Steven Dudley - MS-13: The Making of Americas Most Notorious Gang

The MS-13 was born from war.

In the 1980s, El Salvador was enmeshed in a bloody civil conflict. To escape the guerrilla assaults and death squads, many fled to the US and settled in Los Angeles. Among them were Alex and his brother.

There, as a means of survival, Alex and a small number of Salvadoran immigrants formed a group called the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, a relatively harmless social network bound by heavy metal music and a shared identity. But later, as they brushed against established local gangs, the group took on a harder edge, selling drugs, stealing cars and killing rivals. As authorities cracked down, gang members like Alex were incarcerated and deported. But in the prison system, the group only grew stronger.

Today, MS-13 is one of the most infamous street gangs on earth, linked to thousands of grisly murders each year. But it is also misunderstoodless a drug cartel and more a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing.

Journalist and longtime organized crime investigator Steven Dudley brings readers inside the nefarious group to tell a larger story of how flawed US and Central American policies and exploitative and unequal economic systems helped foster the gang and sustain it. Ultimately, MS-13 is the story of the modern immigrant and the perennial battle to escape a vortex of poverty and crime, as well as the repressive, unequal systems that feed these problems.

A remarkable feat of reporting; the ways in which the United States is complicit in the creation and preservation of MS-13 might well keep you awake deep into the night, as it did me. I cant shake this book, or the feeling that we have doomed so many young men to a life of violence. We have to do better for them, for our children, and for our collective future.

Rachel Louise Snyder, author of N o Visible Bruises: What We Dont Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

Steven Dudleys great contribution in this landmark account of MS-13 is to take a subject that has been sensationalized and mythologized and politicized beyond recognition and, through painstaking reporting and clear-eyed analysis, capture a truth that is less exoticbut more fascinatingthan the headlines. Rather than default to easy alarmism or xenophobic caricatures, Dudley captures the origins of the gang as a human story of migration and migrant communities, and a policy story, about the unintended consequences of U.S. policy. By detailing the experiences of gang members and victims alike, he anatomizes the complex, fluid dynamics of this elusive transnational network. A startling book.

Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Ripped straight from the headlines, MS-13 is one of the years most important books, a gripping, meticulously reported account of the rise of one of the worlds most notorious street gangs. With his remarkable access, Steven Dudley skillfully weaves in the story
of gang members to show how MS-13 grew from a social network to a criminal enterprise that President Trump has blamed for the rise of violent attacks in communities across the United States. But Dudley does more than chronicle the history of the gang. He uses
MS-13 to tell a larger story of flawed U.S. policy that has helped the gang flourish.

Mitch Weiss, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Broken Faith and Tiger Force

Steven Dudleys latest book is a historical treatise moved forward by a series of captivating narratives that present a wholistic, unifying perspective on the Mara Salvatrucha. Dudleys research presses deeper into the past, and walks farther into the countryside of El Salvador and neighborhoods of Los Angeles to bring to the conversation a thoroughly researched and reported body of work.

Samuel Logan, author of This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha

Steven Dudley is the cofounder of InSight Crime, a think tank devoted to investigating organized crime and corruption in the Americas. As a journalist in Latin America, he spent the past two decades writing for the Washington Post, NPR, the BBC and the Miami Herald . MS-13 is the winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award.

@stevensdudley

Also by Steven Dudley

Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia

MS-13

The Making of Americas Most Notorious Gang

Steven Dudley

To my mother, the pillar of the family; my father, my inspiration;
and Juli, for everything since.

Contents

This book is about the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the ruth less forty-year-old street gang that has spread across a half-dozen countries and two continents. It follows a number of charactersmost notably a gang leader, whom I call Norman, and his family. These stories allow us to trace the history of the gang from its beginnings in Los Angeles to its export to El Salvador and other Central American nations, and back again.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part recounts the gangs origins; the second, its process of maturation; the third, the various efforts by those involved to leave the gang or mitigate its influence. Broadly speaking, the three parts mirror most gang members experiences as well: you are enveloped, become serious, then try to leave.

The gang has been compared by Donald Trump to Al-Qaeda and is considered the US governments number one target as it continues its nationwide effort to rid the US of criminal aliens. Indeed, the MS-13 is a threat that trades on its reputation for brutal murders, which has helped make Central America one of the most violent regions in the world and has devastated many US communities.

But the MS-13 is also greatly misunderstood. Its capacity is erroneously likened to much more sophisticated groups such as the Zetas in Mexico and the Yakuza in Japan. While the MS-13 does have an international presence, it is a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing, not international drug trafficking or sophisticated corruption.

In fact, the gang is perhaps better described as a loosely knit social and criminal community that reinforces its bonds via extreme versions of individual and collective violence. And it is as much the result of bad individual decisions as it is the result of flawed US and Central American policy, and the exploitative and unequal economic systems they foster.

Normans family, for example, was devastated by the US-backed war in El Salvador, which included widespread human rights abuses that led directly to the massive migration that Normans family experienced. Politics and war followed these refugees to the US, where they were treated differently depending on their nationality, then deported back to their countries of origin in disproportionate numbers, especially as it relates to criminal deportations. These deportations of ex-convicts are what led to the surge of gangs in Central America. Now, ironically, this surge in gang activity in Central America has led to another flood of refugees and, with the advent of the Donald Trump administration, the hyper-politicization of immigration as a catchall for every US problem.