FBI confronts new gang threat

A notorious street gang based in El Salvador has rapidly spread into 31 US states and raised enough concern for the Justice Department to create a new high-level task force to battle it. But the head of the task force says the gang has no Al Qaeda connections - despite comments made Monday by El Salvador's president.

"The FBI, in concert with the US intelligence community and government of several Central American republics, has determined that there is no basis in fact to support this allegation of Al Qaeda or even radical Islamic ties to MS13 [a.ka. Mara Salvatrucha]," says Robert Clifford, director of the new force, who is in El Salvador this week to discuss cooperation with his Central American counterparts.

Last year, Honduran Security Minister Oscar Alvarez raised an alarm when he said that Al Qaeda might be trying to recruit Central American gang members to help terrorists infiltrate the US. On Monday, Salvadoran President Tony Saca echoed this theme, saying he could "not rule out a link between terrorists and Central American gang members." Such assertions are being heard up north as well.

Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D) of Texas said last month: "We know from El Salvadoran law enforcement that Al Qaeda is meeting with violent gang leaders in El Salvador. We have also had reports that Middle Easterners have been sighted on the banks of the Rio Grande."

But Mr. Clifford unequivocally dismisses this theory. "Very unlikely," says the former Middle East security specialist. "To have something as sophisticated as Al Qaeda overtly align and identify itself with a group of misfits is improbable."

So why a task force now, and why its concentration on one gang? After all, MS13 has been operating for years in the US, and is neither the biggest gang in the US nor, statistically speaking, the most violent - a dubious distinction claimed by a rival Salvadoran group, the 18th Street gang.

Clifford explains that in the past two years there has been a rapid expansion of MS13 branches throughout the US. During that time, there have been 18 MS13-related killings in North Carolina, 11 in Northern Virginia, and at least eight in Los Angeles. Members are showing up in places as disparate as Boston and Omaha, Neb.

MS13 sprang up in California in the late 1980s, when Salvadoran refugees, having fled the violent civil war back home, began forming protection groups against existing Hispanic gangs in their new neighborhoods. In time, they turned to such illegal activities as burglaries, auto thefts, drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, extortion, rape, and murder.

By the 1990s, US law enforcement was taking note of the group, and many members were deported to El Salvador, where they set up branches and, in many cases, returned to the US. Today there are 8,000 to 10,000 members of MS13 in 31 states, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center, an arm of the Justice Department. The number rises to 50,000 internationally.

Page: 1 | 2