Some said they could not read this article. Here it is again.
Shuttling Between Nations, Latino Gangs Confound the Law
By GINGER THOMPSON
Published: September 26, 2004
AN PEDRO SULA, Honduras - Christián Antúnez chokes back a scream as the
nurse sticks a needle above his left eyebrow. "Ay, Mamá!" he shouts. "It
really hurts."
"Don't move," the nurse tells him, sticking him again and again with
anesthesia.
He pleads for a break. At least four other men, all covered with
tattoos, are taking needles around him, on their arms and legs, backs
and chests. The whining rises from the chairs. One man has a tattoo on
his scalp. Another has one over his top lip. Yet another on his neck.
Mr. Antúnez, 22, has them everywhere.
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The men have all come to this makeshift clinic in a neighborhood ravaged
by street violence for a desperate and disfiguring kind of healing: to
have their gang tattoos removed.
"Society thinks we are monsters," Mr. Antúnez said. "The police want us
dead. That's why we do this. If we do not take off these tattoos, we
will never be able to live in peace."
The pain, he said, seems a small price for a new life. "I dream of being
clean, even if it means being scarred."
They are gang members, known here as "maras," after a species of
swarming ants. Indeed, over the last decade gangs have spread like a
scourge across Central America, Mexico and the United States, setting
off a catastrophic crime wave that has turned dirt-poor neighborhoods
into combat zones and an equally virulent crackdown that has left
thousands of gang members dead, in hiding, in jail or heading to the
United States.
The authorities estimate there are 70,000 to 100,000 gang members across
Central America and Mexico. In the last decade, gangs have killed
thousands of people, sowing new fear in a region still struggling to
overcome civil wars that ended just a decade ago. Gangs have replaced
guerrillas as public enemy No. 1.
The presidents of Honduras and El Salvador have called the gangs as big
a threat to national security as terrorism is to the United States. They
have revived old counterinsurgency strategies and adopted zero-tolerance
laws known as Mano Dura, which loosely translates as "firm hand," that
bypass basic rules of due process and allow them to send young men to
prison for nothing more than a gang tattoo.
Instead of offering reassurance, official campaigns inflame public fear.
And in the last year, human rights investigators have begun to report
alarming increases in the numbers of young men killed by the police and
vigilantes.
No one denies that gang violence requires a tough response. No one - not
even the nurses who remove his tattoos - feel sympathy for men with
brutal histories, like Mr. Antúnez. But many human rights advocates and
community leaders worry that the aggressive measures governments are
taking against gangs have not solved the problem as much as they have
spread it.
Thousands of gang members are fleeing north, moving with and preying on
the waves of illegal migrants who travel to the United States, which is
taking aggressive measures of its own and deporting thousands of gang
members on immigration violations. The effect is to churn the gangs
throughout the region.
As gang members move, the gang culture moves with them. Police
departments across the United States call the gangs a top crime problem.
In January, some 72 departments met to discuss the issue in Los Angeles.
Another gang summit meeting by law enforcement authorities will be held
in Washington on Thursday.
In Guatemala, the authorities say gun violence will kill 1,000 more
people this year, compared with two years ago. Gangs, they say, will
commit 80 percent of those killings.
The Mexican state of Chiapas, which shares a lawless border with
Guatemala, has become another gang hunting ground. Gangs strike in parks
and bus stations. During the last year, gang members reportedly killed
more than 70 migrants stowed away on northbound freight trains.
In a rare display of solidarity last year, the governments of Honduras,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama and Mexico signed an agreement to begin
exploring ways to collaborate in the fight against gangs. They stopped
short of adopting measures as tough as those in Honduras and El Salvador.
But in countries crippled by official corruption and impunity, the
crackdowns have weakened the rule of law as much as they have stemmed
the rise in crime.
Shuttling Between Nations, Latino Gangs Confound the Law
Published: September 26, 2004
(Page 2 of 6)
Prisons are filled way beyond capacity with young men waiting months
before they are formally charged. Overcrowded cellblocks have turned
into death traps, with hundreds of gang members killed in suspicious
riots and fires.
