Hoards of "Mara" street gang members who fled to Mexico following crackdowns against them in Central America are now being hired as gunmen by Mexican drug cartels, whom they serve with unreasoning violence, a top prosecutor confirmed this week. The Carrillo Fuentes cartel in the city of Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, has been at the forefront of the movement to hire Mara members as low-level gunmen, said Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the nation's top organized crime prosecutor.
"The drug traffickers hire them as killers but without making them formally part of their organizations," Santiago Vasconcelos said on Monday. "It's a way of using their violence in favor of drug trafficking."
VIOLENCE AS EXPRESSION
"The Maras are a group of criminals who use violence as their main weapon and form of expression," Santiago Vasconcelos said. "They have contempt for life, contempt for women ... this subculture is intimately linked to drug trafficking." Several Central American men with the gangs' distinctive tattoos have been killed in recent months in border cities like Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo, in apparent drug-related killings. But Monday's comments were the first confirmation the Maras have become hitmen for Mexican gangs.
The statement came two weeks after nationwide raids against the Maras resulted in the arrest of about 224 gang members, many on drug and weapons charges.
Police said most of the suspects from the Mara Salvatrucha gang were from Central America, but did not specify their nationalities.
DRIVEN TO MEXICO
The Mara Salvatrucha and MS-18 are Central America's largest and most ruthless street gangs, but crackdowns in Honduras and El Salvador drove much of the gangs' membership into southern Mexico, especially in Chiapas, Veracruz and Oaxaca.
Gang migration to Mexico "potentially puts national security at risk, essentially because of issues linked to our borders," Interior Secretary Santiago Creel said in early December. He said there was no evidence of the gangs' involvement in terroristrelated activity.
Some of the most powerful Central American gangs incubated on the street of Los Angeles in the 1980s and spread to El Salvador and Honduras after gang members were deported back to those countries.
