The street gang Mara Salvatrucha – also known as MS13 – born in Los Angeles with a group of Salvadorans who then returned to their homeland to impose their own law of blood and violence, shows signs of expansion of the criminal portfolio, starting with the drug trafficking in which it sees the opportunity to set up on their own. This bloody gang has an army of at least 100,000 criminals and drug dealers per minute who first inflated half a dozen American countries with violence and drugs starting in the 1980s and then took root in Spain and Italy as well.
This is what tells the tenth and final episode of “NarCovid – Rivers of money for drug kings in the time of the pandemic”, now available only on Apple Podcast. This episode is also full of facts, stories, reconstructions and original rumors that, in this article, are only hinted at.
MS13 is first of all a social organization and then a criminal organization. It draws on a mythical notion of community, a concept of team, and has an ideology based on the bloody struggle against its main rival, the Barrio 18 gang. It is a phenomenon concentrated in mostly urban areas of Central America or in locations beyond. outside the region where there is a large Central American diaspora. In Honduras and Guatemala, the gang is still largely urban. In El Salvador, the gang has steadily spread to more rural areas.
The expansion beyond urban areas is also in some places in the United States, most notably on Long Island and North Carolina and, increasingly, in California. In Los Angeles MS13 is enslaved by the prison gang known as the “Mexican mafia”. In El Salvador, the gang is run by prisons. And we start from here because almost all the leaders are in jail but this does not shift the power of this Central American crime cooperative one iota. Indeed, it strengthens it. But this is just a taste of what you can learn more in the new and latest installment of Narcovid. Happy listening on Apple Podcast.
