Deportations give rise to a murder machine

SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras - Bishop Romulo Emiliani was angry, his tattooed flock shamefaced and silent.

"Why," he demanded, "must you kill your brothers?" The bishop was near tears, but still no one answered.

Four days earlier, Emiliani was in this same prison courtyard, singing and praying and asking God's forgiveness with the same 100 or so members of Mara Salvatrucha, a street gang formed by criminal deportees from Los Angeles.

But now, during Easter week, they had killed again. This time, they didn't disembowel their victims. This time, all seven were found dead in their bunks. A needle and syringe, the prison director guessed, a single deadly air bubble to each of seven hearts - and not a drop of blood.

For that, at least, the bishop was thankful. But prayer alone was not working, he decided; he must go to Los Angeles to negotiate a truce. It was from there, gang members told him, that they get their orders.

There have always been street gangs in Central America, but they used to be small and loosely organized.

"They were different, not like now," said Eddie Ramirez, El Salvador coordinator of Homies Unidos, a Los Angeles and Central American organization that tries to mediate gang disputes and pull young people out of the gang lifestyle. Before, they were not nearly this sophisticated or violent, "but the deportations changed everything."

No one knows how many of the 500,000 criminal aliens deported from the United States since 1996 are gang members. The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it doesn't keep track, and the countries that receive the deportees don't, either.

What is known is that as of last December, nearly 60,000 of the criminal deportees had been sent to Central America and the Caribbean, and that many came from a pool of American street-gang members that law enforcement officials say is about 800,000-strong.

Once in Central America, they quickly reconstituted their American gangs, recruiting new members from among hundreds of thousands of poor teen-agers, said gang experts including Al Valdez, an Orange County, Calif., assistant district attorney.

The deportees arrived sporting gang tattoos and dressing like American gang members. Young locals "saw their style," Ramirez said, "and they wanted to be part of that."

The deported gang members found an abundance of Central American kids who had no purpose in life, said Alex Sanchez, a Salvadoran-born former street gang member who founded Homies Unidos in Los Angeles. They had seen American gangsters on TV, "only we were the real thing, so they started idolizing us. 'Hey man, can we get into your gang?'

"So finally, finally they had something they could say, 'This is mine; this is what I am going to claim; I am going to protect it,' " Sanchez said. "And then the gang wars started."

Today, these reconstituted American gangs have tens of thousands of members, officials throughout Central America say. The gangs are known as "maras."

The gangs have morphed into transnational criminal organizations, trading drugs, stolen cars and guns across international borders, said gang experts including Louise Shelly, director of the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at American University in Washington, D.C.

Gang leaders in Los Angeles communicate with members in Central America by telephone and the Internet, said Valdez, who spends hours monitoring their Web traffic.

Sometimes, they communicate the old-fashioned way, Ramirez said. "It comes on the next plane down here. A personal message: Kill this guy."

In a high-profile case last year, Honduran police killed one Mara Salvatrucha member and wounded another while breaking up a drug-trafficking network along the El Salvador-Honduras border. Evidence confiscated in the raid linked the Honduran gang to the Arellano Felix cartel, a criminal organization operating on the American border in Tijuana, Mexico, said Courtland Winthrop, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.

In Jamaica, deportees have formed criminal networks that trade South American cocaine for sophisticated North American weapons, said Aham Brown, police liaison with the Jamaican Embassy in Washington. They are also flooding Jamaica - long known for marijuana - with heroin and crack cocaine, he said.

In Guyana, deportees are exploiting their contacts in the United States to expand markets for international drug cartels, said Ronald Gajraj, the Home Affairs Minister. Taking advantage of the country's long coastline and a string of clandestine airstrips, they are using Guyana as a major transshipment point for drugs going into the United States, he said.

Two of the biggest gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and Mara Dieciocho, which originated in Los Angeles, traffic in guns and drugs and have tens of thousands of members in the United States, according to police. Now they are playing out their old American rivalries on a Central American canvas.

The result, police throughout Central America say, is a regionwide explosion of assault, robbery, kidnapping, rape and murder.

In El Salvador, the army has begun conducting periodic sweeps of gang-infested barrios. In just one sweep of seven cities and towns in August, more than 328 gang members were rounded up and held without charges.

The country's gang problem is "so big it can't be measured," said Eduardo Linares, Metropolitan Police Chief in San Salvador, the capital.

Ramirez, the El Salvador coordinator of Homies Unidos, is a criminal deportee himself and a former gang member - 14 when he emigrated to Los Angeles and joined the 18th Street gang. He was 30 when he was deported in 1998 for a drug conviction.

He was shot not long after he arrived in San Salvador, he said, and then rattled off the names of murdered friends: "Moreno, Rico, Carlito, Teomarcus, and then Gino. Gino just got killed two months ago. Crazy, man."

