Latino Gangs Confound the Law.

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Registered: 03-18-2000
Latino Gangs Confound the Law.
1
Sun, 09-26-2004 - 10:27am
TATTOED WARRIORS
Shuttling Between Nations, Latino Gangs Confound the Law.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/international/americas/26honduras.html?hp


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.












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 remainder of this article, see next post..........

cl-Libraone~

 


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Sun, 09-26-2004 - 10:36am

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.











"She always did things for her daughter over me," Mr. Fuentes said. The unhappy family lived in a

 


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