Tag Archives: Gangs

El Salvador prosecutors order nearly 600 arrests to stem crime spree

El Salvador's Attorney General Douglas Melendez in San Salvador, El Salvador, April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Jose Cabezas

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – Prosecutors in El Salvador ordered the arrests of some 593 people nationwide on suspicion of crimes like homicide and extortion, an action that appeared to be a major strike against gangs that have turned the Central American country into one of the deadliest in the world.

Attorney General Douglas Melendez said in a statement on Wednesday that all the detention orders were based on investigations. Other charges filed against the suspects included crimes such as terrorism, fraud, rape, kidnapping and drug possession.

So far, 337 suspected gang members had been arrested, police chief Howard Cotto said in a news conference, and efforts are ongoing to arrest the remaining suspects.

State security forces in Central America and Mexico are often accused of arbitrary detentions by human rights groups.

Violence has surged in El Salvador since a 2012 truce between the Barrio 18 gang and its rival Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, began to unravel in 2014.

The majority of those arrested so far were from MS-13 and suspected of committing crimes against the police, Cotto said.

Violent crime in El Salvador and other countries in the region is one of the main reasons why people seek to emigrate, often moving northward through Mexico to the United States.

(Reporting by Nelson Renteria; editing by Grant McCool and G Crosse)

Exclusive: U.S. immigration raids to target teenaged suspected gang members

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Assistant Field Office Director Jorge Field (R), 53, and Field Office Director David Marin arrest a man in San Clemente, California, U.S., May 11, 2017. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo

By Julia Edwards Ainsley

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. immigration agents are planning nationwide raids next week to arrest, among others, teenagers who entered the country without guardians and are suspected gang members, in a widening of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants.

The raids are set to begin on Sunday and continue through Wednesday, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters. The teenagers targeted will be 16- and 17-years-old.

The raids represent a sharp departure from practices during the presidency of Barack Obama. Under Obama, minors could be targeted for deportation if they had been convicted of crimes, but were not arrested simply for suspected gang activity or membership.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement that a person can be identified as a gang member if they meet two or more criteria, including having gang tattoos, frequenting an area notorious for gangs and wearing gang apparel.

The agency said it does not comment on plans for future law enforcement operations, but that it focuses on individuals who pose a threat to national security and public safety.

The memo instructing field offices to prepare for the raids was dated June 30. A Department of Homeland Security official speaking on background confirmed on Friday the raids were still scheduled to take place, though ICE could still change its plans.

Trump, who campaigned on the promise of tough immigration enforcement, has made deporting gang members, especially those belonging to the El Salvador-based Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a top priority.

“You have a gang called MS-13. They don’t like to shoot people. They like to cut people. They do things that nobody can believe,” Trump said at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last month. In a May speech, the president promised the gang would be “gone from our streets very soon, believe me.”

‘THIS IS TROUBLING’

Although children can be deported like adults, U.S. immigration law considers minors arriving at the border without a parent or guardian particularly vulnerable and gives them additional protections.

Minors apprehended entering the country without a guardian are placed in custody arrangements by U.S. Health and Human Services, often with a family member living in the United States.

Law enforcement agencies maintain databases of individuals suspected of having gang affiliations, but the lists have come under fire from civil rights groups.

Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles, said the databases often contain inaccurate information.

“This is troubling on several levels,” Hincapie said. “For one, the gang databases in places like California are rife with errors. We have seen babies labeled as potential gang members.”

Immigration lawyer David Leopold of Ulmer & Berne said innocent children could be swept up in the raids.

“In many cases, children don’t freely decide to join a gang. They are threatened by older gang members and forced to get a gang tattoo if they live in a certain neighborhood,” he said.

The raids planned for next week will also target parents who crossed the border illegally with their children and have been ordered deported by a judge, and immigrants who entered the country as children without guardians and have since turned 18, according to the memo.

The document directs field offices to identify people in their areas that meet the criteria.

The Obama administration targeted those two groups in 2016 raids that sought to deter a surge of illegal border crossings by families and minors that began in 2014.

Obama, however, directed immigration agents to prioritize for deportation only those who had committed serious crimes or had recently entered the country.

