MS-13 in the America's
From The Economist print edition
Numerous, mysterious, and now spreading fast in the United States
IN THE back courtyard of a deserted wreck of a house on the outskirts of San Salvador, El Salvador's capital, a group of young men is gathered. One sleeps on a couch without cushions, under a bare light bulb, as his friends talk. Many are covered with tattoos from their forearms to their faces, marking them to all eyes as gang members. Each tattoo contains a code and tells a story. A trinity of three dots, for example, means hospital, prison and the graveyard, the three possible ends for a gangster.
These young men belong to the largest criminal network in the Americas, and one of the largest in the world. Besides an estimated 25,000 members in El Salvador, there are comparable numbers in Guatemala, Honduras and the United States. The distinctive graffiti found scrawled in Central America are indistinguishable from those in the barrios of Los Angeles—and as far east, these days, as the suburbs of Washington, DC.
Where traditional organised crime, such as the Colombian or Mexican drug “cartels”, tends to be organised in small, elite groups, this network, based round gangs, is larger and more diffuse. Its business is extortion and drug-trafficking. In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras it accounts for between 20% and 50% of all violent crime. In the United States, authorities believe members are responsible for much of the smuggling of people and goods across the border with Mexico.
Two maras, or gangs, are involved, Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha. Though they are bitter rivals, their methods and interests are the same. To some observers, their members are as much a threat to America as al-Qaeda. Indeed, links have been suspected, though there is no evidence for them. The FBI has struggled fruitlessly to convince Americans that one particular meeting between Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, an al-Qaeda lieutenant, and members of Mara Salvatrucha is pure myth. One recent Republican candidate for governor of Virginia made that “meeting” a cornerstone of his stump speech against crime.
More realistically, the maras are feared for their fast-growing numbers, their reputation for unusual violence (in Central America, beheadings are not unheard of as a means of execution) and their appearance in new, far-flung areas of the United States. California has been dealing with the gangs for over 20 years, but as Chris Swecker, assistant director of the FBI, told a congressional hearing on the maras in 2005, mareros have now migrated and proliferated “in many smaller, suburban and rural areas not accustomed to gang activity and related crimes.” In 2003 Brenda Paz, a pregnant 17-year-old federal witness, was found stabbed to death on the banks of the Shenandoah river in deepest Virginia.
Yet the young men in the courtyard in San Salvador, members of Mara 18, or the 18th Street Gang, do not look threatening at all. They seem abject and scared. Not only are they unemployable, but they can no longer walk openly in the street outside their neighbourhood. A series of tough laws passed over the past few years has stiffened penalties even for belonging to a gang (although some provisions were struck down in court as unconstitutional), and police have adopted a get-tough policy which, even if it has not succeeded in reducing crime, has at least frightened gang members. Their new tattoos are in not-very-noticeable places. “We have lost the right to exist,” says 19-year-old Oscar.
How dangerous is the phenomenon they are a part of? Neither Mara 18 nor Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) is well understood. The origins of both are shrouded in disagreement. Gang members themselves do not keep a history or, if they do, do not share it with outsiders. Some police say the gangs were founded in El Salvador in the 1970s or earlier. Others say they sprang out of the Salvadoran immigrant community in central Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Salvatrucha may have been founded by a group who had been kicked out of Mara 18, which was run at first by Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles. Alternatively, Mara 18 was founded by a group of renegade Salvatruchas.
Some experts claim that both have developed command and control structures. Some say that their component “cliques”, which range from ten to 100 gang members, function as franchises; others insist that they are not very organised at all. Certainly the movement of money within the gangs seems mysterious. Both gangs extort from small businesses, taxi drivers, homeowners—almost anyone passing through their neighbourhoods. Both sell drugs. These are both highly lucrative enterprises. But most members seem to be poor.
One American official in Guatemala estimates that in Villanueva, a suburb of Guatemala City, gangs pull in at least $100,000 a week. He assumes that much of this money must be sent to the United States, since gang members in Guatemala, as in El Salvador, appear to be living on the edge of subsistence. But Jody Weis, an agent with the FBI in Los Angeles, says that gang members there are poor, too, and suspects they are sending money to Central America. Anyone who tries to “follow the money” is soon lost. But it is likely that the maras are making much less than the authorities believe.
