Mara Salvatrucha – Overview | Recent Central American History

Mara Salvatrucha – Overview

Leslie Rivers

Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, started off as a small group of Salvadoran immigrants that were Black Sabbath metal heads in the early 1970s and early 1980s. They were just a few kids hanging out on the street corner looking to escape an imminent threat of becoming a child soldier if they continued to live in their home country of El Salvador (Grillo, 200). Salvadorians began to flee to the United States in the 1970s to escape from the debilitating and incomprehensibly violent civil war due to the opposition of the government due to supposed “fraudulent elections, police fir[ing] on protests, and death squads hunt[ing] dissidents” which led to an outright war in the 1980s (Grillo 194). During this time period, you start to see the formation of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a leftist guerilla group still present in Central America today that like the national army, recruited child soldiers in an attempt to combat the army’s “scorched earth” campaign (Grillo, 196). This initial massive flow outward from Central America of natives of El Salvador resulted in many young kids being thrown into downtown Los Angeles where previously-established gangs were a threat of violence to them. This resulted in Salvadorans banding together and forming the Maras. The name was taken from a Charles Heston movie, The Naked Jungle. In El Salvador it was translated to “When the Ants Roar”. The Maras took this and named themselves after ants because they protected one another much like ants do (Grillo, 200). The addition of Salvatrucha in Mara Salvatrucha 13 was due to the Maras being targets for other gangs due to them being a small and not well-defined group that looked like hippies, a vast difference to the other gangs that dressed in the cholo style of wife beaters and shaved heads (Grillo, 200). They added “Salvatrucha”, which is speculated to mean street smarts. The addition of the “-13” was when the Maras merged with a gang called the Mexican Mafia in prisons to gain protection from other gangs of inmates. The Mexican Mafia uses the number thirteen (M is the 13^th letter in the alphabet) to symbolize their gang (Grillo, 201).

The rise in gang violence in Los Angeles was largely due to the proliferation of gangs throughout the region. Following the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, police determined most of the looting and violence stemmed from the gangs, including MS-13 (Arana, 2005). This resulted in California charging Latino gang members as adults with felonies while they were minors. Following in 1996, a federal immigration law stated that any non-citizen that was sentenced to over a year in prison would be sent back to their country of origin to finish their prison sentences (Farah, 2012). These young men that had gang affiliations were shipped back to their home country of El Salvador that had very little political power to keep crime at a minimum due to the recent civil wars. This meant that effectively the gangs could go unchecked and establish local branches of the gang but maintain their American connections (Demombynes, 2011).

Eventually, with little to control them in terms of either police force or political laws, gangs like MS-13 flourished in places like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. This led to unchecked gang violence and deaths that lead to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to have some of the highest murder rates worldwide (Grillo, 187-188). MS-13 initially gained its primary source of income from extortion through local cliques and was not considered sophisticated enough to be as organized like the drug cartels that operate out of Mexico and South America (Wolf, 2012). Therefore, prior to 2000 most cartels were the ones producing the drugs and relied on gangs like MS-13 to transport and sell drugs like cocaine and marijuana that they produced en masse in Central and South America. Post-1990 the increase of drug trafficking of cocaine through Central America went from 30% to 90%, as gangs like MS-13 moved from extortion to cocaine trafficking and human smuggling (Scott and Marshall, 1998).

Further Information

Bibliography:

Arana, A. (2005, June 07). How the Street Gangs Took Central America. Retrieved December 8, 2018, from https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/cfr/international/20050501faessay84310_arana.html?_r=1

Demombynes, G. (2011, May 30). Drug trafficking and violence in Central America and beyond. Retrieved December 8, 2018, from http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/761351468235453648/Drug-trafficking-and-violence-in-Central-America-and-beyond

Farah, D. (2012, October 01). Central American Gangs: Changing Nature and New Partners. Retrieved December 8, 2018, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/24388251?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Grillo, I. (2016). Gangster Warlords: Drug dollars, killing fields, and the new politics of Latin America. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

Scott, P. D., & Marshall, J. (2005). Cocaine politics: Drugs, armies, and the CIA in Central America. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press.

Wolf, S. (2012, April 01). Mara Salvatrucha: The Most Dangerous Street Gang in the Americas? Retrieved December 8, 2018, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/41485342?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

This entry was posted on April 2, 2019 at 12:48 pm and is filed under Central American Gangs, El Salvador with tags Los Angeles, MS-13. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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