The prolific growth of violent, transnational street gangs throughout Central and North America embodies the main security threat to local law enforcement officials today, as street gangs grow increasingly impetuous and entrepreneurial. Throughout the 1980s, street gangs in the US ?confined largely to metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Washington DC?evolved from simple sources of camaraderie into organized criminal enterprises engaged in a host of deadly activities. The composition of gangs?the Bloods, Crips, MS-13, and Jamaican Posse, among others?were limited to racially and culturally similar individuals, forming a brotherhood of alienated and troubled youth.
To combat the growth of foreign gangs in the US, authorities began to deport convicted gang members. This process assisted the global diffusion of gang elements throughout Central America, which was largely free of their influence. Most deported immigrants during the 1990s were young adults who grew up in US cities and knew very little about their native homes. Upon deportation from the US, young men arrived culturally disoriented and alone in foreign lands, finding solace within their gang families.
Today, an estimated 10,000-gang members reside in El Salvador , 35,000 in Honduras , and 15,000 in Guatemala . Since the mid-1990s, the explosion of gang activity and gang-related violence is attributed largely to the end of Central America’s civil wars. Although the civil wars that plagued El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua ceased in the late 80s or early 90s, social reunification and physical reconstruction has occurred at a wearisome pace. The cessation of hostilities and subsequent disbanding of guerrillas and paramilitaries flooded local economies with illegal weapons, which gangsters easily procured.
Central American governments are pursuing suspected gang members, identifiable by the tattoos that blanket their bodies. Although their intentions are meant to deescalate the threat emanating from the maras, Central American prisons act as a finishing school for wannabe gangsters. Prison officials are forced to house prisoners belonging to similar gangs, to avoid bloodshed from competing gangs. Sympathetic and/or corruptible prison guards permit mara inmates to continue their criminal enterprises and recruitment.
Moreover, anti-gang policies, particularly the Mano Duro initiative of the Honduran government, have exacerbated the situation, allowing for rampant human rights violations and civil liberty abuses, perpetuating the cycle of escalating violence. The public display of gang-related tattoos is enough to convict youth of gang-related activities and membership. Such draconian measures fail to address the underlying social drivers that cause youth to join organized gangs: social inequality, marginalization, and corrupt economic and political systems.