Global Crime

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Central American maras: from youth street gangs

to transnational protection rackets

José Miguel Cruz

To cite this article: José Miguel Cruz (2010) Central American maras: from youth
street gangs to transnational protection rackets, Global Crime, 11:4, 379-398, DOI:
10.1080/17440572.2010.519518

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Global Crime
Vol. 11, No. 4, November 2010, 379–398

Central American maras: from youth street gangs to

transnational protection rackets
José Miguel Cruz ∗

Department of Politics and International Relations, Florida International University,

Miami, FL, USA

Most of the empirical research on Central American street gangs, called maras, has
been published only in Spanish. Reviewing that literature, the American scholarship on
gangs, and my own research on Central American gangs from the mid-1990s, this article
depicts the processes through which the maras (Mara Salvatrucha and the Eighteenth
Street Gang) evolved from youth street gangs in the late 1980s to protection rack-
ets with features of transnational organisations. Intense migratory flows between El
Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the United States, and the hard-line suppression
policies against youth gangs in institutionally weak Central American countries created
the conditions that prompted networking and organisation among Central American
street gangs. This article highlights the changes in the dynamics of violence and the
transformations in the gangs’ social spaces to illustrate the evolution of the maras.
Keywords: street gangs; maras; youth violence; protection rackets; Central America

1. Introduction
There has been important discussion in the literature as to whether street gangs develop into
organised crime groups.1 The recent development of turf-based youth gangs into powerful
crime syndicates in Central America, South Africa, Brazil, and the United States seems to
endorse the view that street gangs may evolve into complex criminal groups in different
contexts.2 Hence, the most important questions regarding the research on gangs are not
whether they can evolve into more sophisticated crime groups, but, rather, why and how
some youth street gangs end up as racketeering networks, sometimes with transnational
links.

*Email: jomcruz@fiu.edu
1. Irving A. Spergel, The Youth Gang Problem. A Community Approach (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990); Scott H. Decker, Tim Bynum, and Deborah Weisel, ‘A Tale of Two Cities:
Gangs as Organized Crime Groups’, Justice Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1998): 395–425. Gregory P. Orvis,
‘Treating Youth Gangs Like Organized Crime Groups: An Innovative Strategy for Prosecuting Youth
Gangs’, in Gangs: A Criminal Justice Approach, eds. J. Mitchell Miller and Jeffrey Rush (Cincinnati:
Anderson, 1996).
2. Ana Arana, ‘How the Street Gangs Took Central America’, Foreign Affairs 84, no. 3 (2005):
98–110; John Hagedorn, A World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 2008).

ISSN 1744-0572 print/ISSN 1744-0580 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2010.519518
http://www.informaworld.com
380 J.M. Cruz

From very different perspectives, contemporary authors, such as John Hagedorn and
John Sullivan,3 have focused their attention on the processes of gang strengthening across
time. Hagedorn, on the one hand, stressed the role of local conditions, such as prisons,
urban spaces, drug markets, and ethnic identities, in the persistence and growth of some
gangs, a process he calls ‘gang institutionalization’. On the other hand, Sullivan pointed
to the contribution of communication technologies in the evolution of gangs. Both authors
saw institutionalisation and evolution of gangs as related to globalisation; but whereas
Hagedorn saw gangs reacting to socioeconomic transformations prompted by globalisa-
tion, Sullivan conceived gangs as taking advantage of the information revolution to wage
‘netwar’.
In examining how Central American gangs, locally known as maras, evolved from
youth street gangs to transnational groups with apparent features of protection racket
gangs, I highlight the interaction between local conditions (marginalisation and law
enforcement strategies) and transnational processes (migration and diffusion of Southern
California gang identities). Instead of talking about globalisation, which may be a very
broad and nebulous concept, I concentrate on the role of migration as a mechanism of
exchange of norms and identities that facilitate the constitution of transnational networks.
I argue that more important than the role of communication technologies, we have to exam-
ine the interplay between transnational norms and identities, and local factors. Street gangs
in Central America used those assets provided by migration to survive and cope with local
conditions. In the process, they ended up strengthened and transformed into loose networks
with the capacity of ruling regional protection rackets.
This article is based on a review of several empirical studies conducted in Central
America4 regarding the phenomenon of maras, but it draws considerable empirical infor-
mation from three different research projects in which I was involved. First, the Maras y
pandillas Central American Project;5 second, the Children and Youth in Organized Armed

3. See Hagedorn, ‘A World of Gangs’; John P. Sullivan, ‘Third Generation Street Gangs: Turf, Cartels
and Netwarriors’, Transnational Organized Crime 3, no. 2 (1997): 95–108.
4. Nielan Barnes, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Transnational Youth Gangs in Central America,
Mexico and the United States’ (paper presented at Annual Meeting of the American Sociological
Association, New York, NY, August 10, 2007); José Miguel Cruz, ed., Maras y pandillas en
Centroamérica. Las respuestas de la sociedad civil organizada, vol. IV (San Salvador: UCA
Editores, 2006); José Miguel Cruz and Nelson Portillo Peña, Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas
del gran San Salvador. Más allá de la vida loca (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 1998); ERIC et al.,
Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica (Managua: UCA Publicaciones, 2001); IDESO, ERIC, IDIES,
IUDOP, Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica. Pandillas y capital social, vol. II (San Salvador: UCA
Editores, 2004); María Santacruz and Alberto Concha-Eastman, Barrio adentro. La solidaridad vio-
lenta de las pandillas (San Salvador: IUDOP-UCA/OPS-OMS, 2001); Marcela Smutt and Lissette
Miranda, El fenómeno de las pandillas en El Salvador (San Salvador: UNICEF/FLACSO Programa
El Salvador, 1998).
5. This project was sponsored by the Swedish Church and CORDAID and its findings are condensed
in the Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica book series published in Spanish, cited above. Research
under this project was conducted in four different stages. In the first stage, ethnographic work was
carried out with imprisoned gang members; the second stage consisted in the completion of surveys
within the communities where gangs dwell; in the third and fourth stages, researchers conducted a
series of semi-structured interviews with policy-makers, law enforcement officials, gang members,
and grassroots organisations who work in gang prevention programmes.
 Global Crime 381

Violence (COAV) project;6 and third, the ‘Transnational Youth Gangs in Central America,
Mexico, and the United States’ research project.7 The basic argument interwoven into this
article is that current Central American maras are the result of the cultural flows attached
to the region’s intensive migration, combined with organisational processes that took place
in response to the zero tolerance and mano dura (hard-hand) crackdowns and policies in
Central America. This argument draws on relevant literature oriented by my experience
researching the issue of gangs in Central America and is contrasted with some of the
relevant findings in gang research in the English literature.8

2. Central American maras, street gangs, and organised crime

To understand the evolution of Central American maras, three definitions are in order:
street gangs, organised crime, and maras. First, when referring to a street gang, I will follow
Klein and Maxson’s proposed definition, namely, ‘any durable, street oriented youth group
whose involvement in illegal activity is part of its group identity’.9 This concept is broad
enough to accommodate all the fundamental characteristics – durability, street-oriented,
youth, illegal activity, and collective identity – of the groups inhabiting any contemporary
city and who used to dwell in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala during the 1980s and
1990s. Second, instead of following the definitions of organised crime that have populated
the gang literature thus far, and which have concentrated in the entrepreneurial and organ-
isational features of some drug-trafficking American gangs,10 I will stick to Charles Tilly’s

