Mara gang working as hired guns

A top prosecutor warns that members of the Central American gang are being hired by drug cartels to carry out their killings.

Hoards of "Mara" street gang members who fled to Mexico following crackdowns against them in Central America are now being hired as gunmen by Mexican drug cartels, whom they serve with unreasoning violence, a top prosecutor confirmed this week. The Carrillo Fuentes cartel in the city of Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, has been at the forefront of the movement to hire Mara members as low-level gunmen, said Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the nation's top organized crime prosecutor.

"The drug traffickers hire them as killers but without making them formally part of their organizations," Santiago Vasconcelos said on Monday. "It's a way of using their violence in favor of drug trafficking."

"The Maras are a group of criminals who use violence as their main weapon and form of expression," Santiago Vasconcelos said. "They have contempt for life, contempt for women ... this subculture is intimately linked to drug trafficking." Several Central American men with the gangs' distinctive tattoos have been killed in recent months in border cities like Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo, in apparent drug-related killings. But Monday's comments were the first confirmation the Maras have become hitmen for Mexican gangs.

The statement came two weeks after nationwide raids against the Maras resulted in the arrest of about 224 gang members, many on drug and weapons charges.

Police said most of the suspects from the Mara Salvatrucha gang were from Central America, but did not specify their nationalities.

The Mara Salvatrucha and MS-18 are Central America's largest and most ruthless street gangs, but crackdowns in Honduras and El Salvador drove much of the gangs' membership into southern Mexico, especially in Chiapas, Veracruz and Oaxaca.

Gang migration to Mexico "potentially puts national security at risk, essentially because of issues linked to our borders," Interior Secretary Santiago Creel said in early December. He said there was no evidence of the gangs' involvement in terroristrelated activity.

Some of the most powerful Central American gangs incubated on the street of Los Angeles in the 1980s and spread to El Salvador and Honduras after gang members were deported back to those countries.

Having spent 3 years in Central America as an officer in U.S. Army Special Forces, I can assure you the Mara Salvatrucha are indeed a group to be very concerned about. We trained Salvadorian officers to be the most efficient killers in the history of modern war-fare. The young enlistees only knew about war as children and they wanted the Russians & Cubans expelled from their country. The U.S. Army provided these soldiers with Green Cards since they had served under the direction of U.S. Special Forces. These trained killers were then allowed into the USA. While assuming America would reward them for expelling Communism from our hemisphere, these soldiers found a country that had little interest in their accomplishments. Many turned to criminal behavior with the same fervor they had for mutilating the enemy. These guys are absolutely ruthless. Tha Savadorian Army paid these guys a bounty. It did not matter who they killed, as long as they could produce a corpse, they got paid. Trust me, American law enforcement officials will not be able to thwart the Mara Salvatrucha from achieving their goals of linking up with the Colombian Mafia, Mexican Mafia or whatever group has the money to pay these American-trained professional killers. The Congress of the United States financed the entire operation in El Salvador and now their naive efforts are biting them in the ass. Good job!

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