Unequal shares
According to Oscar, the marero in San Salvador, the mara is like a family. Members take care of each other and retaliate if attacked, but nothing more. According to Salvadoran police officials, any marero with tattoos must have murdered someone in an initiation rite. Oscar and his friends clearly live on the margins of society; but they do not look much like murderers.
Nonetheless, a lot of murders happen. The murder rate in 2004 was 46 per 100,000 people in Honduras; in El Salvador it was 41, in Guatemala 35. In the United States, by contrast, it was 5.7, with the Mexican rate roughly double that. El Salvador and Guatemala are both still recovering from the legacy of decades-long civil war—one possible explanation for the high rate of violence. Honduras, the country worst affected, suffered a “dirty war” in the 1980s. But Nicaragua, which also suffered a long civil war, does not have comparable gang problems. Maras are not widespread in Belize, in Costa Rica, or in Panama. Why El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have tens of thousands of mareros, and their neighbours almost none, is a mystery that no one can answer.
The only consensus among the authorities is that things are getting worse, and that this deterioration has been particularly pronounced over the past four to five years. José Miguel Cruz of the University of Central America, in San Salvador, ascribes this to the get-tough policies of the government. Mareros clapped in jail have had nothing to do but organise, and so the gangs have became stronger and more violent. The first 11 months of 2005 saw 23% more murders in El Salvador than in all of 2004. Comparable increases have been seen in Honduras and Guatemala. Mr Cruz also points out, anecdotally, that of 20 gang members he enrolled in a long-term study in 1996, only five are still alive.
This rise in violence is having a serious impact on Central American economies. According to a study by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the cost of violence to El Salvador in 2003 was $1.7 billion, equivalent to 11.5% of GDP. The Inter-American Development Bank is even more pessimistic, estimating that the per capita GDP of the region would be 25% higher if the rates of violence were no worse than the world average. Furthermore, because the rich have private security—an economic cost in itself—extortion, which can be as little as a few dollars per person per week, most affects those who can least afford it, stunting economic growth and reinforcing persistent inequality. Guatemala has one of the widest gaps between rich and poor in the world.
Of the countries with large numbers of mareros, the best equipped to deal with the problem is the United States. But although there is a certain amount of co-operation, particularly with El Salvador, American policy tends to make the problem worse for its neighbours.
According to Kevin Kozak of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, 30% of gang members picked up by his agency in America are arrested and criminal charges are placed against them. But the other 70% are deported. There is no alternative; they are in the United States illegally, but evidence does not exist to prosecute them for any specific crime. Each week, therefore, dozens of gangsters are flown out by the American government on private jets and released on to the streets of Central America.
To some extent, this process is now co-ordinated with Central American governments. But it is awkward. Officials in El Salvador say they cannot ask the United States to stop the deportations, but nor can they cope with them on any large scale. If even a self-admitted gang member gets off a plane in San Salvador or Tegucigalpa, but there is no evidence to try him for a crime, he has to be allowed to walk free.
The relatively new anti-gang laws in El Salvador and Honduras do not include versions of America's witness-protection programme or its anti-racketeering laws, which allow suspects to be charged with conspiracy to commit a criminal act, rather than the act itself. In most cases, therefore, the marero freshly deported from Los Angeles is free to organise on his home turf—with all the prestige, preparedness and sophistication he has picked up in the United States.
In the United States itself, says Mr Weis of the FBI, law-enforcement authorities are now trying to use techniques developed against the Sicilian Mafia to fight the maras. However, to get an indictment, evidence is needed. And even with a witness-protection programme in place, it is very difficult to find informants. Typically, the FBI manages to recruit as informants roughly one in three of the people it approaches. With the Salvatruchas, says Mr Weis, the number is closer to one in 20.
Off the street, on the web
The gangs he encounters are also organised and sophisticated. They use throwaway mobile phones, which are essentially untraceable, and keep in touch on the internet. (Mara 18 maintains a website at www.xv3gang.com; Salvatrucha's website has been offline recently.) Frank Flores, head of the Hollywood sector of the anti-gang task-force of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), points out that the maras now rarely deal drugs on the street in Los Angeles. They give that dirty work to immigrants whom they have brought to the country illegally, men who are ignorant both of the gang's structure and of its members' identities, and use them much like indentured servants. If they are caught, the gang is not compromised; if they are not, the revenue continues to come in.