6. This was sponsored by Save the Children Sweden, the Ford Foundation, World Vision, and Casa
Alianza. The general coordinator of this project was Luke Dowdney in Rio de Janeiro, and the
research in El Salvador was carried out by Marlon Carranza. More than 20 in-depth interviews with
active gang members were conducted under this research project. See Marlon Carranza, ‘Detention
or Death: Where the “Pandillero” Kids of El Salvador are heading’, in Neither War Nor Peace.
International Comparations of Children and Youth in Organised Armed Violence, ed. Luke Dowdney
(Río de Janeiro: Viveiros de Castro Editora Ltda., 2005).
7. This project was sponsored by the Ford and Kellog foundations. It was carried out by a net-
work of research institutions in Central America, Mexico, and the United States, and coordinated
by ITAM in Mexico. Information about the project can be found at: http://www.wola.org/media/
Gangs/executive_summary_gangs_study.pdf.
8. This article focuses on the gangs in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras and leaves out
Nicaraguan gangs because the latter have not evolved to join MS-13 or Eighteenth Street Gang.
Therefore, the important research conducted on Nicaraguan gangs by Dennis Rodgers and José Luis
Rocha is not reviewed here. See Dennis Rodgers, ‘Living in the Shadow of Death: Gangs, Violence,
and Social Order in Nicaragua, 1996–2002’, Journal of Latin American Studies 38 no. 2 (2006): 267–
92; José Luis Rocha, Lanzando piedras, fumando piedras. Evolución de las pandillas en Nicaragua
1997–2006 (Managua: UCA Publicaciones, 2007). For a comparative study between Nicaraguan
gangs and northern maras, see José Miguel Cruz, ‘Government Responses and the Dark Side of
Suppression of Gangs in Central America’, in The Maras and Security Challenges in Central America
and the U.S., eds. Thomas C. Bruneau, Lucía Dammert, and Jeanne Giraldo (Austin: University of
Texas Press, forthcoming); see also Oliver Jutersonke, Robert Muggah, and Dennis Rodgers, ‘Gangs,
Urban Violence, and Security Interventions in Central America’, Security Dialogue 40, no. 4–5
(2009): 373–97.
9. Malcolm W. Klein and Cheryl L. Maxson, Street Gang. Patterns and Policies (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 4.
10. Martín Sánchez-Jankowski, Islands in the Street (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1991); Carl S. Taylor, ‘Gang Imperialism’, in Gangs in America, ed. C. Ronald Huff (Newbury Park,
CA: Sage Publications, 1990); Orvis, ‘Treating Youth Gangs Like Organized Crime Groups’.
382 J.M. Cruz

notion that ‘protection rackets represent organized crime at its smoothest’. In this sense,
organised crime would be understood as any group with the capability to develop an illegal
system in which the members of the group demand money from someone to provide protec-
tion against any threat or to avoid any harm perpetrated by the same members of the group.
This notion also draws from the works of Thomas Schelling and Diego Gambetta who
stress the monopolistic nature of the activity and put the threat of violence as key means in
the economic activity of the gang.11 Finally, I will conceptualise Central American maras
as a vast network of groups of people associated with the identity franchises of two street
gangs that had their origins in the city of Los Angeles in the United States, but whose devel-
opment no longer depends upon the American dynamics: the Mara Salvatrucha Thirteen
(MS-13) and the Eighteenth Street Gang (also known as Barrio 18). These gangs, who now
dwell in northern Central America, make up two separate transnational networks that have
undergone a clear process of institutionalisation throughout the last few years that, in some
places, is enabling them to become organised protection rackets.12
According to some estimates, by the late 2000s there were approximately 67,000 mara
members in Central America, with 36,000 living in Honduras, 17,000 in El Salvador,
and 14,000 in Guatemala.13 These groups also have thousands of members living in the
United States, particularly in Southern California and the Washington, D.C. area, where
the Central American migrants concentrate. Research institutions and law enforcement
agencies agree that these gangs are responsible for a substantial share of the criminal vio-
lence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. For example, police figures indicate that
around 55% of the nearly 1600 homicides committed in El Salvador between January and
June 2008 were related to street gangs.14 In Guatemala, maras carried out 14% of the
5885 murders committed during 2006; and in Honduras, authorities maintain that gangs
are responsible for 45% of the homicides. Although these figures must be taken cautiously,
every observer of the Central American violence agrees that gangs are important actors of
violence in the region. As maintained by an USAID report, maras conduct international
business including the trafficking of illegal substances, kidnapping, robbery, assassina-
tions, and other illicit profit generating activities.15 But the most distinctive feature of
contemporary maras is their formation of protection racket rings whose leaders operate
from prisons. According to the director of the Salvadoran National Civilian Police, 70% of
the extortions committed in El Salvador are carried out by maras. Gangs extort money
from local convenience stores, transport unions, and informal vendors at the streets.16
An investigation conducted by the Guatemalan police in a suburban town of Guatemala

11. Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia. The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993); Thomas C. Schelling, Choice and Consequence (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1984).
12. Despite all the media hype, there is no consistent evidence that the maras have successfully
gained a strong foothold in Mexico. In fact, the ‘Transnational Youth Gangs in Central America,
Mexico, and the United States’ research project conducted in 2006–2007 concluded that no Central
American gangs were found in the cities included in the study. See Barnes, ‘A Comparative Analysis
of Transnational Youth Gangs’.
13. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime- UNODC, Crime and Development in Central
America. Caught in the Crossfire (New York: United Nations Publications, 2007); USAID, Central
America and Mexico Gang Assessment (Washington, DC: USAID Bureau for Latin American and
Caribbean Affairs, 2006), 45.
14. Salvador Martínez, ‘Vuelven a nueve los homicidios por día,’ La Prensa Gráfica, July 4 2008.
15. USAID, ‘Central America and Mexico Gang Assessment’.
16. Oscar Iraheta, ‘El setenta por ciento de las extorsiones son cometidas por maras’, El Diario de
Hoy 19 August 2009.
 Global Crime 383

City revealed that maras collect nearly 4 million dollars every year from ‘taxes’ imposed
on small business and transport unions that operate in the communities.17 A survey con-
ducted by Demoscopía in a sample of poor neighbourhoods in El Salvador, Guatemala,
and Honduras showed that around 20% of small business pay ‘protection taxes’ to maras;
in addition, in Guatemala, 28% of residents of poor communities have to pay taxes to
gangs; 34% in El Salvador; and 31% in Honduras. Furthermore, according to former gang
members interviewed in the same study, a single Salvadoran gang member weekly collects
around US$1250, whereas a Guatemalan gang member collects US$975, and a Honduran
gang member makes US$935 every week.18
Central American gangs have varied widely throughout the years; their formation into
a network with features of protection rackets is part of a dynamic process and this arti-
cle is also an attempt to capture the stages through which gangs expanded, formalised,
and transnationalised, underscoring the variables contributing to this process according to
local empirical research. Here, I argue that although marginalisation is important to under-
stand the emergence of street gangs in Southern California and Central America, migration
across the region and law enforcement policies in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras
are more important to comprehend their rise as loose transnational networks and powerful
local protection rackets.