Bishop Emiliani said some of the gangs are no longer content with simply killing their rivals. Sometimes, he said, they dismember their victims.

More times than he allows himself to think about, the bishop said, gang members in San Pedro Sula, a Honduran industrial town of 1 million people, get their revenge by killing not just their enemies, but their families as well - "the brothers, the sisters and the mama and father."

Honduran President Ricardo Maduro has been touched personally by the violence. In 1997 his son was kidnapped and murdered by a gang of local thugs. Elected in 2001 on an anti-crime campaign, he has virtually declared war on the gangs.

The Honduran Congress recently gave him the tools to strike back, making gang membership illegal and punishable by up to 12 years in prison. To enforce it, masked police carrying assault weapons and supported by helicopters have been breaking into homes of gang members and carting scores off to prison.

In Honduras and El Salvador, vigilante groups have also been fighting back against the American-inspired gangs.

Some criminal aliens in the United States are so fearful of the vigilantes they go to great lengths to avoid deportation to Honduras and El Salvador.

On June 8, 2000, Gavriel Trevino, 41, held Archbishop Patrick Flores of San Antonio hostage with a dummy hand grenade after U.S. officials told him he was to be deported to El Salvador. He remains in the United States, serving a 40-year sentence for kidnapping.

Sometimes the vigilantes don't discriminate between the criminal deportees, their local gang disciples and innocent young people, Emiliani said.

At least 50 suspected gang members and street kids are killed by vigilantes in Honduras each month, according to Casa Alianza, a Honduran youth advocacy group. The group has counted 1,900 since 1998.

The Rev. Thomas Goekler, a Maryknoll priest from Hartford, Conn., works in San Pedro Sula. There, he said, vigilante squads began as small groups of off-duty security guards and police.

"The gangs know who they are," Goekler said. So far they've killed five vigilantes, just in his barrio.

The gangs are fighting back in El Salvador, too. Sanchez said they have taken to rolling hand grenades under SUVs with tinted windows - the vehicles favored by the vigilantes.

"If a boy leaves his mara to lead a normal life, the mara will kill him," Emiliani said. "And if he does not leave his mara, the other mara will kill him. And if they don't kill him, the death squads will kill him."

The deportees arrived sporting gang tattoos and dressing like American gang members. Young locals "saw their style," Ramirez said, "and they wanted to be part of that."

They always fail to mention that these people were illegals here. Did they learn gang banging here or is it something that they knew before they came here? It seems to me that hispanics countries always have had gang-like parts of their societies. I will agree, that with the lax laws here in the U.S. they get worse.

Of course, we are not allowed to say things like this. It's racist.

I'm just waiting for the Government program that will emerge from Nancy Pelosi -- a special asylum program to bring them back, because of a fear of persecution; or your tax dollars sent down to Honduras, for jobs programs and self-esteem programs and Head Start programs and heaven knows what else.

This reminds me of the late 1980s when the national media decided that whatever the problem, domestic or international, the problem was always Ronald Reagan's or George Bush's fault.

...a pool of American street-gang members that law enforcement officials say is about 800,000-strong."

That's a force larger than our nation's combined infantry in uniform. That force could fully populate a major city like Memphis. We have an illegal alien crime army within our own country, wreaking havoc accross America, causing every kind of crime known to man.

Elected leaders of both major parties claim these gangs of illegal aliens are just doing things(crimes) Americans won't do.

We don't need a house-to-house search of criminals in Iraq as badly as we need one for the round-up of this enormous pack of third-world rats right here. We need a call-up of every able-bodied American to round up this trash and kick them the hell out of here!

One thing that should always be pointed out when discussing these gangs is the fact that 100% of them are violent racist organizations. They have mass-murdered hundreds of thousands of people including thousands that were motivated or aggravated by race since they first became a problem in the 1960s. Imagine if the Klan had hundreds of thousands of members, even non-violent members, what the reaction of the establishment would be. Now contemplate their non-reaction to these gangs. It isn't laxity that has allowed these gangs to flourish, it is racism.

Homies Unidos

Yep. Eddie Ramirez in Salvador, don't know who runs it in Honduras. Like the little Dutch boy trying to plug the cracks in the dike.

-archy-/-

...a pool of American street-gang members that law enforcement officials say is about 800,000-strong."
That's a force larger than our nation's combined infantry in uniform. That force could fully populate a major city like Memphis. We have an illegal alien crime army within our own country, wreaking havoc accross America, causing every kind of crime known to man.

I'm in Memphis. There are probably more MS13 members here in Memphis than there are officers on the Memphis Police Department. Add in their MD18 counterparts, and they probably outnumber the Memphis PD, Shelby County Sheriffs, and Tennessee State Police combined.

Officially, Mexicans and OTM's make up about 3% of the local population. In fact I'd bet on it being well over 5%, and growing .

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