Some gang members, picked up by the police, never make it to jail. Their
battered bodies litter streets and fields. Human rights organizations,
including Amnesty International and the Honduras's National Commission
for Human Rights, have reported incidents of gang members being
kidnapped, tortured and killed by the same kinds of secret security
forces responsible for the disappearances of hundreds of suspected
leftists during the civil war years.
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Commissioner Ramón Custodio has described the killings as a "slow social
cleansing," often involving youth with no criminal record.
Reports by Amnesty International and the State Department have echoed
similar warnings.
"It seems to me that this country is losing, in great measure, the
democratic advances that have cost us so much," said Bertha Oliva,
director of the Committee for the Relatives of the Disappeared, a group
formed at the height of the cold war. "In the 80's, this country said it
was O.K. to kill off its political enemies because they were antisocial.
We say the same today about gang members.''
Crackdown Spawns an Exodus
The two largest gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Mara 18, began on
the streets of Los Angeles. The Salvatruchas gang was started by the
children of refugees from United States-sponsored civil wars in Central
America of the 1980's. Young people started the gangs as support
networks, even social clubs.
Mara 18, linked to Los Angeles's 18th Street gang, which was started by
Mexican immigrants in the 1970's, then began recruiting Central American
refugees to challenge the Salvatruchas.
Fist fights with rival groups turned to gun fights. Gun fights led to
declarations of war.
Then in a crackdown by United States immigration officials, tens of
thousands of gang members were sent back to their home countries. At the
peak of the program in the mid-1990's, some 40,000 criminal illegal
immigrants were sent back each year.
Suddenly, one of the poorest corners of the world, which struggles to
meet its people's basic needs, was burdened by a superpower's crime plague.
Entire neighborhoods were plundered by violent turf wars waged by
volatile young men armed with machetes and homemade pipe guns, called
chimbas. Homicide rates, especially among men under 30, soared.
Law-abiding citizens lived like prisoners in their own homes. Armies and
law enforcement agencies that had been scaled down for what was supposed
to be a new era of peace were forced to build back up.
Now, with the extraordinary measures by Central American governments
driving them away, the rampage has come full circle. The sheer force of
illegal immigration has made the Mara Salvatruchas and 18th Street two
of the fastest-growing gangs in the United States.
They are driving crime in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and the
suburbs around Washington, police officials say. They have expanded from
their big city bases to make violent debuts in places like Durham, N.C.,
Omaha, Neb., and Nassau County, N.Y.
A national study by Northeastern University found that while overall
crime dropped by more than 20 percent from 1999 to 2002, gang homicides
increased by more than 50 percent.
Some of the most shocking violence has played out in the suburbs around
Washington, where members of Mara Salvatruchas have been blamed for
hacking the hands of a 16-year old rival with a machete, and stabbing a
pregnant 17-year-old who was an informant in murder investigations.
Metropolitan Los Angeles, with a population almost equal to that of
Honduras, remains the world capital of street gangs, with an estimated
700 different cliques and more than 110,000 gang members. City and
county police officials say half of all homicides there are gang related.
Chief William J. Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department has
described gang members as "domestic terrorists" who have received little
attention from a society preoccupied with Al Qaeda since 9/11. In
speeches across the country, he has urged other police departments to
make gangs their top law enforcement priority and demand increased
federal support.
(Page 3 of 6)
Like his counterparts in Honduras and El Salvador, Chief Bratton has
expanded the enforcement of antigang policies that have succeeded in
reducing crime but that have also set off criticism among civil rights
lawyers and advocates of immigration.
He has brought back special gang units that were disbanded in the
1990's, when independent inquiries found officers responsible for
preying on communities they were assigned to protect. During the last
two years, the City Council expanded the use of so-called injunction
laws, which make it a crime, within strictly defined boundaries, for
gang members to gather publicly, even in pairs.