(Reporting by Julia Edwards Ainsley; Editing by Sue Horton and Ross Colvin)

Mexico City spike in crime, violence sparks fears of cartel warfare

Police vehicles patrol the streets, after suspected gang members were killed on Thursday in a gun battle with Mexican marines in Mexico City, Mexico, July 21, 2017. REUTERS/Henry Romero

By Gabriel Stargardter

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The sight of vehicles set ablaze by cartels has mostly been confined to lawless stretches of Mexico’s provinces, so the appearance of burning buses in Mexico City this week has stoked fears that the drug gangs’ violence is spreading to the capital.

The so-called narco-blockade on Thursday in the tough Mexico City suburb of Tlahuac occurred after Mexican marines gunned down eight suspected gangsters in broad daylight, a highly unusual incident that underlined a recent spike in violent crime.

“The city’s authorities have lost control of the situation,” said Jose, a veteran Mexico City policeman who spoke on the condition his surname be withheld.

“Now the cartels are getting stronger, they can’t control them any more. That’s why they asked the marines to come in.”

All told, 206 murder investigations were opened in Mexico City between May and June, making it the bloodiest two month-period on record in the capital, official data show.

Mexico City and its urban sprawl form the economic heart of the country, accounting for roughly a quarter of gross domestic product, according to the OECD, and the rise in violence is a major embarrassment for the Mexican government.

The crime spree mirrors a rising tide of violence nationally that has exposed major law and order shortcomings by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and his ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, less than a year before the next presidential election.

Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, who harbors his own presidential ambitions, has also come under fire for not doing enough to protect the capital, and for saying repeatedly that drug cartels do not operate in the city.

In a news conference on Friday, Mancera said the suspects belonged to a “a big, violent criminal organization whose operations were no longer confined to Tlahuac,” noting they traversed the city in armed convoys.

“From my point of view, they didn’t have the structures and size that we associate with cartels,” he added.

Mexico’s criminal underworld has mutated in recent years, thanks to a prolonged military-led assault that smashed the cartels into hundreds of informal crews with little experience in cross-border trafficking.

As these smaller groups jostle over the kidnapping and extortion rackets, violence has soared. The country’s murder tally this year is on track to post the highest since modern records began in 1997.

Various factors are seen behind the capital’s rise in violence.

Weak economic growth and chronically low wages drive youths in poor neighborhoods into crime. These troubled youths often extort small business owners, eventually shuttering them which makes jobs even harder to come by, according to local policeman Jose.

He also dismissed the idea that criminal gangs were not in the city, saying both La Familia Michoacana and the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel operate in the capital.

Francisco Rivas, director of the National Citizen Observatory, a civil group monitoring justice and security in Mexico, said regardless of what constitutes a cartel, the days of the capital being isolated from the drug violence were over.

“What’s happening in Mexico City reflects the national outlook,” he said. “We have a crisis of organized crime.”

(Additional reporting by Lizbeth Diaz and Ana Isabel Martinez; editing by Dave Graham, G Crosse)

Mexican gunfight that killed 17 raises relatives’ fears of police executions

Joel Ernesto Soto, head of the Mazatlan municipal police, speaks during a news conference in Mazatlan, Mexico, July 3, 2017. REUTERS/Jesus Bustamante

By Lizbeth Diaz

MAZATLAN, Mexico (Reuters) – Relatives of 17 suspected gang members killed late last week by police in northwest Mexico fear a skewed death toll points to what has become a grimly regular complaint in recent years – summary executions by security forces.

The 17 men, who authorities said were armed with 24 guns, were killed by police near the coastal city of Mazatlan in the unruly state of Sinaloa on Friday night. Another two people died nearby in what appeared to be earlier, related shootings, the state attorney general’s office said.

None of the suspects in the gun battle were found wounded or arrested.

Genaro Robles, Sinaloa’s head of police, put the outcome down to his officers’ better training and said there was no use of excessive force or extrajudicial killing in the exchange. Five of the 11 police involved suffered gunshot wounds. None died.

However, for relatives of the dead, the events raised the suspicion they were victims of a heavy-handed response by security forces of the kind that has stained Mexico’s human rights record in recent years.

Three people told Reuters they believed their relatives were killed in cold blood. Two of them cited gunshot wounds they said they had seen in the backs of their loved ones as evidence.

“They murdered them,” said the sister of one of the dead men as she waited outside a funeral home in Mazatlan. She declined to give her name for fear of reprisals. “They didn’t have a chance. This wasn’t a gun battle like they say in the news.”

Local municipal police also rejected the allegation, though human rights officials are investigating possible abuses.

