- TIME Latin America bureau
chief Tim McGirk went to the badlands of Honduras to report on the impact
of gang members deported from L.A.
-
- Warning: Descriptions of violence in this story may upset
some users.
-
- The gang hit was ordered in Los Angeles, but the blood
was spilled thousands of miles away in Honduras. On October 7, in the Central
Penitentiary of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the prison homeboys of the "MS"
gang cranked up the volume of their dormitory's TV set.
-
- It was the day of the big Honduras-Jamaica soccer game,
and the blasting soccer commentary covered the screams of ex-gang leader
Geofredo Cortes Ortiz as two ornately tattooed MS members ó both
Hispanics from the U.S. ó dragged him into the bathroom and hacked
him to death with machetes. Their homeboys then joined in the symbolic
rite of methodically cutting the dead man's body into little pieces and
flushing them down the toilet.
-
- Revenge motivated the leaders of the U.S.-based MS, whose
initials stand for "Salvatrucha Gang," to order Cortes killed.
They blamed him for his failure, while leading the gang inside the penitentiary,
to defend his members against an attack by rivals from the 18th Street
gang. It had been the worst prison massacre in Honduran history.
-
- While the MS slept on the floor of their cramped dormitory,
members of the "18" had sneaked in with homemade knives and steel
pipes and killed 11 of Cortes's homeboys. The attackers then gutted their
victims and triumphantly strung their intestines along the prison barbed-wire
like party streamers. They also cut the ears off the corpses and tossed
them over the wall for the stray dogs. "It was a grotesque barbarity,"
says prison psychologist Oscar Suazo. "After it was all over, the
18's were laughing and flashing the gang sign."
-
- Cortes had been transferred out of the Central Penitentiary
soon after the killings, but after he turned to religion, prison authorities
sent him back, hoping he could tame his own gang. And that cost him his
life.
-
- The murder illustrates how Hispanic gangs in U.S. cities
are spreading their terror all over Central America. Deported to El Salvador,
Honduras and Guatemala, these delinquents not only imported the mystique
of U.S. gang culture ó its neo-Nazi tattoos, rap music, baggy trousers
and "homey" slang ó but they also brought crack cocaine,
semi-automatic weapons, home-made bombs and a level of calculated aggression
not seen in the region since the insurgencies and counterinsurgencies of
the '70s and '80s.
-
- Coming from the U.S. gives a deportee the edge over the
local gang-bangers. "These kids might have been low-level gang members
back in the States, but when they come here, they're like the Nike of the
gang world," says Magdalena Rose Avila, founder of Homeys Unidos,
which helps deported gang members settle into Salvadoran society. "One
guy I know recruited 60 or 70 soldiers to his gang in six months."
-
- Outgunned and underfunded local police forces are overwhelmed
by this lethal American export. Tiny El Salvador has over 55,000 gang members,
including some 10,000 deportees. San Pedro Sula, a city of half a million
Hondurans, has over 35,000 ó and only one police officer who handles
gangs. "About all I can do," says Magdalenys Centeno, "is
see who shows up at the gang funerals and take their photos." According
to Centeno, almost all the leaders of local gangs Control Machete, The
Junk, Poison, Crezi Kids, MS and 18 are deportees from the U.S. "They're
much more violent than anything we'd seen before," she says.
-
- The wave of returning gang members hit Central America
in the mid-'90s, when the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)
was given more power to hunt down and prosecute illegal aliens. According
to the INS, the number of criminal deportations to Mexico and Central America
has doubled since 1995 to 62,359 last year. INS officials concede that
many of these "removals" belonged to gangs, either in prisons
or in Hispanic neighborhoods back in the U.S. In Florida and New York,
aliens in jail for criminal acts are given a choice halfway through their
term to either be deported immediately or serve out their stretch and then
be deported. Most go quickly, not realizing that violent death may await
them in Central America.
-
- Both the 18th Street and MS were originally started by
Salvadorans in Los Angeles to fight the Mexican gangs, and then spread
to San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C. They thrive on robberies,
extortion and "taxing" the street drug dealers. Says Russ Bergeron,
INS media director, "We have a fundamental obligation to protect our
American citizens from the threat posed by gang violence." And however
ill-equipped Central American countries may be to cope with these criminals
bred in U.S. cities, other governments have an obligation to take back
their nationals, says the INS. But as San Pedro Sula's regional director
of criminal investigations, Pastor Ortiz, complains, "If American
police with all their resources can't control the gangs in their cities,
what can we do? We have nothing."
-
- Until the homeboy invasion, local gangs got by with knives
or primitive steel-pipe guns. They got drunk and maybe smoked a little
grass. But that all changed under the deportees' murderous influence. The
pipe guns were replaced with AK-47s and Uzis, and the marijuana with crack,
which in San Pedro Sula sells for only $4.25 a "rock." Now, gang
members aspire to have a teardrop tattooed on their cheek, to signify they've
killed a rival. The new-look gangs quickly began shaking down grocery shops,
factory girls and bus passengers for "taxes." They hijacked buses
for drive-by shootings in rivals' neighborhoods, and began raping local
girls, some as young as six, according to San Pedro Sula police.
-
- The inability of the police to tackle the gangs has spawned
vigilante groups such as El Salvador's Sombra Negra (Black Shadow), which
has been gunning down deported youths since 1994. Death squads have caught
on in Honduras, too, where human rights workers say they've killed over
180 gang members over the past two years. Suspected of being off-duty cops
and soldiers hired by local businessmen, these groups are not particularly
discriminating. "Any kid who has a tattoo is fair game," says
Human Rights Commission member Hugo Maldonado. Sociologist Ernesto Bordales
concurs. "The general feeling here is that the only way to deal with
the gangs is to kill them all. "
-
- But many of the vigilantes are simply local men pushed
too far by the gang- bangers' reign of terror. Last Spring in Villanueva,
a shantytown on the edge of San Pedro Sula, homeboys, high on crack, raped
and killed a young teenage girl and her mother, hacking their breasts off.
The screams brought neighbors who, according to Villanueva police chief
Valentino Sandoval, "more or less lynched the gang". After that,
there was no shortage of armed men volunteering for nightly anti-gang patrols.
-
- Just as often, though, San Pedro Sula's gangs do an excellent
job of exterminating each other. Seventeen-year-old Cesar was spotted ambling
down the street in his liquid, druggy gait by a bunch of 18 members. Once
they zeroed in on the MS tattoos on his forehead, Cesar was cornered and
shot four times, in the chest, his shoulders and legs.
-
- His wounds healed, he and seven other gang members are
sitting in a muddy backyard behind an empty house. The homeboy who lives
there with his mother who is a crackhead who has pawned off everything
in the house except for a photograph on the wall of his runaway father.
-
- In the alley, a white jeep with smoky windows rumbles
by, and the MS boys leap up. The 18 have been driving around the neighborhood
in a similar white jeep, smashing in doors of MS houses and spraying everybody
inside, grandmothers and children, with Uzis. Isidra Benegas, the mother
of the crackhead, curses, "These deportees from the U.S. are to blame.
They've brought the crack and the killing." A flicker of guilt crosses
Cesar's face.
-
- He belonged to an MS chapter in Eagle Pass, Texas, before
he was deported back to Honduras. "It's either live in the gang, or
die," he retorts. And Cesar knows his death may be riding in the next
passing car.
-
-
- With reporting by Melanie Wetzel/Tegucigalpa and Eugene
Palumbo/San Salvador
-
-
-
-
- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
-
-
-
- This
Site Served by TheHostPros
|