3. Migration and the transnational networking of gangs

Many authors place the origins of the Central American gangs as a direct outcome of the
migration of Central Americans, especially from El Salvador, since the early 1980s.19 The
phenomenon is far more complex than that. Migration has definitely played a fundamen-
tal role in the expansion and development of the Central American gang problem, but it
is important to point out that this factor does not explain how they really started. Gangs
appeared in Central American countries long before refugees began returning following the
Central American civil wars and before American immigration policies led to the deporta-
tion of numerous gang members back to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.20 In fact,

17. Policía Nacional Civil de Guatemala, Situación de maras en Guatemala (San Salvador: OCAVI,
2007). http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_424.pdf.
18. Demoscopía, Maras y pandillas. Comunidad y policía en Centroamérica. Hallazgos de un estudio
integral (Guatemala: Agencia Sueca de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo, 2007).
19. Arana, ‘How the Street Gangs Took Central America’; Max G. Manwaring, ‘Gangs and
Coups D’Streets in the New World Disorder: Protean Insurgents in Post-modern War’, Global
Crime 7(2006): 505–43; Steven C. Boraz and Thomas C. Bruneau, ‘Are the Maras Overwhelming
Governments in Central America?’ Military Review 86, no. 6 (2006): 36–40.
20. There is a lot of misinformation regarding the origins of the term maras to label the Central
American gangs. The most common legend, usually quoted when explaining the origins of Mara
Salvatrucha 13, is that mara stands for marabunta, a Spanish term that denotes a group of destructive
ants that devour everything they find. According to this, Salvadoran gangs, especially MS-13, would
have adopted the nickname mara to refer to their aggressive character and their destructive purposes.
Although some current gang members have embraced this explanation as a way to gain notoriety in
the media, the truth is that the use of the term mara is more common in Salvadoran jargon, and it was
part of the Salvadoran slang long before Mara Salvatrucha emerged in the 1980s. In the Salvadoran
vernacular, the term commonly refers to any group of people and is widely used as synonymous
with ‘folks’. When Salvadoran gangs started hanging out together in Los Angeles as a distinctive
group from other Hispanic gangs, they adopted the term ‘mara’ in a process of semantic narrowing
to underline their own cultural roots. See José Miguel Cruz, ‘Maras o pandillas juveniles: los mitos
sobre su formación e integración’, in El Salvador: sociología general. Realidad nacional de fin de
siglo y principio de milenio, ed. Oscar Martinez-Peñate (San Salvador: Nuevo Enfoque, 1999).
384 J.M. Cruz

the first studies in Guatemala and El Salvador on Central American gangs, already called
maras by this point, appeared before the impact of migration began to be reported.21 These
studies show that even though street gangs were already considered to be causing a serious
problem with violence in some of the region’s cities, none of the early hypotheses blamed
the impact of migration or the deportation of young people from the United States.
However, migration did contribute to the reconfiguration of gangs by facilitating the
flow of identities, norms, and symbols associated with gang membership;22 something
that can be called gang-social remittances following Peggy Levitt’s concept of social
remittances.23 Migration flows between Central America and the United States bridged
different gang phenomena that originally appeared and developed separately.
How did this process take place? Central America in the early 1980s was plagued with
civil wars and military conflicts. This political instability pushed many Central Americans,
especially Salvadorans, to emigrate, first as political refugees to the United States and
later as economic refugees.24 Thousands of young Salvadoran immigrants grew up in
Californian streets, especially in Los Angeles.25 There they associated with other Latin
Americans, mostly Chicano and Mexican immigrants, who had formed their own gangs
long ago.26
Living in a cultural and economic disadvantage and often neglected by their parents in
a particularly hostile environment, many young migrants found identity and peer support
in the gangs.27 First, they joined Mexican and Chicano gangs; one of those gangs was the
Eighteenth Street Gang.28 Later, as an outcome of the growing Salvadoran population, they
began to form a separate gang with their own identity; this is the context in which the Mara
Salvatrucha gang began, made up primarily of young Salvadoran immigrants, who were
later joined by people from other Central American countries.29
Meanwhile, in Central America, particularly in Guatemala and El Salvador, the condi-
tions created by social exclusion, galloping urbanisation, the socio-political disarray caused
by military conflicts, and problematic family dynamics led to the emergence of street

21. Sandra Argueta et al., ‘Diagnóstico de los grupos llamados ‘maras’ en San Salvador. Factores
psicosociales en los jóvenes que los integran’, Revista de Psicología de El Salvador 11, no. 43 (1992):
53–84; Deborah Levenson, ‘On Their Own: A Preliminary Study of Youth Gangs in Guatemala City’
(Guatemala: AVANCSO, 1988).
22. Gabrielle Banks. ‘The Tattooed Generation Salvadoran Children Bring Home American Gang
Culture’, Dissent 47, no. 1 (2000): 22–8.
23. Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).
24. William Deane Stanley, ‘Economic Migrants or Refugees from Violence? A Time Series Analysis
of Salvadoran Migration to the United States’, Latin American Research Review 22, no. 1 (1987):
132–54.
25. Carlos B. Cordova, The Salvadoran Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005); Donna
De Cesare. ‘The Children of War: Street Gangs in El Salvador’, NACLA Report 32, no. 1 (1998):
21–30.
26. James Diego Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity on Southern California (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1988).
27. Ibid.
28. Herbert C. Covey, Street Gangs Throughout the World (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas
Publisher, 2003).
29. My interview with Alex Sánchez, director of Homies Unidos (Los Angeles Chapter), Miami, FL,
18 February 2008.
 Global Crime 385

gangs.30 This phenomenon, however, was characterised by the presence of a large num-
ber of different gangs that controlled specific, well-defined neighbourhoods and streets in
the city. During the 1980s, street gangs in Guatemala and El Salvador were small groups
of youth whose collective identities were, in many cases, determined by the turf they con-
trolled. For example, in Guatemala, some of the gangs called themselves Los Sacaojos, Los
Capitol, Los Five, etc.31 In El Salvador, gangs were even more fragmented, that is, there
was a wider range of groups: Mara Morazán, Mara Gallo, Mara Quiñónez, Mara AC/DC,
Mara No-se-dice, Mau-Mau, etc.32
When the political strife concluded in Central America in the early 1990s, immigrants
in the United States, mostly Salvadorans, began making their way back home while the
US government started a policy of mass deportations. In the 14 months after the peace
treaty, over 375,000 Salvadorans voluntarily returned from the United States.33 In addition,
more than 150,000 Central Americans were forced to return to their home countries in
a 3-year period during the mid-1990s.34 These processes generated an influx of young
people; some of them were bringing gang experience and a particular culture of being gang
members.35 Most of the returnees were young males who had grown up in a completely
different culture. They barely spoke Spanish, had weak family ties in the country of their
birth, and, in some cases, had no reference group because their family and friends remained
in the United States.36 The following statement from a Salvadoran young male who joined
an existing gang in El Salvador after being deported illustrates such feelings:

‘We’re family. We’re always there. When I first came here, the next day I met the homies. I saw
the opportunity they gave us, because being there is like being in the gang. Nothing changes.
We are from nine different gangs here (in this focus group), we’re from different cliques, and
most of us don’t have any family left here (in El Salvador); and even if we had family here,
they wouldn’t support us.’37

He meant that many of their first and most significant contacts with Central American soci-
ety took place through the local gangs. These contacts facilitated, at first, the transmission
of the symbols for being a gang member: their dress code, the use of tattoos, and means

30. Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes de Honduras and Save the Children-UK (2002); Misael Castro
and Marlon Carranza, ‘Un acercamiento a la violencia juvenil en Honduras’, in Maras y pandillas
en Honduras, ed. Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación y Comunicación-ERIC (Tegucigalpa: Editorial
Guaymuras, 2005); Cruz, ‘Maras o pandillas juveniles’; Smutt and Miranda, ‘El fenómeno de las
pandillas en El Salvador’.
31. Juan Merino, ‘Las maras en Guatemala’, in Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica, vol. 1, ed.
IDESO ERIC, IDIES, IUDOP (Managua: UCA Publicaciones, 2001).
32. Argueta, et al. ‘Diagnóstico de los grupos llamados “maras” en San Salvador’; Smutt and
Miranda, ‘El fenómeno de las pandillas en El Salvador’.
33. Tracy Wilkinson. ‘Returning to Reclaim a Dream – More Salvadorans are going home to a land
transformed by war – and peace. They seek a quality of life they could not find in the United States’
Los Angeles Times, 19 May, 1993.
34. Geoff Thale and Elsa Falkenburger, Youth Gangs in Central America. Issues on Human Rights,
Effective Policing, and Prevention (Washington, DC: Washington Office on Latin America, 2006).
35. Cruz and Portillo Peña, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador’.
36. Donna De Cesare, ‘From Civil War to Gang War: The Tragedy of Edgar Bolaños’, in Gangs and
Society: Alternative Perspectives, eds. Louis Kontos, David Brotherton, and Luis Barrios (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003).
37. Focus group with Eighteenth Street Gang members conducted by Maria Santacruz and José
Miguel Cruz in San Salvador, 2000. See María Santacruz and José Miguel Cruz, ‘Las maras en
El Salvador’, in Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica, vol. I, ed. IDESO ERIC, IDIES, IUDOP
(Managua: UCA Publicaciones, 2001), 92. Translated by me.
386 J.M. Cruz

of communication, which resembled the Hispanic gang profile in Southern California.38

