The rise of MS-13: The roots of the Salvadoran gang and how they came to terrorize America
The MS-13 gang took over headlines as President Donald Trump used the rhetoric of "violent criminals" to push his anti-immigration policies. The Salvadorean criminal gang, in fact, had its origins in the poor neighborhoods of Los Angeles. While many of Trump's statements about the gang have been debunked, there is a lot to know about the transnational criminal organization — MS-13 is only the fifth to be declared so by the US Department of Treasury after the Russia-based Brothers’ Circle, the Italian Camorra, the Mexican cartel the Zetas and the Yakuza in Japan.
Origins
The MS-13 gang, originally known as the Mara Salvatrucha gang, was formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by young immigrants from El Salvador who were heavy metal fans. But rather than as a crime unit, the gang was set up to protect Salvadoran immigrants from other gangs that were prominent in Los Angeles at the time, which included Asian, Mexican, and African-American gangs.
As El Salvador was going through a civil war in the 70s and 80s, many Salvadorans came to the United States seeking asylum. However, the immigrants were refused asylum and instead were classified as undocumented immigrants. When Salvadorans began to immigrate in large numbers, they mostly settled in cities with large undocumented populations, like Los Angeles.
It was under the leadership of Ernesto Deras, a former member of Salvadoran special forces, trained in Panama by United States Green Berets, that the MS-13 started evolving into a crime unit. Deras used his military training to discipline the gang and improve its logistical operations.
The MS stands for Mara Salvatrucha, said to be a combination of Mara, meaning gang (or for La Mara, a street in San Salvador), Salva, for Salvador, and trucha, which translates roughly into being alert. The term "Salvatruchas' was also used in reference to Salvadoran peasants who trained to become guerrilla fighters who fought against William Walker, an ambitious businessman and proponent of slavery from the United States who tried to subdue various parts of Central America with a small army in the 1850s. The 13 is believed to represent the position of M in the alphabet.
Expansion
It was in the 1990s as the United States began to deport many members of the gang back to El Salvador as the civil war ended that the gang found a foothold in the country — a trend that still continues. According to one estimate, 20,000 criminals were sent to El Salvador from 2000 to 2004 — a considerable number for a Salvadoran government that didn’t have the capacity to deal with criminal organizations and that wasn’t being notified which of the deportees being returned to them were criminals, thanks to the US law at the time.
The convicts, who often had only the scarcest connection to their countries of birth, had little chance of integrating into legitimate society, and they often turned to gang life. In this way, the decision to use immigration policy as an anti-gang tool helped spawn the virulent growth of the gang in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Most MS-13 members in El Salvador were not deportees. A 1996 survey showed that only 16 percent of Salvadoran gang members had been to the United States, while 88 percent of them had joined the gang in El Salvador itself.
Central American policies at the time did not help either — the “mano dura,” or “iron fist” policies, which jailed youths based on appearance and association as well criminal activities, became the norm following their implementation by Salvadoran President Francisco Flores in the late '90s. As a result, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala saw their prison populations overflow with members of the MS-13 and other gangs.
Because the Central American countries' prison systems were unprepared for the sudden influx of thousands of violent and organized gang members, violence rose sharply in jails. While authorities separated the gangs, the individual gangs got the opportunities to reorganize, consolidate and plan criminal activity. With access to cellphones, computers and even television, the MS-13's Central American branches were able to rebuild from inside prison walls and carried out crimes such as car theft, extortion and petty drug dealing.
Current status
While some estimates suggest that there are between 30,000 and 50,000 members worldwide with a rough estimate of 10,000 within the US, forming approximately 10% of the 1.4 million gang members within the country, other estimates suggest only 30,000 members are present worldwide. In early 2018, the district attorney for Nassau County, New York, stated that an investigation had "uncovered a structured network of MS-13 operations in New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Texas, from within a Mississippi prison cell, and in countries around the globe including Mexico, Colombia, Korea, France, Australia, Peru, Egypt, Ecuador and Cuba."
Last year, nearly 100 alleged members of the violent MS-13 gang and associates had been charged on New York’s Long Island, in one of the largest takedowns of the criminal enterprise in US history.
While the gang is known for its violent and brutal crimes, it is not as big as President Trump makes it out to be. For instance, a Long Island detective told Pro Publica that police officers call MS-13 members “mighty munchkins,” because they have often not yet hit their growth spurts and tend to commit their crimes in large groups. The members meet at night because they have to work menial jobs and sometimes even go to school during the day. MS-13 hasn’t reversed nationwide trends of declining violent crime, even in the areas where they’re most powerful.
MS-13 cliques in different areas are less like branches of the same organization than like franchises — the West Coast and East Coast MS-13 groups do not have much mutual respect for each other.
The MS-13 remains a significantly smaller gang than the Crips, the Bloods, and the Latin Kings and even smaller than several small-scale gangs such as the Gangster Disciples in Chicago. On average, only 35 murders are attributed to the MS-13 per year, fewer than that attributed to the Gangster Disciples in Chicago. The reason that MS-13 is played up in Trump's rhetoric is because of its strong ties to Central America, from where many people migrate to the United States.
MS-13 makes its money through relatively small-time drug dealing and old-fashioned extortion. That extortion can be brutal, and sometimes wide-scale: In 2015, they extorted the bus drivers of San Salvador into going on strike for higher wages, so that more of those wages could be turned over to the gang. But it’s not as sophisticated as the multitude of revenue streams that other transnational criminal organizations have.
Moreover, many of MS-13's victims are young immigrants, mostly undocumented. The gang rarely goes after outsiders — those who are not friends with any gang members or targets for recruitments. What makes MS-13's murders horrifying is that they don't just kill people, they use their signature weapon, the machete, to cut off body parts.
In the communities where MS-13 has been highlighted — Suffolk and Nassau counties on Long Island; Montgomery County, Maryland; Fairfax County, Virginia — the gang’s activity makes up a large percentage of murders and violent crime. Suffolk County had only 22 homicides in 2017 but attributed 14 of them to MS-13.