It is a tableau that repeats itself throughout Central America, from Honduras to Guatemala and El Salvador, highly tattoed young men who battle each other in local prisons for no known reason, other than turf battles. Meet the Central American gangs, new Los Angeles-styled criminal groups that have spread from California to Central America and Mexico and turned into powerful, cross-border crime networks. Central America's gang problem owes in large part to Washington's decision, in the mid 1990s, to start expelling foreign-born convicts from U.S. soil - often without warning to their home countries of their criminal records. There are no exact numbers on how many criminals were shipped to Central America since the deportations began, but local officials estimate that between 2000 and 2004 alone, the number topped 20,000, and Central America's gangs are now thought to number 70,000-100,000 members. The marabuntas, or maras, as they are known (after a deadly species of local ants), have become the most serious challenge to peace in the region since the end of the civil wars of the 1980s.

But the danger the gangs pose is not just limited to the region. Fed by an explosive growth in the area's youth population and by a host of social problems, the gangs are starting to spread. Ensuing hardline policies in Central America that make having a tattoo a crime that sends you to jail, has led many gang members to flee for Mexico and the United States. They are moving in mass, settling in rural and suburban areas, hiding among local Central American populations.

A series of attacks that occurred between Texas, Virgina and San Pedro Sula, Honduras, illuminates the frightening mobility of the gangs. Last December MS 13 gang members sprayed with bullets a passenger bus in Chamalecon, Honduras, killing 28 passengers. The attack was to spite President Maduro's crackdown on gang activities in the country, is one of several brazen incidents that show the maverick and maniacal drive of the new gangs. The attackers were led by members of a single Los Angeles clique of MS 13--there are about 12 different cliques in Los Angeles alone. The attack was allegedly led by Lester Rivera-Paz a member of Mara Salvatrucha's Normandie Locos clique, one of 13 groups the gang has in Los Angeles.

U.S. officials arrested Lester in Texas shortly after he had crossed the U.S. border, fleeing Honduran authorities. Lester had been deported four times and has a considerable criminal record in Los Angeles. His clique the Normandie Locos, has been found in Fairfax, Virginia, New York City and several other U.S. cities. The murder investigation of a 16 year old girl killed by Normandie Locos members four years ago revealed how the clique made trips around the United States in a bid to create new gang chapters. Other Los Angeles cliques have also been found well-established in the East Coast. "The MS 13 is a tight organization that is hard to penetrate," said a gang task force detective in New Jersey, where the gang has moved into several suburban cities, but local authorities refuse to acknowledge they might have a problem.

The gangs' worrisome ability to shuttle between their home countries and the United States has led US authorities to build a regional information network that could keep the information on the individual gang members in check. US authorities have announced a change on their policies on releasing criminal records. The FBI has opened an office in San Salvador to coordinate activities against the gangs. In September, the FBI announced a major arrest of several dozen MS 13 members in various cities.

But the gang has grown in areas where immigrants go. They are present in 33 U.S states. They offer protection and friendship to the thousands of illegal Central Americans and some Mexicans who come to the United States to work. The population boom in Central America has left many youth without opportunities, and a segment of the new immigrants are unaccompanied 14 and 15 year old Central Americans who have been coming silently to the United States to find work. Many of those immigrants are already gang members, but those who are not, are attracted to the gang for protection and friendship. According to the FBI, the gang offers some of these new recruits girls and drugs and sense of home. The gang also has a large recruitment drive in America’s schools, targeting Central American youth as young as 8 years old.

And even the fact that U.S. federal authorities have created MS-13 task forces is giving the gang some cache, which it is using as a marketing tool. In Maryland, one former gang member said that many of the youth in the school wanted to be part of MS-13 and that the gang cliques were accepting other nationalities, as long as they were foreign born.

Helping the gang’s growth is the lack of a coordinated effort in the United States and a lack of knowledge about the gangs. Also despite a spate of new gang training conferences and the existence of experts who travel the country giving their law enforcement colleagues training on how to spot the gang, the gang is tremendously able to camouflage itself. They often wear blue and white and wear other tell tale elements with their belts, their shoes and their hand signals. But they are known to also change those when they feel the police has targeted them. In Queens, New York recently, a group of MS-13 were wearing black shirts and black bandannas.

The measures against MS-13 have only been punitive. Most gang experts say that the most effective way to end gangs is to invest on the kids before the gangs get to them. “The problem is people want quick reactions,” said Detective Moreno who has been fighting gangs for 29 years and saw the first members of MS-13, when they sprouted to fight back attacks by Mexican-American gangs in their poor neighborhoods of East Los Angeles.

In many cities in the United States, where gangs are new and there are few Hispanics, police need to learn how to work with the local immigrant community. “It is hard to go after the gangs because it is hard to get witnesses, and to get the community to cooperate, you have to convince them that it will be for their own good. They came here from other countries, and they don’t see why calling the police would do them any good, especially if they don’t have papers. The key is getting to the community, the gangs pray on their own people.

The gang situation grew worst after 9/11. In New York City, where police and prosecutors terminated one sophisticated drug gang known as the Crazy Cowboys and several Jamaican gang posses, detectives were either allowed to retire without replacing them, or those who remained were moved to anti-terrorism duties after 9/11.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department created a task force to deal with MS-13 and other gangs, coordinating efforts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Drug Enforcement Administration and Border Patrol. The task force has arrested 1500 gang members and sent some to U.S. jails and deported others back to Central America. Authorities are preparing a new $10 million National Gang Intelligence Center, and announced that gangs will be reclassified as criminal organizations and enterprises, allowing the use of the federal anti-racketeering law, RICO, which carries tougher sentences. Washington is preparing a new RICO law especially tailored for gangs.

Central America's governments have largely confined their activities to military and police actions - and only aggravated the problem: Prisons act as gangland finishing schools, and military operations disperse the gangs' leadership. After two years of hardline “Mano Dura” policies, the prisons are full. But putting gangs in jail is not definitively the end, there have been many prison breakouts.

Central American governments have also used their highly publicized crackdowns on gangs to avoid action on another urgent priority: strengthening local democratic institutions. Since the end of the Central American civil wars in the early 1990s, judicial, legislative, and social reforms have stalled amid partisan infighting, and local politics remains split along the same left-right fault lines that caused bloodshed two decades ago.

What is missing in both the U.S. and Central America is investment in the region’s poor children. As the region’s population booms with 50 percent of the people 15 and under, investments on preventative programs in education, employment and intervention programs that protects youth who want to leave the gangs need to be included.
Fruitful anti-gang programs that have brought results in California area more inclusive. In order to tackle the problem, both the United States and Central America, any future anti-gang campaign will be to work on underlying ills that feed the gangs in the first place: dysfunctional politics, rampant corruption, the drug trade, poverty and overpopulation.