But more importantly, they transmitted American gang identities and, with them, a sense
of belonging to gangs that have been originated in the United States.
One of the first manifestations of this reworking process can be found in the expression
used in Guatemala for maras that got their names from the gangs of Los Angeles – mara
clones – called this way ‘because they are copies of similar foreign groups, the product of
the impact of outside cultures, primarily from the United States’.39 By the early 1990s, one
could find the Mara Salvatrucha and the Eighteenth Street Gang among the existing variety
of gangs in San Salvador40 and White Fence and Latin Kings among Guatemalan groups.41
However, this situation did not last long. Influenced by the growing influx of returnees and
the aura of admiration surrounding young people who had returned from California, the
majority of the existing gangs in El Salvador and Guatemala first, and in Honduras later,
began to adopt the ways and aesthetics of returning gang members – deportees or not.
Over a span of 5 years, the gang identities from the United States spread out throughout
the region, not through violence or turf wars, but rather through straightforward imitation
and the gradual adaptation of identities.42
Two Honduran gang members interviewed as part of the research project Maras y
pandillas en Centroamérica illustrate this point:

‘The first mara I belonged to was the Latin Kings. It was formed by two dudes who came from
the U.S.A. One from Los Angeles the other from Miami. They were all tattooed (...). They had
an awesome Van, always riding a pretty chick in there. I saw them and dreamt being like them,
because they looked gutsy and nobody messed with them.’ (Honduran MS-13 gang member).
‘The dudes who started MS-13 here were Lana and Toby. They came using huge
trousers.... They always had a gun in their pockets but you wouldn’t notice. We always learned
from them ... since they were coming from the U.S.’ (Honduran Eighteenth Street Gang
member).43

Local gang members, already active and organised into their own groups, began at first
to imitate the styles of the returnees and later ended up changing the names of their groups
to one of the two gangs most accessible of the US model – Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or
the Eighteenth Street Gang.44 As part of this process, small gang groups formed clusters
that shared the same name and then gradually adopted a system of behaviour, norms, and

38. James Diego Vigil, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity on Southern California (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1988).
39. Merino, ‘Las maras en Guatemala’, p. 176.
40. Argueta, et al. ‘Diagnóstico de los grupos llamados “maras” en San Salvador’.
41. Caroline Moser and Cathy McIlwaine, Violence in a Post-Conflict Context. Urban Poor
Perceptions from Guatemala, Conflict Prevention and Post-Conflict Reconstruction (Washington,
DC: The World Bank, 2001).
42. Castro and Carranza, ‘Un acercamiento’.
43. Ibid., 101 & 114. Translated by me.
44. It is not entirely clear why these gangs – MS-13 and Eighteenth Street Gang – prevailed in Central
America, whereas others, such as the Latin Kings or White Fence, did not. There are no systematic
data about gang memberships during the first wave of returnees to Central America. One plausible
reason is that most of the returnees and deported gang members coming from the Southern California
were affiliated to those gangs. Since the spread of gang membership was driven more by imitation
than by imposition or violence, there are reasons to believe that many local gang members adopted
the identities of the most popular ‘brands’ among the returnees; whereas the other identities faded
away as MS-13 and Eighteenth Street Gang grew stronger.
 Global Crime 387

values that made them part of the same organisation. In this way, the old turf gangs turned
into cliques – called clikas in Spanish – that made up a federation of gangs recognised as
a single barrio – either Eighteenth Street Gang or MS-13. These cliques were turf-based
as each of them controlled a specific neighbourhood, with relative independence from the
rest of cliques.45
However, the young returnees responsible for importing the US Hispanic gang culture
model played an important role not only in the process of transplanting youth identities,
but also in the process of configuring these federations into informal local-city networks.
They were the ones who established contacts among the different groups that made up
the gang, which permitted the flow of information and norms from abroad, and also
among the local cliques. They acted as informal gang brokers in the Central American
countries.
By 1996, according to a survey conducted with active gang members in the San
Salvador Metropolitan Area (SSMA), 85% of young people in gangs belonged to the Mara
Salvatrucha or the Eighteenth Street Gang; only 15% of gang members belonged to other
gangs.46 A similar survey conducted in Honduras showed that MS-13 and the Eighteenth
Street Gang controlled 85% of the gang members in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula.47
However, in terms of numbers, the share of gang members repatriated from the United
States was rather low. The survey in San Salvador revealed that 17% of active gang mem-
bers in the SSMA had been in the United States and that only 11% had belonged to gangs
while in the United States. The vast majority of mara members had joined in different
Salvadoran cities. On a subsequent survey conducted in 2001, data showed that the percent-
age of gang members in San Salvador who have joined in the United States had increased
only to 12%.48
This process repeated itself in more or less the same fashion in Guatemala and
Honduras, which were also impacted by the migration of their citizens to the United States.
Just as in El Salvador, by the late 1990s, both Guatemala and Honduras had moved towards
the model of two large gang confederations, although some small native gang groups
persisted.49
Although it is impossible to understand the formation of Central American maras as
networks with disregard for the migration flows between the United States and Central
American countries, it is important to acknowledge that the proliferation of youth gangs
in Central America had already started before the bulk of returning migration took place.
As Maxson and colleagues have pointed out in the case of American street gangs,50 local
factors have larger influence in the formation and expansion of local cliques than migra-
tion. In the end, two phenomena that arose in relative independence and with their own
dynamics of causality ended up coming together and forming part of a single regional
system of networks that now covers northern Central America and several American
cities.

45. Santacruz and Cruz, ‘Las maras en El Salvador’; Smutt and Miranda, ‘El fenómeno de las
pandillas en El Salvador’.
46. Cruz and Portillo Peña, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador’.
47. Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes de Honduras and Save the Children-UK (2002).
48. Santacruz and Concha-Eastman, ‘Barrio adentro. La solidaridad violenta de las pandillas’.
49. Castro and Carranza, ‘Un acercamiento’; Merino, ‘Las maras en Guatemala’.
50. Klein and Maxson, ‘Street Gang. Patterns and Policies’; Cheryl L. Maxson, Gang Members on
the Move (Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 1998).
388 J.M. Cruz

3.1. The importance of symbols and identities

Social remittances, the flow of symbolic materials, identities, and norms that accompa-
nied the migration of youth throughout the region, were more important than the actual
number of returned gang members to Central America. According to Decker, Hispanic
gangs in the United States tend to be multigenerational, more expressive, more violent,
more turf-oriented, and less entrepreneurial than other ethnic gangs.51 This gang culture
was originally transferred to youth groups in Central America and shaped the behaviour of
the young people who made up the maras. In very practical terms, it meant the transfer of
symbols and language codes that include the use of graffiti, tattoos, and hand signals.
It is around these elements that the young people from different backgrounds, places,
and countries were able to recognise each other as part of the same gang franchise, indepen-
dent of where they dwelled or whether they had met or not. This is particularly important
for understanding why the phenomenon has successfully reproduced itself with similar
characteristics across an extensive region from the United States to Central America. The
expansion of these gangs did not hinge on a centralised process where Central American
cliques and gang wannabes asked the gang leadership in the United States for membership.
Rather, it was an informal process whereby many extant small cliques adopted a specific
franchise as their own collective gang identity and imitated the norms and symbols repre-
sentative of that franchise. When a teenager wanted to join the gang, the candidate just had
to hang out with the members of the clique he wanted to join and go through an initiation
rite that imitated the rites followed by the original gangs in the United States.52
Maras did not expand because of a premeditated and centralised process, but through a
social imitation process based on migration and networking. The use of tattoos illustrates
the importance of the imitation of symbols in the expansion of these gangs. One of the
things that young people joining any Central American gang used to do – especially before
the mano dura crackdowns – was to get tattooed, often on the most visible parts of their
body, including the face.53 This practice has never been part of the formal initiation rite, but
the use of tattoos became so generalised and so entrenched in gang life that nearly every
gang member had a tattoo. Following the same pattern depicted by Horowitz54 regarding
Chicano gangs, tattoos became one of the prime tools for showing allegiance to a specific
gang franchise, while at the same time set the conditions for being imitated by other groups.
These demonstrations of identity and belonging could be taken everywhere; it accompanied
the youngster in his travels and established the dynamics of his relationships with people
he met along the way.

