Officer Frank Flores sleeps little and sometimes forgets his lunch. But he has one clear goal: rid Los Angeles of gang members who were deported to Central America in the 1990s and are now returning to terrorize the city.
Flores is one of a growing number of police across the US battling an upsurge in gang activity, especially from violent gangs started by Central American refugees of the 1980s civil wars.
In mid-March police in seven US cities arrested 103 members of the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a gang US officials say has 20,000 members in the US and thousands more in Central America and Mexico.
PHOTO: AFP
"Our goal is simple: dismantle MS-13 by removing gang members from our streets and our communities," Acting Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Garcia said.
One way to do that is through deportation: for the past 15 years US officials have deported gang members, many of whom grew up in the US and speak little or no Spanish but were born in Central America.
Deeply worried by the surging gang violence, Central American leaders agreed in their first anti-gang summit in Honduras' capital of Tegucigalpa Friday to coordinate efforts to fight them.
Here in Los Angeles, officer Flores is now seeing the results of that policy. Those same gang members "are fleeing countries such as El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala because of the pressure of the government and police and they are coming here," said Flores, with the Los Angeles Police Department's gang division.
Gang members choose Los Angeles because many have friends and relatives in the area's vast Hispanic community, Flores said.
The National Youth Gang Center estimates that of more than 750,000 gang members in the US, half of them live in California. Flores believes the true number of gang members in Los Angeles is twice as large, and that half of the homicide in the county is gang related. "And that is conservative," he added.
The Mara Salvatrucha -- mara is slang for gangs, and Salvatrucha is slang for Salvadorans -- was founded in Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrants, many of whom had experience fighting in their country's civil war of the 1980s. The group was formed initially as a protection against other more established gangs.
Today the Mara Salvatrucha and the its main rival, the M-18, accept members of all ethnic backgrounds, and have a reach that extends from Central America to Canada. Most gang members are between the ages of 13 and 25, said Flores. "At 25 they stop because either they are dead or they are in prison," he said.
Jose, a former White Fence gang member who declined to give his last name, beat the odds and survived to the ripe old age of 34 mainly because he spent almost half of his life in prison.
The Mexican-born Jose never forgets the day he got home and found his 18-year-old girlfriend, pregnant with his second son, laying on the floor in a pool of blood and clutching the hand of the couple's dead five-year old son.
"The Lennox gang shot my children. The next day I went to take revenge and they shot me in the head," he said, pointing out his ear-to-ear scar. "I was in coma for two months."
Jose came from a broken family and joined White Fence when he was 13. He was arrested three times, the last time at age 19 for killing a homeless man with other gang members and stealing 26 dollars he was carrying.
Jose recently left prison and is trying to reform his life by working for Homeboy Industries, a Los Angeles group that provides jobs to former convicts.
"I want to change, I want to change," he says. Then he goes silent. Without his gang Jose seems lost.
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