http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2028
By Piers Scholfield
BBC News, Washington
The suburbs of the US are no longer the same as those immortalised in 1950s movies, with http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2804families living in big houses and the father driving off to work in his Buick, past manicured lawns.
These days, it is more likely that http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1903 will not even be the first language you hear on the streets.
In Langley Park, Maryland, the kiosks sell Spanish-language newspapers; the supermarket shelves are stocked with tortillas and assorted black beans.
Mexican music plays in the background while the tannoy blares out announcements in http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3068.
Outside, groups of men http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4062 on the street corners and their Spanish is accented – Nicaraguan, Honduran and, most often, Salvadoran.
They wait, hoping to be picked up for a day’s labouring in the houses and gardens of Washington DC’s middle class.
But among the hard-working families lurks a http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2822. Vicious street gangs, committed to violence, have spread throughout the Americas and are now a significant threat in the US.
We visited Maria Hernandez in her apartment in Langley Park.
She welcomed us through her battered front door, which had been smashed by police in a dawn raid.
They were looking for evidence connecting her son, Marvin, to an assault, where a man suffered brain damage after being hit on the head with a baseball bat.
Maria told us that Marvin had joined a gang after being picked on at school.
The police search warrant said Marvin was a member of MS13.
MS13 – or Mara Salvatrucha – is the biggest and fastest-growing of the Latin American street gangs.
In Maryland alone, MS13 members are accused of being responsible for a long series of violent crimes including murder.
Favoured tactics include decapitation by machete.
MS13 started life as a group of young immigrants on the streets of California in the 1980s.
After nearly a million Salvadorans fled their civil war for the US, many of them settled in Los Angeles where gang violence was rife.
In the 1990s, the “maras” spread to Central America after many of their leaders were deported from the United States.
Those countries, struggling to get back on their feet after years of devastating civil conflict, were a perfect setting in which gangs could proliferate.
Today, some estimates put up to 60,000 maras active in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and – according to the FBI – in more than 40 US states.
Rod J Rosenstein is Maryland’s US Attorney.
His office is currently prosecuting a series of cases against MS13. He told us the gang’s motives are more about mayhem than money.
“There’s evidence that the model of the gang is rape, kill, control,” he said.
“They’re really about gaining control over other immigrants from their community, intimidating people and asserting some degree of threat which enables them to control their neighbourhoods.”
Rosenstein’s prosecutors have moved on from charging individual gang members with discrete crimes.
Instead, they are now targeting MS13 with federal racketeering laws – the same legislation used against the Mafia and other organised crime.
For this tactic to be successful, they must prove that MS13 is indeed an organised network.
We attended court in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The prosecutors spent much of their time talking about gang meetings; about the clothes – blue and white for MS13 – and the tattoos.
And, most damningly, an alleged firm http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3444 between gang leaders in El Salvador and their proteges in the US.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7328967.stm