51. Scott H. Decker, ‘Youth Gangs and Violent Behavior’, in The Cambridge Book of Violent
Behavior and Aggression, eds. Daniel J. Flannery, Alexander T. Vazsonyi, and Irwin D. Waldman
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Spergel, ‘The Youth Gang Problem. A Community
Approach’.
52. The formal initiation rite consisted in an endurance test. The gang wannabe must endure a 13-
second (MS-13) or an 18-second (Eighteenth Street Gang) beating by five or six members of the
clique. In recent years, as gangs became more organized, the initiation rite also included a ‘mission’,
this is, the murder of a rival gang member. See Cruz and Portillo, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las
pandillas del gran San Salvador’; and Aguilar and Carranza.
53. The photographic works of Isabel Muñoz and the late film-maker Christian Poveda, who was
allegedly murdered by Salvadoran gangs, provide an unparalleled showcase of these practices. See
Isabel Muñoz, Las maras. Cultura de la violencia (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural
Exterior, 2007).
54. Ruth Horowitz, Honor and the American Dream: Culture and Identity in a Chicano Community
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983).
 Global Crime 389

4. The institutionalisation of mara networks

Central American maras have been extremely adaptive. In some sense, this is the result
of a very intense migration phenomenon that has been taking place increasingly in the
region, but it is also the result of the severity in which the anti-gang crackdowns were
carried out in some countries. John Hagedorn55 maintained that to understand why some
gangs have institutionalised in some cities, we have to take into account the role of law
enforcement agencies in the shaping of gangs’ organisation and identities. In another
line of theory, Scott Decker and colleagues have argued that the presence of perceived
or real threats prompt many youth gangs to strengthen their internal structures and become
more cohesive to survive.56 In the case of Central America, in addition to the diffusion
of Southern California identities, the additional significant factor in the institutionalisation
of street gangs is the enactment of mano dura policies. These policies were carried out in
Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
For many years, the maras in Central American countries did not recognise any
structure beyond being part of a federation of clikas, which formed one grand mara.
This applies both to the MS-13 and the Eighteenth Street Gang. According to stud-
ies conducted in the mid-1990s,57 it was impossible to identify formal leadership inside
each clika and the members themselves denied that any internal or external structure
existed.
This incipient organisation kept the cliques acting with relative autonomy in their own
neighbourhood or street. However, the cohesion, identity, and sense of belonging to a single
body had to be maintained somehow and this was done through the informal contacts that
many gang members from different cliques had between themselves and through meetings
of several clikas in other regions of the country. At these meetings, the members of the
different clikas would discuss matters relevant to the entire gang, such as the relationship
with civilians or the responses to acts of aggression by the police or by another gang.58
In addition, the dynamics of violence helped to advance cohesion across the gang cliques.
This fact was enabled by the waving of identities. Gang warfare between Barrio 18 and
MS-13 shaped the Central American gang phenomenon. Different cliques and neighbour-
hood gangs were drawn into war, and gang violence increased social cohesion among the
cliques that happened to share the same franchise, even when their gang members barely
know each other.59 This specific warfare between MS-13 and Eighteenth Street Gang – that
was also imported from Southern California – contributed to the growth of these franchises
and may explain the disappearance of other gang identities.
This dynamic in gang organisation remained relatively intact throughout the 1990s in
Central America. By the beginning of the new century, evidence began to appear that, with
the penetration of cocaine and crack in Central American streets,60 gangs were organiz-
ing much more: they were increasing their drug-trafficking operations and were showing

55. Hagedorn, ‘A World of Gangs’.

56. Scott H. Decker and Barrik Van Winkle, Life in the Gang. Family, Friends, and Violence
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Decker, et al., ‘A Tale of Two Cities’.
57. Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes de Honduras and Save the Children-UK (2002); Cruz and
Portillo Peña, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador’.
58. Carranza, ‘Detention or Death’; Santacruz and Cruz, ‘Las maras en El Salvador’.
59. Santacruz and Concha-Eastman, ‘Barrio adentro. La solidaridad violenta de las pandillas’.
60. Rodgers, ‘Living in the Shadow of Death’.
390 J.M. Cruz

signs of establishing specific roles among gang members.61 However, the qualitative leap
in terms of gang organisation, both in the Mara Salvatrucha and in the Eighteenth Street
Gang occurred in response to the mano dura policies that were implemented in Central
American countries between 2001 and 2006.62 These plans dictated the criminalisation of
youth by banning any ‘youth street group’; the expansion of police power by providing
them with discretionary faculties; and the limitation of civil rights to any gang member.63
The fundamental linchpin of these plans was a large-scale persecution and suppression of
gangs. The massive imprisonment of gang members as part of these programmes led to
substantial transformations in gang structures and dynamics.
According to the Salvadoran police, as reported by Cruz and Carranza64 from July
2003, when the mano dura programme started, to July 2005, the police had arrested 30,934
youngsters accused of being gang members, but most of them (84%) were later released
without charges. A significant number of arrests were carried out against the same individ-
uals; meaning the clean-ups led to situations where the same gang member was imprisoned
and then released up to four or five times in a 1-year period. Despite this, an important num-
ber of MS-13 and Eighteenth affiliates remained in prisons and were indicted. Hence, these
raids led to severe prison overcrowding. By October 2007, 34.5% of the 17,200 inmates
in Salvadoran prisons were gang members. They represented around 35% of the estimated
gang membership in El Salvador at that time (16,800 gang members). Sixty-four per cent of
imprisoned gang members belonged to MS-13, whereas 35% to Eighteenth Street Gang.65
In Guatemala, between June 2003 and June 2004, authorities detained 10,527 gang
members on charges of drug possession and an additional 11,708 were detained for petty
crimes in the ‘preventive’ centres of the department of Guatemala.66 These arrests repre-
sented 49% of all the incarcerations made only in the province of Guatemala. However,
the courts formally indicted only 1% of the people arrested for drug possession. In most
of the cases, the judge did not find sufficient evidence or determined that it was col-
lected illegally. Even so, at the beginning of the police crackdowns, judges consented to
those illegal detentions to give some time to the police to collect evidence, often through
unlawful procedures.67 By 2006, 60% of detained gang members belonged to Eighteenth
Street Gang, whereas the rest to MS-13.68 In Honduras, police campaigns aimed at incar-
cerating gang members resulted in a much smaller number of gang members in prison.
Approximately 5300 persons were arrested between August 2003 and April 2007, accused