America's campaign against these gangs is less organised than one might suppose. The various agencies involved—the FBI, ICE and local police departments—co-operate to some degree. An operation called Community Shield, led by ICE and enforced by the LAPD and the New York Police Department, led to the arrest of 103 Salvatruchas in February and March 2005 and another 582 gang members last August. However, information-sharing leaves much to be desired.
Mr Flores is proud of Calgangs, a database which uses digital photographs and other information to track gang members; but national law-enforcement officers have no access to it. Calgangs stores the details of 928 Salvatruchas, a tiny fraction of the estimated size of the gang; and more information sits, unread, on file-cards in cabinets in Mr Flores's office. He lacks the staff to sort through it. Moreover, of the four detectives in the anti-gang task-force, only two speak Spanish. Of the 12 uniformed officers, only one does.
This is in Los Angeles—a city where the maras arguably originated, and which has a large Latino population. Local police elsewhere in the United States are even less prepared to deal with the maras, says Mr Flores, who has been teaching police in other jurisdictions about the gangs. The Washington, DC area, which has the second-largest concentration of maras in the country, is approximately where Los Angeles was ten years ago, says Mr Flores. Everywhere, the statistics on gang-related crime are not remotely reliable. The same fear that makes it difficult to recruit informants means that most gang crime goes unreported.
At least, in the United States, the arrests that are made may make some small difference. The gangs continue to organise in prison, but jailhouse murders are relatively rare, and the state retains some control over the penal system. In Central America, that is not the case. In 2005, says Douglas Omar García Funes, subdirector of investigations for the Salvadorean national police, an average of two to three mareros were killed in jail each day. In October 16 escaped, a typical number. The gangs, says Mr Funes, dominate the jails.
The warden of Tonacatepeque, a youth prison (with inmates aged 13 to 24), agrees with him. Although the prison is surrounded by an imposing 20-foot fence, and the warden claims his methods are more or less effective, he admits that the gang structure exists unchanged inside the prison. When he wants to search the cells, all the inmates are led out to a field in their underwear in the early morning, as he would not risk a search with inmates present for fear of losing control. Beat Rohr of the UNDP puts it more plainly: “The jails are nothing more than schools of crime.”
Indeed, across the affected Central American countries, the prisons are often segregated between the two rival maras, as authorities have been unable to keep control when members of both gangs are under the same roof. In August 2005, a long-standing truce between the Salvatruchas and Mara 18 in Guatemala—holding even though the two were still at odds in El Salvador and Honduras—was broken when at least 35 Mara 18 members were killed by Salvatruchas in a co-ordinated effort across several Guatemalan jails.
“We cannot”, says Paul Vernon of the LAPD, “arrest ourselves out of the gang problem.” This is something that the Guatemalan and Salvadorean governments have yet to realise. The victory of Manuel Zelaya in November's elections in Honduras is a good sign; Mr Zelaya was less prone to get-tough rhetoric than his opponent. Honduras has had perhaps both the worst attacks by maras and the heaviest-handed anti-maras efforts. In December 2004 a bus was attacked, and all 28 people on it murdered; the assault was thought to be, at least in part, payback for a mysterious prison fire earlier in the year in which over 100 Salvatruchas burned to death.
A better life
Gang violence in Central America is unlikely to wane in the near future. Police resources are stretched or non-existent. Rehabilitation programmes are tiny and, according to one Salvadoran official involved in the small pilot programmes, have at best a 30% success rate. Jails are stuffed to almost twice their capacity in El Salvador, and will probably remain so. Despite good intentions on all sides, effective co-operation among law-enforcement agencies—the sharing of databases, for instance—is not on the horizon. No country even has a comprehensive database of who is who among the gangsters. As police dither, the gangs also grow stronger up and down the United States.
The only real hope is that economic growth will eventually lift El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras out of their poverty and so reduce the incentives for joining gangs. Oscar, the Salvadorean marero, says he would prefer to get a regular job rather than be in a criminal gang any more. But with gang violence itself acting as a brake on his country's growth, the prospect seems dim.