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In some injunction zones, gang members are even prohibited from using
pagers and cellphones, said Commander Richard Roupoli of the Los Angeles
Police Department's special operations bureau. Rocky Delgadillo, the Los
Angeles city attorney, defended the injunction laws. "Yes, we are
impinging on their civil liberties, that's the whole idea," he said. "We
do it all the time in our society for safety reasons."
"People deserve protection," he added. "And I believe gang members are
terrorizing our communities."
Michael R. Hillmann , a deputy chief at the Los Angeles Police
Department, said in an interview that "our gangs are like warring
tribes," and that the police department's efforts to quell them have
been so successful that Marine commanders assigned to take control of
trouble spots like Falluja, Iraq, have visited Los Angeles to learn from
them.
Overflowing Jails
To step into a Honduran penitentiary can feel like making a wrong turn
into a really bad American neighborhood.
Gangsta rap pumps raw and angry. Maximum-security perimeters are covered
with graffiti. Restless young men pace like caged tigers. They wear
baggy jeans, shaved heads and hardened stares.
Their bodies are tattooed with serpentine numbers and letters that look
scrawled by the hand of the Devil. They greet each other with strange
hand signs and call each other "homies." And when they introduce
themselves, they turn on the bravado and use nicknames like Sly, Killer
and Lucifer.
"Outside they'll tell you we are not angels, that we cut people up and
leave their heads in the street," said Lucifer, whose cold stare and
meticulously groomed goatee made it clear how he got his nickname. "But
we are not monsters.
"We only hurt people that try to hurt us."
The federal penitentiary at Tamara, about a half hour outside the
Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, was built in the 1990's for a maximum
population of 1,800 inmates. The population now is almost double that.
Police Inspector Nazir López Orellana helps run the prison with barely
enough money to pay for food - about 46 cents a prisoner a day - much
less adequate security, recreation or rehabilitation. The key to
controlling the surging numbers of gang members, he said, is to keep
members of each gang on opposite sides of the prison.
In May, there were 201 Mara Salvatruchas at the prison, and 237 members
of Mara 18. It is a population that lives by a mysterious code of
conduct, he said, with complex emotional needs. And he has no real means
to help them.
"We want to make very clear we don't have the capacity to give them the
treatment they need," he said.
One of the inmates introduces himself in English as Ricky Alexander
Zelaya. He said he was a native of Honduras, a product of California
corrections facilities and living an international nightmare.
He is a beefy man, wearing a San Diego Chargers T-shirt and tattoos so
elaborate they look more like murals. The police here arrested him, he
said, for stealing a car and carrying an illegal machine gun. But he has
been locked up lots of other times.
Marlon Enrique Fuentes pulls up a plastic stool and sits beside Mr.
Zelaya. He looks like most of the Mara 18 gangsters in this cellblock:
desperate for a decent meal, a hot shower and a good night's sleep.
He is distinguished by the tattoos on his face. The words "Try Me" are
tattooed on his right cheek. The words "Cry Me" are tattooed on the left.
What does it mean? Mr. Fuentes lowers his head, puts on his gang face
and switches from Spanish to English to answer.
"It means I don't play," he said, glaring, and then smiling as if trying
to take the sting out of his words.
The bitterness comes back when he begins to talk about his life. Mr.
Fuentes said his mother died before he began to walk. He said his father
spent all their money on liquor and prostitutes, and as soon as he was
able, Mr. Fuentes ran away and ventured alone across five borders to
reach relatives in Los Angeles. He said his aunt took him into her home,
but never her heart.
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"She always did things for her daughter over me," Mr. Fuentes said. The
unhappy family lived in a poor section of Hollywood, where Mr. Fuentes
said he found respect and purpose in a gang called 18th Street
By the time he became a teenager, he said, he was selling dope and
taking part in drive-by shootings, bouncing between the streets and
jail, until the United States sent him and a flood of other criminal
migrants back home.
In 2001, leading Honduran forensics experts say, the murder rate in
Tegucigalpa soared to 905 murders from 581 the year before. The country
was still crippled from the ravages of Hurricane Mitch. The nation's
average annual per capita income was less than $3,000, with two-thirds
of the population living in poverty. But polls showed that crime had
replaced poverty as the nation's No. 1 concern.