61. Ibid; Carranza, ‘Detention or Death’; Elin Cecilie Ranum, ‘Guatemalan Youth Gangs: Caught
Between Institutional Weakness and the Persistence of Illegality’, in Government Responses and the
Dark Side of Suppression of Gangs in Central America, eds. Thomas C. Bruneau, Lucía Dammert,
and Jeanne Giraldo (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming).
62. Mo Hume, ‘Mano Dura: El Salvador responds to gangs’, Development in Practice 17, no. 6
(2007): 739–51; Thale and Falkenburger, ‘Youth Gangs in Central America’.
63. Mark Ungar, ‘Policing Youth in Latin America’, in Youth Violence in Latin America. Gangs
and Juvenile Justice in Perspective, eds. Gareth Jones and Dennis Rodgers (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009).
64. José Miguel Cruz and Marlon Carranza, ‘Pandillas y políticas públicas. El caso de El Salvador’, in
Juventudes, violencia y exclusión. Desafíos para las políticas públicas, ed. Javier Moro (Guatemala:
MagnaTerra Editores, S.A., 2006).
65. Ministerio de Seguridad Pública y Justicia, Reporte de las pandillas en El Salvador (San
Salvador: OCAVI, 2007). http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_423.pdf.
66. Ranum, ‘Guatemalan Youth Gangs’.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
 Global Crime 391

of forming part of ‘illegal associations’, the legal term used for gangs or maras. Over 35%
of the gang members captured ended up in prisons.69
Crackdowns in Central America were particularly harsh: police operations lacked inter-
nal oversight and abuses of human rights and illegal executions multiplied not only in
El Salvador, but also in Honduras and Guatemala.70 In response, while being in prisons,
gangs began to organise themselves in a more structured fashion. It was there that dozens
of gang members from the same gang, but from different clikas coming from different
places throughout the country established contact with each other, recognised the exis-
tence of a myriad of gang cells, and created a more structured organisation. This conversion
was made possible, in part, by the decision of the authorities to separate gangs in deten-
tion centres according to their gang affiliation.71 These conditions enabled gangs to set
up their networks inside jails and create country-wide structures that expanded outside jail
walls, resembling much of what some gang members had witnessed while being in US jails
and following the model of prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia or ‘Nuestra Familia’.72
National leaderships, then, were established within the prisons. The following exchange
between me and a 14-year-old Eighteenth Street Gang member in El Salvador illustrates
the point:

Interviewer: Did ‘Tony’ pass orders in Chalate?

Gang member #2: He read them the act, the rules of the barrio: no smoking (crack).
Int: And this ‘Tony’ is...
G2: There are only Eigthteens there...
Int: Is he the leader?
G2: The heart of the Eighteenth (gang) is there ... I mean, there are only Eighteens there...
Int: Where? In Chalate?
G2: Chalate controls the whole Eighteenth (gang)...
Int: But that’s in ... Is that the prison?
G2: The prison, yes ... as Mariona, but Chalate is even bigger...
Int: Only Eighteens?
G2: Only Eighteenths there. All the Eighteens end up there. In Mariona there are more
Eighteens than MSs.
Int: Is someone there who calls the shots or everybody runs the barrio?
G2: There are bosses there, there are ten bosses. Ten people ‘throw the word’...
Int: Are all of them in Chalate? Is anyone free now?
G2: No. They are all homeboys. Actually, they are like 600 who have the word, they are
from different neighbourhoods but they all are in the same barrio (gang) ... from

69. Renán David Galo Meza, Situación de maras o pandillas en Honduras (Tegucigalpa: Secretaría
de Seguridad de Honduras, 2007). http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_425.pdf.
70. Amnesty International, Honduras: Zero Tolerance for...Impunity. Extrajudicial Executions of
Children and Youths since 1998 (London: AI, 2003); International Human Rights Clinic, No Place
to Hide: Gang, State, and Clandestine Violence in El Salvador (Cambridge, MA: Human Rights
Program, Harvard Law School, 2007); Ranum, ‘Guatemalan Youth Gangs’; Thale and Falkenburger,
‘Youth Gangs in Central America’.
71. In 2001, both in El Salvador and Honduras, a prison policy was implemented that separated gang
members by their gang identity to prevent problems with violence inside the jails. In practice, this
led to the labelling of Mara Salvatrucha jails and Eighteenth jails. In Guatemala, this type of policy
was implemented in 2006 after a series of prison riots.
72. George M. Camp and Camille Graham Camp, Prison Gangs. Their Extent, Nature, and Impact
on Prisons (South Salem, NY: Criminal Justice Institute, 1985).
392 J.M. Cruz

Campanera, Ciudad Delgado ... plenty of homeboys from different places, cities, all
in there...
Int: And how do they pass the rules out? Do they ...?
G2: Those who visit them sneak the letters into the jail ... We send them güilas, we call
those letters güilas ... : Greetings for all the raza! We let them know how’s the move
outside, and because they’re all locked up they know quicker the mess we’re making
outside ... they all know what we do ... so they send us a congrats card ... yes ... always
the truth, pal...
Int: But ... these guys are older?
G2: Yes, they’ve been in the barrio for ten years...
Int: How have they managed to survive?
G2: They’ve been watchful ... Those locked-up guys have earned the whole Eighteenth
barrio. They founded the Eighteenth (gang) ... dudes like ‘Topo’...73

The prisons became, therefore, the cradle for the expanded territorial organisation of
the gangs. A large number of gang members who came from different areas throughout the
country were put together in the jails. This practice enabled them to function as a sort of
standing assembly where they could debate, make pacts, and decide on structures, strate-
gies, and ways to operate. The mano dura policies, with its effect of increasing the number
of imprisoned gang members, nourished this kind of assemblies and facilitated communi-
cation and links among gang members both nationwide as well as internationally, insofar as
foreigners also served sentences inside the jails. This phenomenon matches similar findings
in the US literature which indicates that while in prison, some gangs may grow stronger.74
The assault of the mano dura plans forced gangs to rethink their operations. For exam-
ple, maras went from meeting out in the streets to meeting in safe houses and other private
areas, out of the reach of police operations. They went from moving about as pedes-
trians in the streets to moving about in vehicles to avoid police checks. To make these
changes, they needed resources and they got them in two ways: first, by establishing links
to drug-trafficking cartels within the prisons,75 and second, by developing extortion rack-
ets which imposed ‘security taxes’ on small- and medium-size business in the zones they
controlled.76 Racketeering expanded their economic capacity and enabled them to sustain
their own organisations with more diverse and abundant resources.77
The mano dura also contributed significantly to cohesion among the cliques across the
franchises. As one Salvadoran national leader of the Eighteenth Street Gang put it in an
illuminating interview to a local newspaper,

73. This interview was carried out as part of the project ‘Children and Youth in Organized Armed
Violence’ in El Salvador. The interview was conducted by me, and the local project was led by Marlon
Carranza. I am grateful to Marlon for letting me use this material for this article. The interview was
held at the premises of the University of Central America in San Salvador on October 2003. The
personal names have been changed to protect the identities of gang members; but the names of
the prisons remain the same. ‘Chalate’ stands for the prison in the city of Chalatenango; whereas
‘Mariona’ stands for ‘La Esperanza’ prison in San Salvador.
74. See Sullivan, ‘Third Generation Street Gangs’; Decker, ‘Youth Gangs and Violent Behavior’;
Hagedorn, ‘A World of Gangs’.
75. Cruz and Carranza, ‘Pandillas y políticas’.
76. My interview with Salvadoran police sub-commissioner Hugo Ramírez, September 23, 2005.
77. Demoscopía, Maras y pandillas.
 Global Crime 393

‘Before this began (the Mano Dura Plan) it was different. We hadn’t gotten to seeing things
collectively. The system has united us more because there is something there, we could call it
solidarity. (...) And, like it or not, we cannot look at things individually, because they haven’t
treated us individually, nor have they pursued or locked us up individually.’78