Numerous, mysterious, and now spreading fast in the United States
IN THE back courtyard of a deserted wreck of a house on the outskirts of San Salvador, El Salvador's capital, a group of young men is gathered. One sleeps on a couch without cushions, under a bare light bulb, as his friends talk. Many are covered with tattoos from their forearms to their faces, marking them to all eyes as gang members. Each tattoo contains a code and tells a story. A trinity of three dots, for example, means hospital, prison and the graveyard, the three possible ends for a gangster.
These young men belong to the largest criminal network in the Americas, and one of the largest in the world. Besides an estimated 25,000 members in El Salvador, there are comparable numbers in Guatemala, Honduras and the United States. The distinctive graffiti found scrawled in Central America are indistinguishable from those in the barrios of Los Angeles—and as far east, these days, as the suburbs of Washington, DC.
Where traditional organised crime, such as the Colombian or Mexican drug “cartels”, tends to be organised in small, elite groups, this network, based round gangs, is larger and more diffuse. Its business is extortion and drug-trafficking. In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras it accounts for between 20% and 50% of all violent crime. In the United States, authorities believe members are responsible for much of the smuggling of people and goods across the border with Mexico.
Two maras, or gangs, are involved, Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha. Though they are bitter rivals, their methods and interests are the same. To some observers, their members are as much a threat to America as al-Qaeda. Indeed, links have been suspected, though there is no evidence for them. The FBI has struggled fruitlessly to convince Americans that one particular meeting between Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, an al-Qaeda lieutenant, and members of Mara Salvatrucha is pure myth. One recent Republican candidate for governor of Virginia made that “meeting” a cornerstone of his stump speech against crime.
More realistically, the maras are feared for their fast-growing numbers, their reputation for unusual violence (in Central America, beheadings are not unheard of as a means of execution) and their appearance in new, far-flung areas of the United States. California has been dealing with the gangs for over 20 years, but as Chris Swecker, assistant director of the FBI, told a congressional hearing on the maras in 2005, mareros have now migrated and proliferated “in many smaller, suburban and rural areas not accustomed to gang activity and related crimes.” In 2003 Brenda Paz, a pregnant 17-year-old federal witness, was found stabbed to death on the banks of the Shenandoah river in deepest Virginia.
Yet the young men in the courtyard in San Salvador, members of Mara 18, or the 18th Street Gang, do not look threatening at all. They seem abject and scared. Not only are they unemployable, but they can no longer walk openly in the street outside their neighbourhood. A series of tough laws passed over the past few years has stiffened penalties even for belonging to a gang (although some provisions were struck down in court as unconstitutional), and police have adopted a get-tough policy which, even if it has not succeeded in reducing crime, has at least frightened gang members. Their new tattoos are in not-very-noticeable places. “We have lost the right to exist,” says 19-year-old Oscar.
How dangerous is the phenomenon they are a part of? Neither Mara 18 nor Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) is well understood. The origins of both are shrouded in disagreement. Gang members themselves do not keep a history or, if they do, do not share it with outsiders. Some police say the gangs were founded in El Salvador in the 1970s or earlier. Others say they sprang out of the Salvadoran immigrant community in central Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Salvatrucha may have been founded by a group who had been kicked out of Mara 18, which was run at first by Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles. Alternatively, Mara 18 was founded by a group of renegade Salvatruchas.
Some experts claim that both have developed command and control structures. Some say that their component “cliques”, which range from ten to 100 gang members, function as franchises; others insist that they are not very organised at all. Certainly the movement of money within the gangs seems mysterious. Both gangs extort from small businesses, taxi drivers, homeowners—almost anyone passing through their neighbourhoods. Both sell drugs. These are both highly lucrative enterprises. But most members seem to be poor.
One American official in Guatemala estimates that in Villanueva, a suburb of Guatemala City, gangs pull in at least $100,000 a week. He assumes that much of this money must be sent to the United States, since gang members in Guatemala, as in El Salvador, appear to be living on the edge of subsistence. But Jody Weis, an agent with the FBI in Los Angeles, says that gang members there are poor, too, and suspects they are sending money to Central America. Anyone who tries to “follow the money” is soon lost. But it is likely that the maras are making much less than the authorities believe.
