MS-13
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| “ | You wouldn't believe how bad these people are. These aren't people. They're animals. | „ |
| ~ U.S. President Donald Trump describes MS-13 |
Mara Salvatrucha (or MS, Mara, and MS-13) is a transnational criminal gang that originated in Los Angeles and has spread to other parts of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Central America. The majority of the gang is ethnically composed of Central Americans and active in urban and suburban areas. In the U.S., MS-13 has an especially heavy presence in Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California; the Washington, D.C. metropolitan areas of Fairfax County, Virginia, Montgomery County, and Prince George's County, Maryland; Long Island, New York; the Boston, Massachusetts area; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Houston, Texas. There is also a presence of MS-13 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Members of MS distinguish themselves by tattoos covering the body and also often the face, as well as the use of their own sign language. They are notorious for their use of grotesque violence and a subcultural moral code that predominantly consists of merciless revenge and cruel retributions. This cruelty of the distinguished members of the "Maras" or "Mareros" earned them a path to be recruited by the Sinaloa Cartel battling against Los Zetas in an ongoing drug war south of the United States border. Their wide-ranging activities have drawn the attention of the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who have initiated wide-scale raids against known and suspected gang members – netting hundreds of arrests across the country. They are rivals with the 18th Street Gang. New members who join are brutally beaten and the primary weapon used by the gang are machete's and knife with blades that are about 60cm long.
Crimes edit
- Drug trafficking
- Robbery
- Larceny
- Human trafficking
- Extortion
- Illegal immigration
- Murder
- Prostitution
- Racketeering
- Battery
- Kidnapping
- Money laundering
- Contract killing
- Dogfighting
- Cockfighting
- Bullfighting
- Arms trafficking
History edit
La Mara Salvatrucha was created in around 1983 by the sons of Central American (mainly Salvadoran) political refugees in Los Angeles as a strategy for surviving in streets populated by traditional Mexican-American gangs and in an environment with scarce means of social integration.
In 1989, when La Mara Salvatrucha had only 500 members, the Los Angeles police and some officials of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service considered them criminals, and deported many of them who had records for felonies ranging from murder to possession of stolen property. Some of the deportees quickly returned to the United States and extended the group's organization to other states; others stayed in their parents' country of origin, where they were culturally alienated. Those deportees recruited new members, too. Salvadoran sociologists calculate that for every member of La Mara Salvatrucha deported, twenty to twenty-five new members were recruited in their destination country.
Since the 1980s the public image of La Mara Salvatrucha has changed from an organization of excluded youth to a transnational criminal organization. The Salvadoran government claims that gangs are responsible for around 80 percent of the violent deaths in their nation, and that gangs have been the main national-security concern of Central American countries since the end of the civil war in 1992. In 2003 the government of El Salvador announced the toughening of legal punishments against gang members. In the United States enforcement agencies such as the FBI initiated raids against gangs in 2005.