In the 2002 presidential race, voters elected a powerful businessman,
Ricardo Maduro, a Stanford-educated supermarket mogul, whose only son
had been killed in a kidnapping attempt. He promised a stiff crackdown
against crime, and described street gangs as Honduras's own Al Qaeda.
The president called in the army to help the 8,000 officers of the
National Police to wage war against an estimated 30,000 maras. To help
prosecutors get around the legal obstacles of proving that gang members
were responsible for crimes, the Honduran Congress tweaked the penal code.
With overwhelming public support, it changed Article 332 to make it
illegal to belong to a street gang. The reform was modeled after laws
used in Europe to combat violent Nazi gangs.
In Honduras, the crime is called "illicit association," and for it gang
members can receive 6 to 9 years in jail, and gang leaders 9 to 12.
Marked for Arrest
Charges are brought almost entirely by the police. Tattoos are the most
important proof. Sentences can hinge as much on the size of a gang
member's tattoos as on his criminal record, or lack of one.
Several officers in the Honduran National Police, who presented
themselves as "gang experts," said that the larger the tattoo, the more
dangerous the gang member.
That seems to be the law enforcement theory that landed Walter Manuel
Nolasco in Tamara.
Long and lanky with a mustache that looks more like whiskers, Mr.
Nolasco is known as El Gato, Spanish for cat. He acknowledges that he is
a member of the Mara 18. He lifts his T-shirt to show the number 18
tattooed on his chest like numbers on a football jersey. For a Honduran
court, that was enough to find Mr. Nolasco guilty of "illicit
association against the internal security of the state," and to sentence
him, a 20-year-old father, to 10 years in prison.
Mr. Nolasco was one of the first gang members to be arrested and
convicted under the reformed Article 332. Documents from his trial and
sentencing give a glimpse at how the law works.
He was arrested on Aug. 28, 2003, in a commando-style raid as he was
just getting out of bed with his pregnant wife. Mr. Nolasco did not have
time to grab a shirt.
The officers saw his tattoos: a turkey and a gangster's face on his
right arm, a Nike slash on his back, and the number 18 on his chest.
They found photos of Mr. Nolasco making hand signs. They looked under
the bed and found an AK-47.
At his trial, the court called in a "protected gang expert," to explain
what Mr. Nolasco's tattoos meant.
The witness was not identified in court documents, but he told the court
he had received foreign training, most likely in the United States,
where the Maras were born, in street gangs' secret lexicon, and once had
infiltrated a gang.
It was the No. 18 on his chest that marked Mr. Nolasco as a gang member,
the witness said, telling the court that such tattoos have "special
characteristics and are utilized by gang members to identify themselves
as members of the Mara 18."
The witness also said, "It is not just anyone who wears a tattoo linked
to gangs, but someone who is already a member and who has had to fulfill
an assigned task, generally, commit a crime."
He pointed out that the "size and the placement" of a tattoo were
"linked to the member's level of commitment to the organization." From
reviewing photos of the defendant, the witness concluded that Mr.
Nolasco "carries a certain level of leadership, is firm, consistent, has
some say and commands his barrio."
Mr. Nolasco was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Now, his mind flashed
to a daughter who would grow up without him.
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"I am not going to be there to take her to school, not for a long time,"
he said.
Some prisoners, like Alan Anthony Carrasco, never make it out.
The 24-year-old Mr. Carrasco was being held in a prison in Honduras's
second-largest city, San Pedro Sula, on charges of murder and illicit
association.
In May, Mr. Carrasco was killed with 107 other Mara Salvatruchas in a
fire that the authorities said was caused by faulty wiring in an
air-conditioning unit. Guards at the prison said the heat from the fire
was so intense that they could not open the door to the cellblock for
more than 45 minutes.
Prisoners who survived the fire, however, tell a different story. They
say that the guards never tried to rescue them and that they used
dumbbells to break the locks on the doors to save themselves.
