and political realities of everyday life.

Despite the fact that these “alien” groups were becoming better organized and had begun to engage in low-level criminality such as theft and property offences, the groups were largely shrugged off by authorities, who viewed them as a passing trend linked to the customs imported by people who had previously fled the country. Violent crimes such as homicides and activities characteristic of organized crime were only sporadic at the time.

In the United States, on the other hand, the organization of Central Americans and Mexicans into so-called street gangs was far more advanced. Their presence and notoriety in that country gained such magnitude that the authorities — reacting to public and media pressure — began to target organized groups of youths who were committing crimes and violently defending their streets from rival gangs. In the meantime, the gang culture continued to spread within various Latin American immigrant communities, primarily those located in the cities of Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and generally in the states of the eastern and western seaboards.

However, the response by U.S. authorities was late in coming. By the time anti-immigrant sentiment and policy translated into a concerted crackdown against gangs, the 18th Street Gang (Mara 18) and Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS 13) were firmly entrenched. In the early 1990s, when the first Central Americans — mostly Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Hondurans — were deported from the United States back to their countries of origin, a large number of gang members and at-risk youth went with them.

These individuals returned to marginalized slum neighbourhoods, where a lack of public planning, weak public security and weak policing agencies enabled the MS 13 and Mara 18 gangs to win followers and create groups who identified strongly with their barrios, or neighbourhoods. These individuals proceeded to commit crimes of extreme violence, including homicide, rape and extortion. They also began to operate jointly with organized crime groups, aiding and abetting these groups and acting with virtually no constraints, short of being killed.

The problem became more acute in the late 1990s and the beginning of the millennium. In the marginalized outskirts of the cities — where poverty is the common denominator for resident families — the maras gained permanent control over most commercial, religious and social activities. Working people who resisted gang control and intimidation, or who refused to meet the terms of extortion demands, were often forced to abandon their homes under threat of death. As a result, the value of human life has degenerated to such a degree that a simple citizen — unable to pay the equivalent of two or three dollars a week demanded by the gang members controlling the milieu — may be summarily executed. In addition, young people living in these neighbourhoods are wrested from their families and forced to join clicas (local sections of the gangs) from the age of eight or nine.

Major challenges for police

While the gang phenomenon is yet to be fully understood, the investigation of gangs and their membership presents enormous challenges. It is clear that gang members espouse a unified ideology and comprise a brotherhood within a section or clica of the gang; however, it is inconceivable how one member of MS 13 managed to rack up a record of 30 homicides and 25 rapes — not to mention innumerable property offences and crimes against individual freedoms — without being stopped. It is hard to fathom the emotional havoc wreaked on each of the families that lost one or more relatives at the hands of this individual, who either killed these people personally or indirectly caused their deaths by forcing them to join the clica.

Policing systems must come to terms with their failure to comprehend and adequately respond to the gang phenomenon. In Guatemala, authorities lack a comprehensive, planned, preventive approach. There is no task force dedicated to understanding and tackling the problem at the root. Instead, enforcement measures have been hurried and haphazard, often leading to excesses such as torture. Far from solving the underlying problem, such unbridled enforcement has in fact resulted in a further loss of respect for and mistrust of the authorities.

The ineffectiveness of the current approach is evidenced by the dearth of prosecutions of gang members responsible for crimes. Databases of tactical and strategic intelligence are not being exploited as they should be. Notwithstanding the major hurdles encountered in fighting these groups, existing databases should be used to mount effective surveillance of criminal operations. A number of points of vulnerability have been identified and should be exploited to eliminate gangs in their formative stages. Such concerted actions would discourage desperate authorities from resorting to retributive mechanisms such as torture, which only serve to bolster the ideology of hate and violence and entrench the gang archetype for new generations about to join the maras’ ranks.

There are indeed efforts being made to seriously study the origins of the gang problem, with a view to finding viable alternatives to prevent generations of at-risk youth in marginalized areas from being drawn into gangs. The hope is that this work will assist in better comprehending the true magnitude and raison d’être of these gangs which, despite their seemingly intractable nature, are misunderstood by the institutions charged with administering justice and by society at large. It is time for the analysis to move beyond a mere recounting of the atrocious crimes committed by gangs, as that approach contributes nothing to the ultimate resolution of the problem.

Translated from Spanish to English by Roger Barany and Cal Deedman.