Dan Rather
IF YOU think of the 'gang problem' only in terms of prisons, inner-city schools and urban crime, think again. Gangs have gone international, and their influence in our hemisphere is spreading.
Some parts of the United States policy establishment are finally waking up to this unpleasant fact. But much of Washington doesn't seem to have a clue, and most Americans appear to know even less.
One, and only one, part of the problem has to do with rising gang violence across Latin America. This is not only destabilising a region that includes Mexico, Central America and northern South America; it's also fuelling crime and violence in the U.S.
According to Chris Swecker, assistant director of the FBI for its Criminal Investigative Division, gangs these days are more violent, better organised, better financed and more widespread than ever before. There are an estimated 30,000 known gangs, with approximately 800,000 members, operating in at least 2,500 communities in every part of this country.
Latino gangs, for example, are increasingly engaged in violent crime in many big cities, particularly Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. They are also extending their turf into suburban and rural areas.
Listen to what Swecker has to say about the expanding territory of one vicious gang, MS-13, which had its origins in El Salvador's civil war: "MS-13 has a significant presence in Northern Virginia, New York, California and Texas, as well as places as disparate and widespread as Oregon City, Oregon, and Omaha, Nebraska."
MS-13, whose full name, "Mara Salvatrucha," translates very loosely into "Salvadoran gangsters," has grown to include immigrants not only from El Salvador but also from such Central American countries as Honduras and Guatemala. There is, additionally, evidence that the U.S. deportation of Salvadoran immigrants with criminal records back to their home country has had the perverse effects of cross-pollinating U.S. and Central American gang culture and of strengthening MS-13 in El Salvador.
Authorities in Maryland recently made a major raid on alleged MS-13 members there. In Massachusetts and Arizona, local law-enforcement authorities have said privately that they see signs of MS-13 operations in their states. Drug money from, among other places, Colombia and Mexico provides much of the financing, allowing MS-13 and other gangs to grow in size and sophistication.
REAL AND PRESENT DANGER
Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, the Republican chairman of the House International Relations Committee's Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, has undertaken an effort to inform and alert Americans about what he views as a real and present danger to the country.
"It is clearly in everyone's best interest that we address this problem now and end it," Burton says, urging that the Department of Homeland Security and federal law-enforcement agencies focus hard on the gang scourge before it gets any worse.
TRANSNATIONAL GANG VIOLENCE
This brand of transnational gang violence is the new organised crime in America. And in some ways the gangs of today make the old 'Mafia' look almost quaint. Like Russian gangs with opium connections in Afghanistan, they stand astride a worldwide nexus of illicit traffic in drugs and weapons. Because of this, gang networks have the potential to aid and abet the arming and financing of regional and global terrorism, and there have been allegations that they are already doing so.
We already know that criminal gangs can cause terror where they operate, and we should be aware that their scope is spreading. These are reasons enough to keep a close eye on them. And four years after the 9/11 attacks, as efforts to protect the U.S. from external threats continue to evolve, the question of whether gangs might - now or in the future -
contribute to the spread of terrorism is one that may also bear close watching.
Dan Rather is a television broadcaster.
