Central America's massive crackdown on the street gangs has drawn a bloody response: some gangs are dismembering young women to send police a message of defiance. Others are fleeing to Mexico and neighboring countries, bringing their violence with them.
Honduran President Ricardo Maduro, who was elected in 2001 on a "zero tolerance" anti-crime platform, estimates that more than 2,000 gang members have fled since August, when his government outlawed street gangs and started rounding up their members. El Salvador followed suit in October.
The wave of escaping gang members has wreaked havoc in Mexico. On Tuesday, armed with guns and machetes, gang members killed two women and wounded five other illegal migrants riding a train in southern Mexico. Seventy people have died in such attacks so far this year, Mexican officials say.
The violence has also reached as far north as the US border. Gang members in border towns like Nuevo Laredo rob and kill fellow Central American migrants, recruit Mexican youths and may be allying themselves with Mexican drug traffickers.
Mexican police have rounded up gang members in Nuevo Laredo -- south of Laredo, Texas -- and along the Guatemalan border, deporting hundreds.
Central American gangs are known as "maras," a name derived from a species of aggressive swarming ants. Their members are easily spotted because their heads, necks and arms are often covered with elaborate tattoos bearing symbols of the three main gangs -- "MS," "13," "18" and dice, death's heads or daggers.
"A lot of us have come here because of the problems with the government," said Lorenzo Maldonado, 18, a member of "MS-13," at a Nuevo Laredo jail where he was being held pending deportation back to his native Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Maldonado said that when he was caught, he was heading to San Diego "to work, not commit crimes, and send money back to my family and my homies in Honduras."
Maduro, whose son was kidnapped in 1997 and murdered by a gang of local thugs, has proposed implementing laws across Central America to stop gang members from taking refuge in neighboring countries. That could mean an even greater exodus to Mexico.
In a terrible irony, many Hondurans and others trying to escape violence in their native country have fallen victim to it in Mexico as gangs target fellow Central American migrants on their way to look for work in the US.
"I left Honduras because I didn't want any problems with the maras, because you can't even go out on the street there," said Jose Marciago Molina, 20, who was shot in the back by gang members he identified as fellow Hondurans.
Molina had crossed into Mexico illegally earlier this year and was heading for the US when he was robbed.
``I started to run, and they shot me in the back. They took everything I had, even my shoes," said Molina, who walks on crutches because the bullet is lodged near his spine.
Consular officials in Tapachula, on Mexico's southern border, described one mass assault on migrants in November by as many as 20 gang members who hacked migrants with machetes and tossed some from moving trains. At least one died and three were critically injured.
It is hard to estimate how many migrants have been killed by the Central American gang members in Mexico.
"There are hundreds who are pushed off trains by the maras if they resist the robberies," said Asdrubal Aguilar Zepeda, the Salvadoran consul in Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border.
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