Some of the largest and most powerful Central American gangs, like the Mara Salvatrucha, were formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s and incubated in El Salvador and Honduras after gang members were deported back to those countries.
An estimated quarter-million gang members are in Central America, and they are growing more brutal. In El Salvador in early July, suspected gang members left the decapitated heads of two young women near a police station. That same week, several body parts were found in neighboring Guatemala.
Central American authorities have reacted with tough anti-gang policies with names like "Heavy Hand" and "Operation Broom."
Many maras fled, and Mexican and Guatemalan authorities estimate 3,000 gang members operate along their border.
"The Salvatruchas are creating a serious problem for us," Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha said.
The gangs have been implicated in a violent reform school uprising in Chiapas. In Tapachula, authorities believe they have recruited 700 Mexican youths.
"This is becoming a town ruled by the law of the maras," said Jose Juan Perez a city councilman in Ciudad Hidalgo, another Mexican city on the Guatemalan border.
Last year, police in Chiapas state arrested 15 Mara Salvatrucha members on suspicion of raping and murdering two Mexican girls, then throwing their bodies down a well.
In their native Honduras, the maras have begun using a grisly new form of protest against the government crackdown.
In October in northern Honduras, a note scrawled with "Mara 18 doesn't want to talk to Maduro any more" was found in a park alongside the decapitated head of a young girl.
On Nov. 7, five suspected gang members burst into a dance club in the Honduran coastal city of San Pedro Sula and shot to death two female dancers. They wrote "Maduro, we don't want to talk to you" on the walls of the club before fleeing.
A few days later, suspected members of the Mara 18 strangled a girl, cut her body into eight pieces, stuffed them into trash bags and left them in a vacant lot with an obscene message directed toward Maduro.
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