Unequal shares
According to Oscar, the marero in San Salvador, the mara is like a family. Members take care of each other and retaliate if attacked, but nothing more. According to Salvadoran police officials, any marero with tattoos must have murdered someone in an initiation rite. Oscar and his friends clearly live on the margins of society; but they do not look much like murderers.
Nonetheless, a lot of murders happen. The murder rate in 2004 was 46 per 100,000 people in Honduras; in El Salvador it was 41, in Guatemala 35. In the United States, by contrast, it was 5.7, with the Mexican rate roughly double that. El Salvador and Guatemala are both still recovering from the legacy of decades-long civil war—one possible explanation for the high rate of violence. Honduras, the country worst affected, suffered a “dirty war” in the 1980s. But Nicaragua, which also suffered a long civil war, does not have comparable gang problems. Maras are not widespread in Belize, in Costa Rica, or in Panama. Why El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have tens of thousands of mareros, and their neighbours almost none, is a mystery that no one can answer.
The only consensus among the authorities is that things are getting worse, and that this deterioration has been particularly pronounced over the past four to five years. José Miguel Cruz of the University of Central America, in San Salvador, ascribes this to the get-tough policies of the government. Mareros clapped in jail have had nothing to do but organise, and so the gangs have became stronger and more violent. The first 11 months of 2005 saw 23% more murders in El Salvador than in all of 2004. Comparable increases have been seen in Honduras and Guatemala. Mr Cruz also points out, anecdotally, that of 20 gang members he enrolled in a long-term study in 1996, only five are still alive.
This rise in violence is having a serious impact on Central American economies. According to a study by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the cost of violence to El Salvador in 2003 was $1.7 billion, equivalent to 11.5% of GDP. The Inter-American Development Bank is even more pessimistic, estimating that the per capita GDP of the region would be 25% higher if the rates of violence were no worse than the world average. Furthermore, because the rich have private security—an economic cost in itself—extortion, which can be as little as a few dollars per person per week, most affects those who can least afford it, stunting economic growth and reinforcing persistent inequality. Guatemala has one of the widest gaps between rich and poor in the world.
Of the countries with large numbers of mareros, the best equipped to deal with the problem is the United States. But although there is a certain amount of co-operation, particularly with El Salvador, American policy tends to make the problem worse for its neighbours.
According to Kevin Kozak of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, 30% of gang members picked up by his agency in America are arrested and criminal charges are placed against them. But the other 70% are deported. There is no alternative; they are in the United States illegally, but evidence does not exist to prosecute them for any specific crime. Each week, therefore, dozens of gangsters are flown out by the American government on private jets and released on to the streets of Central America.
To some extent, this process is now co-ordinated with Central American governments. But it is awkward. Officials in El Salvador say they cannot ask the United States to stop the deportations, but nor can they cope with them on any large scale. If even a self-admitted gang member gets off a plane in San Salvador or Tegucigalpa, but there is no evidence to try him for a crime, he has to be allowed to walk free.
The relatively new anti-gang laws in El Salvador and Honduras do not include versions of America's witness-protection programme or its anti-racketeering laws, which allow suspects to be charged with conspiracy to commit a criminal act, rather than the act itself. In most cases, therefore, the marero freshly deported from Los Angeles is free to organise on his home turf—with all the prestige, preparedness and sophistication he has picked up in the United States.
In the United States itself, says Mr Weis of the FBI, law-enforcement authorities are now trying to use techniques developed against the Sicilian Mafia to fight the maras. However, to get an indictment, evidence is needed. And even with a witness-protection programme in place, it is very difficult to find informants. Typically, the FBI manages to recruit as informants roughly one in three of the people it approaches. With the Salvatruchas, says Mr Weis, the number is closer to one in 20.
Off the street, on the web
The gangs he encounters are also organised and sophisticated. They use throwaway mobile phones, which are essentially untraceable, and keep in touch on the internet. (Mara 18 maintains a website at www.xv3gang.com; Salvatrucha's website has been offline recently.) Frank Flores, head of the Hollywood sector of the anti-gang task-force of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), points out that the maras now rarely deal drugs on the street in Los Angeles. They give that dirty work to immigrants whom they have brought to the country illegally, men who are ignorant both of the gang's structure and of its members' identities, and use them much like indentured servants. If they are caught, the gang is not compromised; if they are not, the revenue continues to come in.
