Rick Raw: MS-13 Mara Salvatrucha Gang Proliferating Worldwide as an Organized Crime Organization

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net www.rickatnight.com

Just as our law enforcement agencies and military are coping with threats from al Qaeda conducting a jihad on America, a highly organized gang called Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 has proliferated from Los Angeles into all American states, Central and South America. This organized crime syndicate has the potential to turn peaceful regions into lawless hell holes.

This ruthless band of El Salvadorian criminals formed the gang in 1980 to defend itself from other LA gangs. In the 1990s the FBI rounded up most of the gang members in Los Angeles and deported them to El Salvador, which was a huge blunder.

From there, the gang spread as an organized crime virus throughout Central and South America. The members who were not deported in America proliferated through the states, engaging in drug smuggling and sales, black market gun sales, human trafficking, auto chop shops, home invasions, assaults on law enforcement officials, and contract killings.

Like al Qaeda, MS-13 is run from autonomous cliques (like cells) that operate with their own leaders. The main leaders of the gang run the entire organization from special prisons in El Salvador. These prisons are not designed to incarcerate MS-13 members but protect them from other criminal organizations. The prisons are actually sanctuaries for the MS-13 leaders who bribe officials and send money to professional launderers who stash the enormous profits in off-shore and Swiss banks.

Not much is known about the hierarchy of Mara Salvatrucha. The rank and file members guard the gang’s secrets with their lives. The name loosely means a gang of Salvadorian rebels. Salvatrucha was slang for the Salvadorian guerrillas, which was the source of the early members who smuggled military arms into Los Angeles.

The members are initiated by a group beat-down and then they get the gang’s tattoos on their bodies, which marks them for life. Once someone is sworn into MS-13, there is no way out except prison or death. Prison is MS-13's university where members hook up with other gang members and plan crimes from jail.

Brenda Paz was the only MS-13 member to become a FBI informant. She told authorities that the gang is highly structured, with multiple leaders, and the goal is to become the richest and most feared gang in the world. Indeed, since 1980, the gang has achieved both those objectives.

In 2003, Brenda Paz was murdered by her close friends for being a snitch. Originally, she was secreted into the witness protection program, but she was unhappy and left the protection of the U.S.Marshalls. Foolishly, she wrote a diary of her MS-13 betrayal and the gang found it. They lured her out on a fishing trip to Virginia and her closest friend stabbed her. She must of known that she was marked for death.

What makes this gang especially dangerous is their roots of poverty in El Salvador and their military experience as Salvadorian rebels. MS-13 members easily recruit poverty stricken youth from Central and South America, give them a home and certain luxuries that they would never have in their old lives. Their women or wives are also pledged to the gang, and are tasked with carrying out crime missions.

Since the upper echelon leaders of MS-13 are protected in their own prisons in El Salvador, the United States law enforcement officials can’t touch them. All they can do is make token arrests of MS-13 soldiers committing crimes in America. These hardened career criminals do not fear jail. A prison sentence is a vacation with their home boys.

There have been rumors of an al Qaeda MS-13 collaboration but it was just a rumor. There is no evidence of al Qaeda having anything in common with MS-13, except maybe MS-13's counterfeit document operation to get members into the United States.

Brenda Paz was a wealth of information for the FBI, but even she didn’t know the gang’s darkest secrets or their chain of command. One of the founders of MS-13, Ernesto "Smokey" Miranda had begun studying law and working to keep children out of gangs. He was murdered at his home in El Salvador because he declined to attend a party for a gang member who had just been released from prison.

Thus, the tens of thousands (and growing) MS-13 members continue to wreak havoc on law abiding citizens of America and other countries. Like the plague, finding a cure may be difficult if not impossible. Every day hundreds more young people are recruited into this deadly criminal army.