Costa Rica Arrests Salvadoran Gang Member
for Kidnapping
Agents from Costa Rica’s OIJ law enforcement
agency arrested a suspected member of El
Salvador’s Mara Salvatrucha gang over the
weekend for the kidnapping of two Costa
Rican brothers, officials said.
The 33-year-old gang member was arrested
Saturday along with a 27-year-old Salvadoran
woman and a 21-year-old Panamanian woman,
OIJ director Jorge Rojas said.
The police operation took place in both San
Jose and Corredores, a town near the border
with Panama, where the Salvadoran had lived
for about six months.
The victims, brothers ages 19 and 22 from a
family of merchants, had been kidnapped last
Monday and were rescued unharmed.
The brothers were abducted from their house
and kept at a residence in San Jose, police
said.
The kidnappers were demanding about $10,000
in ransom for the brothers’ release.
The kidnappers planned to send the money to
the Mara Salvatrucha in El Salvador, Rojas
said.
The family negotiated with the kidnappers
and gave them a vehicle in exchange for
releasing the brothers, Rojas said, adding
that police recovered the vehicle.
El Salvador’s two largest violent youth
gangs, known as “maras,” are Mara 18 and
Mara Salvatrucha.
Mara Salvatrucha is a criminal organization
that evolved on the streets of Los Angeles
during the 1980s, with most of its members
young Salvadorans whose parents fled their
nation’s erstwhile civil war for the United
States.
Because many of the gang members were born
in El Salvador, they were subject to
deportation when rounded up during
immigration crackdowns in California in the
1990s.
Sent “home” to a land they barely knew, they
formed gangs that spread throughout El
Salvador and to neighboring countries in
Central America, where membership is now
counted in the tens, or even hundreds of
thousands, and gang members are engaged in
murder, drug dealing, kidnapping and people
smuggling.
In addition to those activities, gang
members are blamed throughout Central
America for a spike in rapes and robberies,
and for running protection rackets to extort
“taxes” from bus companies and owners of
small businesses. EFE |
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