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CENTRAL AMERICA |
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Nine
Suspected Foreign Gang Members Arrested in
El Salvador
SAN SALVADOR – El Salvador’s National
Civilian Police, or PNC, arrested nine
suspected Nicaraguan gang members on
extortion charges, the press reported.
The Nicaraguans, all suspected members of
the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, were
arrested last week at a house in San Miguel,
a city located 138 kilometers (about 86
miles) east of San Salvador, the Diario de
Hoy newspaper reported.
The suspects belonged to a cell of the gang
that specialized in running extortion
rackets in downtown San Miguel, the PNC
said.
El Salvador’s two largest violent youth
gangs, known as “maras,” are Mara 18 and
Mara Salvatrucha, which carry out killings,
run extortion rackets and are engaged in
other criminal activities.
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.
In November 2008, Nicaraguan authorities
turned a Mara Salvatrucha leader, Saul
Turcios Angel, over to judicial officials in
El Salvador.
Turcios Angel had been on the run from the
law for almost a year.
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