"Their plan is to put us all in jail and then set the jails on fire,"
said Gustavo Olivera, a 26-year-old gang member who survived the fire.
"We want to change. We are fathers and husbands. We want to work to give
our families good homes. But the government does not want that."
Antony Javier Torres agreed. "The government demonizes us for political
purposes," he said. "We are worth more to them dead than alive."
A year earlier at a different prison, the authorities determined that
guards were responsible for a massacre.
Sixty-eight people, most of them members of Mara 18, died in a fire at a
prison called El Porvenir. The authorities at the prison said the gang
members shot other prisoners and then barricaded themselves in their
cellblock and set a suicidal fire.
An investigation by a presidential commission, however, found that 59 of
the victims were stabbed, shot and burned to death by guards and
soldiers. Some, the authorities say, were gunned down as they ran out of
the fire with their hands in the air.
President Maduro promised a "profound transformation" of the nation's
prison system.
Little has changed. Meanwhile, relatives of dead inmates remain haunted
by confusion.
Outside a tiny cinderblock house in the Chamalecón neighborhood, Alan
Anthony Carrasco's relatives gathered next to a pile of wood, cut in
long, thin sheets.
The government had sent a casket to help the family meet the costs of a
funeral, they said. But the casket was so flimsy it collapsed.
Mr. Carrasco's parents look shell-shocked. Margarito Carrasco and Aída
Rodríguez said they knew their son was a member of the Mara Salvatrucha.
They thought jail was their last hope to save him.
"I had lost control over him," Mr. Carrasco, a construction worker,
recalls of his son. "I told him not to come home anymore after 10. But
he came home after 10, then 11, then 12, then he stopped coming home."
Mr. Carrasco's mother, Ms. Rodríguez, said, "I thought at least, in
jail, he was safer than on the streets."
The elder Mr. Carrasco said: "It's fair for the police to send people to
jail who commit crimes. But they should not send them to their death."
"My son was paying for his crimes," he added. "There was no reason to
kill him."
Ms. Rodríguez said, "I don't know who to blame - the gangs or the police."
Enforcement With an Iron Hand
It is an atmosphere that feels frighteningly familiar to veteran human
rights leaders like Ramón Custodio.
In the 1980's, Mr. Custodio was one of the few who dared to denounce the
government attacks against suspected leftists. Hundreds of Honduran men
and women were kidnapped, tortured and killed by a secret military unit
called Battalion 3-16. Many remain missing.
Now it is young men with tattoos who are reported missing, or found dead
in Honduras. Human rights groups have reported numerous incidents of
plainclothes officers roaming in unmarked cars and ambushing gang
members in broad daylight.
"The state claims that the gangs are terrorizing society, and they are
responding with terror," Mr. Custodio said. "The pattern today is just
the same as before."
Honduras's minister of security is especially sensitive to such
criticism. He is the nephew of the late Gen. Rafael Álvarez, the founder
of Battalion 3-16.
In an interview, he said human rights leaders were wrong to compare the
past and present. His agency is understaffed and ill equipped, he said.
It should have at least three times its current level of 8,000 officers
and 400 vehicles.
Still, with support from the military it has made significant progress
in their fight against crime.
Kidnappings, he said, have dropped from 47 cases in 2000 to 9 cases in
2003. Car thefts have gone down by 25 percent over the same period, he said.
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Until the reforms to the penal code, he said, the agency had not been
able to make a real dent in gang-related killings. Gang members were
arrested, he said, but usually released within 24 hours because victims
would not come forward to file charges.
The new law, he said, has given the police a stronger hand to combat
gangs. He rejects accusations of systematic abuses.
Honduran human rights activists, he said, "have not evolved because they
continue with the same discourse, because there is no longer an
ideological struggle like there was in the 1980's."
"This is an evolved police force," he added.
Óscar A. Gámez Bonilla was supposed to be the model Honduran police
officer. He had been appointed last year to establish a precinct in
Rivera Hernández, a settlement of some 130,000 people and considered one
of the most violent in the country.