5. The changing nature of gang violence

The first studies done of gang members, in the late 1980s and into the late-1990s,79 essen-
tially showed that the fundamental reasons why young people joined gangs in those years
had to do with processes of identity search than with the intent of joining criminal organ-
isations. In the early 2000s, Santacruz and Concha-Eastman80 found that although a large
proportion of gang members were still motivated by values of solidarity, respect, and
mutual support, it was already possible to notice somewhat of a change in motivation,
shifting towards a more sustained use of instrumental violence for economic purposes. By
2005, there was no doubt that an important share of both, MS-13 and Eighteenth Street
Gang, have become closer to resembling criminal organisations, whose objective was to
maintain control of criminal economic apparatuses.81 Protection racket structures were in
full force by 2006.82
The maintenance of these criminal economic systems involves control over certain ter-
ritories, in the more traditional sense of gang activity, but it also involves the threat of use
of violence to control and regulate criminal economic markets. It is difficult to comprehend
the dynamics of the Central American maras, both in their early stages and at present, with-
out paying attention to the fact that their life revolved around the use of violence. While
in the 1990s, most of the violence was directed to rival gang members, by the late 2000s
violence is being used against all people whose actions are perceived of as posing a threat
to the extortion rackets.83
Therefore, a good share of the gang organisation at present appears to be oriented
towards the objectives of maintaining and expanding extortion schemes in the Central
American countries where they operate. The increasing flow of deportees, the exodus
generated within the Central American region by persecution from the mano dura policies,
and the growing technological ease of communications have led these criminal economic
systems to operate not only in national circles, but also transnationally, although in
uneven ways: not all the cliques have the same access to criminal networking and not all
seem to have developed the same level of transnational ties.84 A survey conducted with
a representative sample of 316 imprisoned gang members in El Salvador during 2006
revealed that 28% of them kept contacts with gang members in other countries; most

78. José Luis Sanz and César Castro, ‘La 18 quiere dejar la violencia’, La Prensa Gráfica (El
Salvador), November 21, 2004, pp.1–7.
79. Argueta, et al. ‘Diagnóstico de los grupos llamados “maras” en San Salvador’; Cruz and Portillo
Peña, ‘Solidaridad y violencia en las pandillas del gran San Salvador’; Levenson, ‘On Their Own’;
Smutt and Miranda, ‘El fenómeno de las pandillas en El Salvador’.
80. Santacruz and Concha-Eastman, ‘Barrio adentro. La solidaridad violenta de las pandillas’.
81. Cruz and Carranza, ‘Pandillas y políticas’.
82. Demoscopía, ‘Maras y pandillas’.
83. María Santacruz and Elin Ranum, Segundos en el aire: mujeres pandilleras y sus prisiones (San
Salvador: IUDOP-UCA, 2010).
84. Barnes, ‘A Comparative Analysis of Transnational Youth Gangs’; Gema Santamaría Balmaceda,
‘Maras y pandillas: límites de su trasnacionalidad’, Revista Mexicana de Política Exterior 81 (2007):
101–23.
394 J.M. Cruz

of them with peers in the United States, but also with people in Guatemala, Honduras,
and Mexico. The survey also revealed that those contacts provided information (42%),
facilitated the exchange of orders and rules from some leaders (23%), and supplied
economic support and resources (17.6%).85
Research conducted by Ranum in Guatemala and Andino86 in Honduras has also found
that some gang members have this kind of cross-national coordination and communication,
but they concluded that not all cliques participate in the same way. A recent research con-
ducted in El Salvador found that some neighbourhood cliques act in autonomous ways,
but they have to pay royalties to the national leadership if they receive money from their
activities.87 As the studies researching the transnational gang bonds are still scarce, it is
hard to know how much of this is a structured programme of transnational gang action or
if it is only a series of actions taken by some gang members or isolated cliques. However,
it is clear that at present many of these actions are based on a local structure, usually found
within Central American prisons, and that they are made possible as a result of an efficient
flow of information and communication that transcends national boundaries.

6. The stages in the evolution of Central American maras

It is possible to distinguish three stages in the way in which Central American maras have
evolved. Each stage involves changes in the maras’ spatial and social relations, but they are
not necessarily mutually exclusive. The focus on the relationship between maras and social
spaces provides the opportunity to examine both the institutional evolution of gangs and its
local-to-transnational character. The first stage belongs to the era of gang formation, both
in Central America and in Los Angeles, in which the mara is deeply entrenched in a spe-
cific urban neighbourhood or street. Maras entered a second stage when the gangs turned
into networks that transcended such borders and, therefore, went beyond neighbourhood
limits within the cities; the link to urban spaces, although still there, became more diffuse.
The third stage, still current at the time of this writing, is characterised by the reworking
of specific spaces – jails or detention centres – which have become nodes in intra-gang
dynamics and communications.
Like most of street gangs, the Central American maras began as groups linked to spe-
cific urban territories. Whether in Los Angeles or in Guatemala City, in San Salvador or
in San Pedro Sula, gangs flourished as a fundamental part of popular barrios and shanty
towns. In Los Angeles, these barrios were those that received Central American immi-
grants; in Central America, they were socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods. As part of
these barrios, gangs shaped social relations in some sectors of the cities. The maras estab-
lished their own turfs but they hardly had control or influence over large portion of the
city because they were small groups whose influence was limited to the areas in which
they gathered and operated. In these spaces, violence did occur; however, a gang’s violence
would not normally extend outside these boundaries because once they were outside of
their turf violence would lose its meaning.
Migratory flows and the creation of gang networks changed this dynamic and led to a
second stage in maras’ spatial relations. In this stage, characteristic elements appear that

85. The survey was conducted by the University of Central America as part of the project
‘Transnational Youth Gangs in Central America, Mexico, and the United States’. I am grateful to
Jeannette Aguilar for sharing the database of the survey.
86. Ranum, ‘Guatemalan Youth Gangs’; Tomas Andino, ‘Las maras en la sombra. Ensayo de actu-
alización del fenómeno pandillero en Honduras’ (San Salvador: Universidad Centroamericana “José
Simeón Cañas”, 2005). http://interamericanos.itam.mx/maras/docs/Diagnostico_Honduras.pdf.
87. Santacruz and Ranum, ‘Segundos en el aire’.
 Global Crime 395

will define Central American gangs as the recognised transnational groups that they are at
present. With the adoption of identities originating in the streets of Southern California,
the maras reconfigured living spaces in three ways. First, they expanded the urban limits of
their domination. A mara not only controlled a street or a barrio, with the presence of
various cliques belonging to the same gang, the gang now dominated a large number
of barrios and, in some cases, a small city, town, or city suburb. In a way, gangs became
omnipresent; it was possible to find the same gang dominating different sectors of a city or
different cities at the same time.
The second outcome of this reconfiguration of geographic space also occurred at the
urban level, but belongs to the dynamics of violence: violence not only served to defend a
specific turf, instead it now also served to strengthen identities. Central American research
on gangs88 has found that with the growing number of cliques belonging to the same gang,
the probability of contact between warring gangs multiplied beyond territorial ties; that is,
a gang member roaming the city could run into another gang member belonging to a rival
group anywhere. This fact meant that if they recognised each other as members of rival
gangs they could cause violence in any location throughout the city. This involves a funda-
mental change in the dynamics of violence because it now becomes universal, meaning that
it could occur anywhere, even beyond each gang’s turf or national boundaries. Aggression
was no longer circumscribed to specific surroundings. Thus, the turf controlled by the
gangs became diffuse, and because of this, it covered the entire space in which gang mem-
bers moved, causing the conflict and insecurity that they represent to citizens to become
omnipresent. Being a Salvatrucho or an Eighteen became more important than controlling
a specific turf. By doing this, it reshaped gang warfare:

Our enemies are the Panochos (Eighteenths) because of the panocho (eighteenth) number they
say they control; the Twenty-ones because they hang out with them; the Wuarachas because
they hang out with them; the Chinolas because they ‘clique’ with them and ... all the friends
of the Eighteenths are our enemies ... because they want the world only for them. That’s why
we kill each other ... let’s see who controls more territory (Vatos Locos MS-13 Honduran gang
member).89