Drug smugglers have been scrapping for control of the state amid a power vacuum following the deportation of iconic Sinaloa-native, drug boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Police chief Robles said officers were alerted to two people injured behind a mall in the small town of Villa Union on Friday evening, and chased down the suspected assailants, sparking a gun battle on a road outside town.

Blood was visible on the road when Reuters visited the scene at the weekend.

Nightime footage posted on social media afterwards purporting to show victims of the event, showed bodies piled up in the back of pickup trucks, with more scattered along a road. Reuters could not verify the authenticity of the videos.

The nephew of one of the victims said his uncle had worked for a drug cartel and had been shot from behind. “When I saw my uncle’s body it had gunshots in the back,” said the man, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

One local policeman described the shootings as “butchery” and unlike another recent gun-battle he had seen. He asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

STATE PROBE

Miriam Hernandez of the Sinaloa state Commission for Human Rights said the organization had opened an investigation into whether the killings involved human rights abuses.

Joel Ernesto Soto, head of the municipal police in Mazatlan, whose men fought in the gun battle, said he welcomed the probe.

“They can come and ask and speak to us. We’ll be here waiting,” he said, referring to the commission. “This event was completely fortuitous; there was nothing untoward.”

In 2015, police executed nearly two dozen suspected gang members in an ambush near the western town of Tanhuato, the national human rights commission found. It was one of the worst abuses by security forces in a decade of drug violence.

That followed another notorious incident in 2014 when 22 suspected cartel henchmen were killed by soldiers in Tlatlaya, a town a couple of hours southwest of Mexico City. Many of the soldiers were later acquitted of murder.

Police killed 17 people for every officer lost in gun battles in 2014, a study by Mexico’s National Autonomous University found. Experts said that ratio was consistent with excessive use of force.

Violence has risen sharply in Sinaloa since kingpin Guzman was sent to the United States in January, as splits within his once-dominant Sinaloa Cartel and attacks from rival gangs fed a killing spree.

There were 619 murders in Sinaloa in the first five months of 2017, up more than 75 percent from the same period in 2016.

“Everything is disintegrating,” policeman Soto said.

The family members gathered outside the Mazatlan funeral home said the rising violence was making police more corrupt.

“These killings were dirty,” said the mother of one of the victims, who also declined to give her name. “This wasn’t a fight. It was something else, but what can you do?”

(Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by Dave Graham and Lisa Shumaker)

Mexican army fights surge in violence for control of poppy country

A soldier walks among poppy plants before a poppy field is destroyed during a military operation in the municipality of Coyuca de Catalan, Mexico

By Lizbeth Diaz and Michael O’Boyle

COYUCA DE CATALAN, Mexico (Reuters) – The Mexican army says its fight against surging opium production that feeds U.S demand is increasingly complicated by the rise of smaller gangs disputing wild, ungoverned lands planted with ever-stronger poppy strains.

The gangs have engulfed the state of Guerrero in a war to control poppy fields, turning inaccessible mountain valleys of endemic poverty and famous beach resorts into Mexico’s bloodiest spots.

Colonel Isaac Aaron Jesus Garcia, who runs a base in one of the state’s most unruly cities, Ciudad Altamirano, told Reuters on an operation to chop down poppies high in the Guerrero mountains that violence increased two years ago when a third gang, Los Viagra, began a grab for territory.

Bodies are discovered almost daily across the state, tossed by roads, some buried in mass graves. In Ciudad Altamirano, the mayor was killed last year and a journalist gunned down in March at a car wash.

“These fractures (in the gangs) started two years ago, and that caused this violence that is all about monopolizing the production of the drug,” Jesus Garcia said.

From this frontline of the fight against heroin, Jesus Garcia sees a direct link between a record U.S. heroin epidemic that killed nearly 13,000 people in 2015 and violence on his patch.

“The increase of consumers for this type of drug in the United States has been exponential and the collateral effect is seen here,” Jesus Garcia said.

Heroin use in the United States has risen five-fold in the past decade and addiction has more than tripled, with the biggest jumps among whites and men with low incomes.

Jesus Garcia said the task of seeking out poppy fields in one of Mexico’s poorest and least accessible regions, rising above the beach resorts of Acapulco and Ixtapa, was practically endless.

His 34th Battalion and others send platoons of troops on foot for month-long expeditions every season. They set up camps and fan through treacherous terrain, part of a campaign that destroys tens of thousands of fields a year.

One such field visited by Reuters was deep in a lawless region six hours from Ciudad Altamirano through winding dirt roads thick with dust that rose into the mountains.