His mission, he said, was to carry out community policing strategies,
the soft side of the nation's tough campaign against crime. He said, in
an interview, that he would prevent crime by providing counseling and
support to struggling parents to stop gangs where they start, in broken
homes.
"This is a change of attitude, a change in philosophy," he said. Two
weeks later, the pilot program had fallen into disgrace. Inspector Gámez
and two subordinates were arrested and charged with kidnapping,
torturing and murdering a 16-year-old and 19-year-old suspected of
stealing guns from the precinct.
One victim, a newspaper vendor named Juan Manuel Aguilar, was beaten to
death in front of his father, also named Juan Manuel.
"I told the police where to find my son, because they said they wanted
to question him," agonized the elder Mr. Aguilar in an interview. "They
did not do that. They went to kill him."
'The Immigration Hammer'
President Maduro estimates that about 1,000 gang members have fled
Honduras since he began the tough measures of Mano Dura. Human rights
activists say the number is much higher.
With them travels news about the government's antigang campaign,
igniting outrage and panic from Tegucigalpa to Los Angeles to Washington.
In May, the leaders of a gang rehabilitation organization, called Homies
Unidos, traveled to El Salvador and Honduras to talk to government
officials and gang members about the impact of new law enforcement efforts.
Tom Hayden, a former California state senator, a well-known activist and
the author of a new book about gangs titled "Street Wars: Gangs and the
Future of Violence," went along on the trip. Later, he declared the
deportations of gang members equivalent to death sentences, and
contended that United States law specifically discouraged deporting
anyone who faced the threat of torture or death back home.
An increasing number of gang members are seeking asylum in the United
States. Still, the federal government continues the deportations that
started this cycle of violence 10 years ago. From March 2003 to February
2004, the United States deported more than 78,000 criminal illegal
immigrants. More than 7,000 of them were deported to Honduras from 2000
to 2003. Another 2,000 were deported in the same period to El Salvador.
John Torres, deputy assistant director for smuggling and public safety
investigations in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said immigration
laws were devastating to gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha and 18th
Street, which are dominated by foreign-born members.
Convicted criminals who were deported from the United States and
returned, he said, could be sent to prison for as long as 10 years.
"The immigration hammer is particularly strong because we can use it to
put people in jail for long periods of time on charges that are not hard
to prove," Mr. Torres said. "We don't have to prove that they committed
a murder. We don't have to prove they committed an aggravated assault.
We don't have to prove they committed an armed robbery. We just have to
prove that they were deported and that they are back."
Civil rights lawyers contend that unless law enforcement efforts are
accompanied by programs to deal with the social and economic forces that
draw young people to gangs, crackdowns and deportations are likely to
have little more effect than to keep gang members moving in circles;
back and forth across borders, in and out of prison.
Still, every Wednesday a chartered jet carries a new load of deportees
from the United States to Tegucigalpa.
As they landed back in Honduras, most looked like ordinary workers who
had migrated to the United States in search of work. Jorge Omar Potter,
36, wore a muscle shirt and a Roman numeral XVIII, for the Mara 18 gang,
on his bicep.
"Don't you have another shirt?" asked a counselor as he welcomed Mr.
Potter.
He had been living in Hollywood since 1982, but stared silently.
"Things have changed a lot since you were home," the counselor warned
him. "We have to get you something to wear. You'll won't even make it as
far as the bus station with that tattoo."
Dan Alder contributed reporting for this article.
ken.....com wrote:
>Hey David,
>
>Would you be so kind as to cut and paste that article into an emial? I would
>love to read it. And thank you for posting it on the list serve.
>
>Kenneth Joseph Hutz
>250 Vincent Dr.
>Mountain View, CA 94041
>
>***
>
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>Este correo electrónico, incluyendo cualquier información adjunta, es
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>emisor. Si Ud. no es el destinatario nombrado, por favor borre este
>mensaje y notifique a su emisor.
>
>***
>***
>
>"The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing." Mignon
>McLaughlin.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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