America's campaign against these gangs is less organised than one might suppose. The various agencies involved—the FBI, ICE and local police departments—co-operate to some degree. An operation called Community Shield, led by ICE and enforced by the LAPD and the New York Police Department, led to the arrest of 103 Salvatruchas in February and March 2005 and another 582 gang members last August. However, information-sharing leaves much to be desired.
Mr Flores is proud of Calgangs, a database which uses digital photographs and other information to track gang members; but national law-enforcement officers have no access to it. Calgangs stores the details of 928 Salvatruchas, a tiny fraction of the estimated size of the gang; and more information sits, unread, on file-cards in cabinets in Mr Flores's office. He lacks the staff to sort through it. Moreover, of the four detectives in the anti-gang task-force, only two speak Spanish. Of the 12 uniformed officers, only one does.
This is in Los Angeles—a city where the maras arguably originated, and which has a large Latino population. Local police elsewhere in the United States are even less prepared to deal with the maras, says Mr Flores, who has been teaching police in other jurisdictions about the gangs. The Washington, DC area, which has the second-largest concentration of maras in the country, is approximately where Los Angeles was ten years ago, says Mr Flores. Everywhere, the statistics on gang-related crime are not remotely reliable. The same fear that makes it difficult to recruit informants means that most gang crime goes unreported.
At least, in the United States, the arrests that are made may make some small difference. The gangs continue to organise in prison, but jailhouse murders are relatively rare, and the state retains some control over the penal system. In Central America, that is not the case. In 2005, says Douglas Omar García Funes, subdirector of investigations for the Salvadorean national police, an average of two to three mareros were killed in jail each day. In October 16 escaped, a typical number. The gangs, says Mr Funes, dominate the jails.
The warden of Tonacatepeque, a youth prison (with inmates aged 13 to 24), agrees with him. Although the prison is surrounded by an imposing 20-foot fence, and the warden claims his methods are more or less effective, he admits that the gang structure exists unchanged inside the prison. When he wants to search the cells, all the inmates are led out to a field in their underwear in the early morning, as he would not risk a search with inmates present for fear of losing control. Beat Rohr of the UNDP puts it more plainly: “The jails are nothing more than schools of crime.”
Indeed, across the affected Central American countries, the prisons are often segregated between the two rival maras, as authorities have been unable to keep control when members of both gangs are under the same roof. In August 2005, a long-standing truce between the Salvatruchas and Mara 18 in Guatemala—holding even though the two were still at odds in El Salvador and Honduras—was broken when at least 35 Mara 18 members were killed by Salvatruchas in a co-ordinated effort across several Guatemalan jails.
“We cannot”, says Paul Vernon of the LAPD, “arrest ourselves out of the gang problem.” This is something that the Guatemalan and Salvadorean governments have yet to realise. The victory of Manuel Zelaya in November's elections in Honduras is a good sign; Mr Zelaya was less prone to get-tough rhetoric than his opponent. Honduras has had perhaps both the worst attacks by maras and the heaviest-handed anti-maras efforts. In December 2004 a bus was attacked, and all 28 people on it murdered; the assault was thought to be, at least in part, payback for a mysterious prison fire earlier in the year in which over 100 Salvatruchas burned to death.
A better life
Gang violence in Central America is unlikely to wane in the near future. Police resources are stretched or non-existent. Rehabilitation programmes are tiny and, according to one Salvadoran official involved in the small pilot programmes, have at best a 30% success rate. Jails are stuffed to almost twice their capacity in El Salvador, and will probably remain so. Despite good intentions on all sides, effective co-operation among law-enforcement agencies—the sharing of databases, for instance—is not on the horizon. No country even has a comprehensive database of who is who among the gangsters. As police dither, the gangs also grow stronger up and down the United States.
The only real hope is that economic growth will eventually lift El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras out of their poverty and so reduce the incentives for joining gangs. Oscar, the Salvadorean marero, says he would prefer to get a regular job rather than be in a criminal gang any more. But with gang violence itself acting as a brake on his country's growth, the prospect seems dim.
posted by Marko at 1/10/2006 09:07:00 AM
<< Home