Central American gangs: a mafia with a thousand heads

This post is from the US based National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers.

This piece notes the relationships between the Mexican drug cartels and other criminal organizations.

September 24, 2010 by m3report
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The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (NAFBPO) extracts and condenses the material that follows from Mexican and Central and South American on-line media sources on a daily basis. You are free to disseminate this information, but we request that you credit NAFBPO as being the provider.

Friday, 9/24/10

La Prensa Grafica, San Salvador, El Salvador (9/22/10)

Central American gangs: a mafia with a thousand heads

The mafia-like gangs that lash Central America, known as maras, have various governments in tenterhooks, enacting laws and regulations to combat the thousands of members of these groups which arose a quarter of a century ago from the Hispanic barrios of Los Angeles. The mara phenomenon is concentrated in the so-called North Triangle, composed of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, countries characterized by poverty and family disintegration due to emigration.

In El Salvador, where this phenomenon is strong, maras are true mafia organizations involved in drug and weapon traffic, extortion and kidnappings. El Salvador’s new law states that ”the so called gangs or maras are illegal and are banned” and sets prison terms of seven to ten years for their leaders and six years for others, just for being a member.

Currently some 7,000 gang members are in prison in El Salvador, but police estimate that there may be 9,000 to 20,000 more out on the streets, because many adolescents are recruited daily. The “maras,” actually an abbreviation of “marabunta,” the devouring ant of the Amazon, have thousands of members in countries like Guatemala and Honduras, where the rate of criminality is also among the highest in Latin America. Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes stated that “It’s necessary for the government to increase control over this type of groups (gangs) to implement actions that may allow combat and prevention of violence.” Some Salvadoran judges have warned that the law “does not solve the problem of lawlessness,” while other Central American countries – Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua – fear that it might cause Salvadoran gangsters to emigrate there.

The gangsters’ activities are added to those of the drug cartels. Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers have had “ties” for years along Central America, a passageway for cocaine that they move from South to North America, which has deteriorated the levels of security.

http://www.laprensagrafica.com/el-salvador/judicial/142765-las-pandillas-centroamericanas-una-mafia-con-mil-cabezas.html