Sifting out the fiction from the facts about MS-13 in the U.S.

 

The world is full of “tough guys” who just want to beat on people to prove that they are “tough.” The truth of the matter is that they are just weak-minded people who cannot deal with reality, who on one end just want to brow-beat you into submission with the threat of physical violence (like, say, “bullies”), and on the other end are the pathological issuers of violence, like gang members.

Some years ago when I was still working at the airport I was on my way to catch a 3:30 AM bus on a lonely road for the early morning shift when I noticed ahead of me there some large individual who looked like former wrestler-now-actor Dwayne Johnson loitering in the middle of the street; I thought he was drunk or something. As I got closer to him he moved to my side of the walkway and stood as if he was waiting for me.

I tried to walk around him but he blocked my path. I was wearing headphones, and he asked me what kind of music I listened to. Huh? I didn’t have time to tell him because he then sucker-punched me in the head—not real hard, but hard enough for him to tell me to stay down while he pulled the cord from around my neck and ran off to a car that was hiding in the darkness, which pulled away with the headlights off.

Alright, so what the hell just happened here? It must have been a gang “initiation” thing, with someone in the car watching what this guy was doing. For all of that it was an unfortunate haul for both of us: instead of the iPod he thought he was stealing, the guy ran away with my airport ID card, which happened to include a Department of Homeland Security stamp, which was required to work on international flights.

Now, if you lose your ID card you have to “prove” that it was stolen, or else you have to pay $250 for the first replacement, or $500 for the second, which at the time was more than my gross pay for a week. I reported the incident to police, and then repeated the story to ID access office. But they didn’t believe me, and then I found out the officer in charge of my case had taken a week vacation just then. I stood my ground, and when the officer returned to work I called him and kept him on the line, insisting that the ID people talk to him. 

But they refused, instead contacting my supervisor to come  down to interrogate me; he seemed to think that I wasn’t lying, and admitted that the ID access people had been playing games with me the whole time, because the person who stole my card apparently got “scared” by DHS seal and put my card in an unmarked envelope and into the “lost and found” slot the day after the theft—and they deliberately kept this information from me (by the way, at the time all the employees in that office were black, so you can speculate on how they transferred their own self-consciousness into stereotypes about other groups). What was stolen from me, then, was a week’s pay, and to me it was a "wash" about who was the real "thief."

So why am I bringing this up now? Because its my own story about an encounter with "gang culture" as we learn about a recent story where an Uber Eats driver in Florida was murdered and dismembered by an alleged MS-13 gang member, apparently to steal money; it appears that when the driver insisted he carried no money the gangster likely became “enraged” and acted in the “demonic” way we have been told the MS-13 gang members behave. But there has been some fiction mixed in with the facts about this gang in American culture, media and politics, although this incident could also be said to be typical when these “tough guys” decide to “prove” their “toughness.”

The basic facts about the MS-13 gang is that it was originally formed by El Salvadoran immigrants escaping the right-wing murder regime in their home country during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, and apparently many didn’t see much improvement in their lives or safety in the tough barrios of Los Angeles, where the gang was born. We are not talking Gangs of New York here; there was no political organization that went out of its way to help brown-skinned immigrants to "assimilate" in order to eventually get their votes. In fact quite the contrary; they are more "useful" to use as scapegoats for political purposes.

The MS-13, which learned the "trade" from gangs already existing in the U.S. (no doubt also from the way Italian organized crime carried out keeping things in "order") only accounts for one percent of all gang membership in the U.S., and a similar percentage of all gang murders, which is why reports about them in the media and by politicians far exceed the “quantity” of their crimes relative to other gangs, and you only hear about them when they commit a particularly gruesome murder of someone who isn’t Hispanic, who in places like Long Island, New York are the principle murder victims, as if anyone outside of Long Island cares. 

The other reality is that those gang members who have been convicted of crimes and are not U.S. citizens are deported to Central America, where they have had the effect of terrorizing the locals and causing them to seek to flee to the U.S. In a post on The Crime Report website entitled “Calling MS-13 ‘Animals’ Isn’t Just Racist—It’s Dangerous and Counterproductive” by Stephen Handelman, insists that the MS-13 is more infamous for the way it commits murders than the actual number of murders it commits, that many gang members were people who were either threatened with death to either join or who were trying to quit.

Handelman also criticizes the way that certain politicians (Trump) demonize all immigrants—especially from Central America—as “animals” and violent criminals when the percentage of those in gangs in this country is miniscule compared to certain other groups, and the crime rates in communities where the MS-13 exist are far from the most crime-infested in the country. Estimates of the number of MS-13 gang members in this country tops out at 10,000—far fewer than the 350,000 “Crips” and 200,000 “Bloods.” 

But I’m not here to “defend” these gangsters, just to point out that everything is “relative” to something else; the level of brutality in the way some people kill is horrible whoever does it—we can look at the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world, and even that committed by white females, such as the gruesome killing, subsequent necrophilia upon and then dismemberment of her “lover” by Taylor Schabusiness, who “famously” attacked her own attorney in court.  

In the U.S. violent crime generally meets with swift punishment, but as The Guardian noted in the story found here https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/10/how-the-us-helped-create-el-salvadors-bloody-gang-war , the U.S. “export” of MS-13 gang members to Central America far out-strips the gang’s activities here in both in numbers, community terrorism, violence and even drug trafficking. While in the U.S. the MS-13 is like other gangs, protecting its "territory" and enforcing through violent coercion its "code," in many parts of Central America there are simple people just trying to live, which the new breed of U.S.-bred gangster find easy prey.  

In the absence of police protection (or as in El Salvador, security forces are no less to be feared by ordinary people than are the gangs), MS-13 forms the shadow "government" that "recruits" by force new members who have little choice (other than death) but to comply. Anyone who speaks against the gang or cooperates with law enforcement is likely to end up in a hole in the ground. 

Previously, "gangs" in Central America were strictly amateur affairs, but in the eagerness of administrations dating from Clinton to dump the hardcore refuse created by American social dysfunction into Central America where it didn't exist before (and we need not get into how America’s “addictions” have had a destructive impact on Mexican society over the past few decades) have made a mockery--and exposed the hypocrisy--of U.S. immigration policy, making it both worse and inevitable that the export of violence would lead to the escape from that violence, and in Central America there is no other place for those wishing to escape the violence to go but to head north.