It was irrigated by a lawn sprinkler mounted on a pole that spritzed water over less than a hectare of poppies and fertilizer bags were piled nearby, basic farming techniques the soldiers nevertheless said were a sign of growers’ new sophistication.

A dozen troops fanned out, chopping down the flowers with machetes.

Soldiers stand guard as they destroy poppies during a military operation in the municipality of Coyuca de Catalan, Mexico

Soldiers stand guard as they destroy poppies during a military operation in the municipality of Coyuca de Catalan, Mexico April 18, 2017. Picture taken April 18, 2017. REUTERS/Henry Romero

HIGHER YIELDS

Army officials said gangs use poppy varieties that produce higher yields and more potent opium from smaller plots, and that its higher value is driving violent competition between gangs.

“Now we see more production of poppy in less terrain, and it has to do with the quantity of bulbs each plant has,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jose Urzua as he showed bulbs oozing valuable gum from slits. He explained opium is often harvested by families.

In these tiny mountain hamlets opium has grown for decades, officials said, but a coffee plague and the U.S. opiate epidemic has led farmers to plant much more.

The harvest has become central to Guerrero’s economy, also dependent on cash sent home by immigrants.

One army official said the field seen by Reuters could produce around 3 kilos (6.6 lb) of opium, fetching up to $950 per kilo from traffickers who sell it for up to $8,000.

“There aren’t many alternatives here,” said a woman selling soft drinks and snacks from a pine shack by a dirt road. Her husband grows poppies, and she said anyone who runs a business faces extortion by gangs.

(Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Chris Reese)

Two Faces Of Humanity Seen In Baltimore

It wasn’t all a gang of rioters in Baltimore last night.

The gang members who Baltimore officials said were banding together to attack police went to the media with a message that they didn’t call a truce so they could team up to attack the police; they were teaming up to stop the rioting.

A group of Bloods gang members told WBAL-TV that they had been attacked on the streets when they were stopping rioters from damaging buildings and businesses by police who did not realize they were attempting to stop the riots.

A member of the BGF gang said that the groups were “black men united for justice” and that people need to stop believing everything they’re hearing in the media because they’re tired of being blamed for the rioting when in this case they’re not involved with the crimes.

Others stepped up to stop the rioting and protests in an attempt to bring calm to the city of Baltimore…including the family of Freddie Gray.  Gray’s family, clergy and residents of the area banded together to stop the violence.

“I want them all to go back home,” said the Rev. Jamal Bryant.  “It’s disrespect to the family. The family was very clear — we’ve been saying it all along — today there was absolutely no protest, no demonstration.”

Members of a Christian church formed a human wall as well as other faith groups.

CNN showed video of a parent coming into the middle of the rioting and grabbing her son, forcing him to go home.

“I wish I had more parents that took charge of their kids out there tonight,” Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said.

The darker side of the city was shown all night through looting, arson and violence.  A drug treatment center and senior center that was under construction was burned to the ground by protesters.  A CVS pharmacy, a locally-owned pharmacy, liquor store and multiple cars were robbed and burned.

Gangs Vow Unified Attacks on Baltimore Police

Baltimore police investigators have confirmed that the city’s three biggest gangs are joining together to attack police following the funeral of Freddie Gray.

The Bloods, Crips and the Black Guerrilla Family have formed what’s being labeled a “partnership” to “take out” the police.

Spokesmen for the Baltimore police would not officially say the threat is connected to the death of Freddie Gray but the coordinated assaults on police officers began shortly after the end of Gray’s funeral service Monday in Baltimore.

The news of the unification of the gangs backs up a previous warning this year from the FBI that the Black Guerrilla Family gang was targeting “white cops” in the state.  A member of the BGF was caught in a Baltimore area police station with a gun in January in what he said was a “security test” of the precinct ordered by gang leaders.

The gang members have been posting on social media their actions against police, flashing gang colors and signs amid the rioting.  They’ve shown kicked in car windows, evidence of looting and other actions while demanding “Justice for Freddie.”

Members of the Nation of Islam said they had brokered the deal between the gangs.

“I can say with honesty those brothers demonstrated they can be united for a common good,” Nation of Islam minister Carlos Muhammad told The Daily Beast.

“At the rally, they made the call that they must be united on that day. It should be commended.”

The incidents involving the gangs in Baltimore are having national impact.  Both the NYPD and the LAPD have announced their officers are on heightened alert over the threats.