Finally, migratory flows led this expanding gang turf to swell beyond national borders.
Gangs went from controlling streets and barrios in one country’s cities to controlling urban
areas or zones in different countries, where they all conformed to the same way of recog-
nizing their identity and using similar systems of norms, codes, and values. In this way,
in Central America, identity representation systems underwent fundamental changes. It
was no longer possible to say that identity cleavages depended upon the ethnic origin of
the gang members, because with transnationalisation of identities it was now impossible
to ensure that Mara Salvatrucha members were all native Salvadorans or that Eighteenth
Street Gang members were all Chicanos or Latinos who had grown up in the United States.
The gangs in Central America no longer constructed their identity in relation to their ethnic
origin, as it was in Southern California, or in relation to control over a specific barrio, as

88. José Miguel Cruz, ‘Factors Associated with Juvenile Gangs in Central America’, in Street Gangs
in Central America chap. 1, ed. José Miguel Cruz (San Salvador: UCA Editores, 2007); Wim
Savenije, Maras y barras. Pandillas y violencia juvenil en los barrios marginales de Centroamérica
(San Salvador: FLACSO, 2009).
89. This gang member was interviewed by Marlon Carranza and Misael Castro; see Castro and
Carranza, ‘Un acercamiento’, 160–161. Translated by me.
396 J.M. Cruz

it was in the early days in Central America, but rather in virtue of their opposition to and
rivalry with the opposing gang.
The third and most recent stage in gang spatial relations began when, as a conse-
quence of the repressive anti-mara policies, gang members were routinely housed together
in Central American jails, grouped by their own gang identities. The designation of pris-
ons as being exclusively for MS-13 gang members or for Eighteenth Street Gang members
signified a new reworking of mara turf domination. The gangs went on to control detention
centres with a dual advantage over the control they exercise throughout urban streets: first,
it is a space given to them by the authorities, which they do not have to fight for; second,
in the jail, gang members from different places can be brought together around a single
organisation, which provides national – and in some cases transnational – legitimacy to the
leadership that emerges in these detention centres.
This scenario turned Central American prisons into centres of life for gang networks
and, therefore, into their central nodes. In some ways, this is turning street gangs into
prison gangs with transnational ties and street presence. The centres of mara control moved
from the streets to the jails and the quality of their operations consequently became more
focused, more structured, and more organised.90 This does not mean that gangs abandoned
the streets, but their relationship with the streets changed substantially. On the one hand,
they no longer have to make their control evident through a physical presence; sufficient
control can be exercised through symbolic messages, which can range from graffiti on a
public wall to the execution of a neighbourhood resident who failed to honour the ‘pro-
tection fees’. But, on the other hand, gang members no longer relate directly to the people
who live in the space they control. The transfer of living space to the jails and the territo-
rial mobility involved in constantly fleeing from the police result in those who control the
barrios not necessarily being the same young people all the time, but rather only those who
are on duty at a particular time. This means that the gang members, youngsters previously
known within the barrio and linked to its inhabitants, lose contact with the barrio, so that,
as Vigil has envisaged,91 the community loses the opportunity to control and contain the
violence produced by the gangs. This actually generates conditions more conducive to the
development of a network that functions increasingly like business rings than a youth gang.
This new configuration of space, with the jails as the principal nodes in Central
America, means that relationships basically become established between the nodes or
among the jails of the region and the streets in Southern California. In the maras’ early
stages as a network, their nodes were rather diffuse, with barely a slight recognition that
the detention centres in the United States served as places in which some decisions would
be made and the luck of some gang members would be determined, but which had no influ-
ence on the direction and the actions of the different associated cliques in Central America.
As the maras became more formal, organised structures in Central American penal centres,
a dynamic was created in which different cliques were answerable to the gang leaderships
in the jails and would establish regional communication among themselves through those
jail nodes. This dynamic also allowed new types of criminal economic activity. In an insti-
tutional environment plagued with serious flaws and with an army of loyalist members
roaming outside, prison gangs’ capabilities to maintain full communication with the streets

90. Galo Meza, ‘Situación de maras o pandillas en Honduras’; Ministerio de Seguridad Pública y
Justicia, ‘Reporte de las pandillas en El Salvador’.
91. Vigil, ‘Barrio Gangs’.
 Global Crime 397

enabled them to create racketeering cartels and ensure their survival both at the streets and
at prisons.

7. Conclusion
Central American gangs have undergone a significant change since they first appeared
in the mid-1980s. The original beginnings of maras as street gangs do not bear a direct
relationship to regional migration but to local conditions of marginality and widespread
violence. However, maras as transnational networks and as protection rackets in Central
America are the result – in part – of the intense human and cultural flows that circulate
among Southern California and the countries of Central America.
But, in contrast to most interpretations in the media and some scholars about the role
played by migration, gang members were not seeking to expand their franchise and their
drug distribution networks through relocation. Rather, migration is important because it
contributed to maras expansion through the diffusion of Southern California gang iden-
tities. The key point is not the relocation of gang members trying to expand their drug
business, as is usually taken for granted in the US literature; the fundamental feature of
gang migration in the Central American case is that deportation and circular migration
disseminated gang identities, which helped the reconfiguration of vast franchise networks
and, therefore, led to identity-based gang warfare within Central American countries. Such
gang warfare universalised the threats of physical violence, increased cohesion among
gangs, and actually escalated the events of violence in societies where the criminal justice
institutions have been historically weak.
Then, as government enforcement agencies began their massive crackdowns on street
gangs, the mara networks acquired an increasingly formal structure as more specific tasks
were distributed among the members to cope with the assault. This warfare encouraged
greater organisation and the search for resources, namely, guns, drugs, and, more impor-
tantly, money, that were not hard to find in institutionally weak Central American countries.
This is how the incentive for cohesion and the identification of a clear objective around
which to organise certain collective actions came to be involuntarily given from the outside:
indiscriminate government repression ended up strengthening the mara networks rather
than weakening them. The mass jailing turned detention centres into standing assemblies
and provided the spaces for strategic decision-making. The persecution and harassment in
the streets – frequently using extralegal operations – drove them to associate with drug
cartels on those new spaces and to envisage new forms of retaliation and survival. What
had been informal identity-based networks went on to become to a large extent rather for-
mal prison-based criminal networks capable of developing city-wide protection rackets to
generate resources.
In the formation of Central American maras, a transnational process nourished local
dynamics of marginalisation, illegality, and violence. The gangs were certainly helped by
migration and deportation processes as the latter shaped the diffusion of mara-identities,
but the main drivers were still local. Gangs reacted to local dynamics of violence as they
participated in this universal war against each other and against the state. They also found
opportunities as they networked and developed protection rings from the prisons.
The Central American maras, the MS-13 and the Eighteenth, have gone from inhabiting
the barrio to inhabiting the transit zone between northern Central America and southern
United States. They have gone from living among and confronting urban dwellers to chal-
lenging the authorities and institutions of the region’s countries from behind prison walls.
398 J.M. Cruz

They have gone from being part of everyday lives of the common citizen to controlling
some of the local criminal economies from the lawless Central American jails.

Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was prepared for the project Redes Transnacionales en la Cuenca
de los Huracanes at ITAM, Mexico. Funding for this article was partially provided by the Ford
Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation. Portions of this article were presented at the workshop
‘Violence and Citizenship in Post-Authoritarian Latin America’, organised by the Princeton Institute
for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University, on 7 March 2008.
I am grateful to Paul Almeida, Carol Atkinson, Susan Cruz, Scott Decker, Brian Faughnan, John
Hagedorn, Cheryl Maxson, Natalia Saltalamacchia, María Santacruz, and the anonymous reviewers
of Global Crime for comments on earlier versions of this article. All shortcomings and flaws are
mine.

Notes on contributor
José Miguel Cruz is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Florida International University. He has been
the director of the University Institute of Public Opinion at the University of Central America in San
Salvador and worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank,
and the United Nations Development Program on the topic of Central American violence. His latest
book, Street Gangs in Central America (UCA Editores, San Salvador, 2007), summarises an 8-year
long research project on gangs in the Central American region.