MS-13 until death.
Open the door!
If they still won’t pay, the first thing we do is kill their spouse.
MS-13 and its rivals, like the 18th Street Gang,
cause chaos and violence across Central America,
sometimes at levels similar to active war zones.
We have MS-13 here.
It’s very uneven terrain,
which gives them an advantage.
But designating these gangs as “terrorists” or even as “cartels”
is part of a long-standing pattern of US officials
misunderstanding how they operate.
Transnational criminal organizations like MS-13
represent one of the gravest threats to our American safety.
This is how gangs like MS-13 actually fit into the drug trade
and how it's the war on drugs itself that creates the conditions
for them to cause chaos.
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[MS-13]
This is all MS-13’s territory.
If you were to come here by yourself?
They could kill you.
The gang wars of Central America
have pushed countries like El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala
almost to breaking point.
In 2012, Honduras became the most violent country on Earth
outside actual war zones,
with an average of 20 homicides a day
in a country of just 8 million people.
This young man had been tied up, gagged, and beaten.
The police didn’t find any identification on him.
So, like so many other victims in this city,
he will be classified as unknown.
Each month, the San Pedro Sula morgue
buries dozens of unclaimed, unidentified bodies in a mass grave.
But the gangs driving this violence
didn’t originate in Central America at all.
They largely came out of the streets of Los Angeles.
In its early days, MS-13 was mainly known for
its love of heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath,
with the gang taking up the devil’s horns hand sign
and other satanic imagery as part of its identity.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s,
Los Angeles experienced a huge influx of Salvadorian
and other Central American migrants.
At first, it was much more centered on
their love of rock and roll and metal music.
And over time, because they were in this violent atmosphere,
they evolved into what we know today as the MS-13,
this very violent gang.
The problems for Central America began in the 1990s
when in response to the so-called crack epidemic,
the US government passed laws allowing it to deport gang members,
often for drug crimes.
When members or ex-members of gangs get deported en masse
from the United States back to Central America,
what they find is incredibly fertile ground
for them to become involved in gangs again.
And they find it very easy to usurp the power of local gangs
and become the leaders
because they carry with them this kind of United States cachet.
José joined MS-13 in the US at just 13 years old.
He was deported back directly from a US prison.
But since he’s not wanted for crimes in El Salvador,
he’s being treated like any other deportee—
released back into the streets.
He’s convinced he’ll be killed any day by police or rival gangs.
And he thinks his best chance to protect himself
is getting straight back into the game.
Once the police find out where I live,
they’re going to come and snatch me, and they’re going to kill me.
In 2006, the Mexican government,
backed by billions of dollars of US military aid,
declared war on the cartels.
Previously, cartels moved cocaine from South America to Mexico
largely by sea and air.
These days, they avoid the increasingly aggressive Mexican navy
by relying more on land routes
through Central America’s chaotic border zones.
The “balloon effect” in drug policy
is the notion that if you push on one area
and try to police or repress any part of drug production
or drug trafficking organizations,
then it will act like a balloon.
In other words, you push on a balloon on one side,
and the air pushes out on another side.
If you destroy crops in one area,
then they will simply pop up in another
because the demand for these crops
doesn’t disappear because you destroy them.
It remains.
International cartels will often fight over trade networks,
but the street gangs, like MS-13, rely on controlling territory
for extortion and street-level dealing.
And this is where the truly horrifying violence
of Central America really takes off.
Fuck, imagine if we could film every time we killed someone.
How does MS control a neighborhood
and you can’t even see them?
Just like the police is organized, the gangs are also organized.
[Cops] think they’re going to make us weaker.
What they’re doing is giving us more strength to keep going.
Members of the MS-13 have tried to pull the MS-13
closer to becoming what may be euphemistically called a drug cartel,
because the MS-13 is not set up to be a criminal organization.
They’re set up to be kind of a proxy family,
a criminal family, to be sure.
The United States government
has used a number of tools to go after gangs.
One of them is this so-called RICO law,
which is a conspiracy law
that was originally set up to go after mafia organizations.
In other words,
you don’t have to be directly involved in a crime
in order to be connected to an overall accusation or indictment.
While plenty of MS-13 members and leaders
have been imprisoned in both Central America and the US,
it hasn’t really dented the gangs’ power
because these gangs aren’t built with the command and control structure
of a traditional organized crime group,
let alone a political terrorist organization.
They are more a fragmentary collection of individual cliques
which can operate independently while sharing the MS-13 brand.
Democrats, Nancy Pelosi as an example,
are trying to defend MS-13 gang members.
I called them “animals” the other day,
and I was met with rebuke.
They said, “They’re people.”
They’re not people.
These are animals.
The chaotic nature of these gangs creates such brutal violence
that it’s led to a geopolitical crisis
as people flee from their homes in Central America
and make the long and dangerous journey to the US southern border.
I want to be in the US.
Because I can’t go back to Honduras.
Why not?
Because I had some issues with
some gang members.
Two of them are dead.
There’s a lot of pressure that gangs put on local residents,
especially in places like Central America.
They are very active in recruiting.
They are very often predatory as it relates to women and girls.
And they are violent.
Throughout most of the 2010s,
the president of Honduras was Juan Orlando Hernández.
Hernández made himself an ally of the Trump administration
by claiming that he’d cracked down on the migration
that all the gang violence was causing.
Juan Orlando Hernández wooed Donald Trump.
He really picked up all the rhetoric that was swirling around migration,
which sent all the right signals to the United States government.
Trump praised Hernández in speeches
and in 2019 approved $500 million in funding for Honduras, Guatemala,
and El Salvador.
President Hernández is working with the United States very closely.
You know what's going on, on our southern border.
And unfortunately, the drugs become worse.
They become bigger quantities.
And we’re building a wall now.
We're up to almost 100 miles.
But in February of 2022,
just a month after being voted out of office,
Hernández was arrested by Honduran police and the DEA
and extradited to New York
on charges that he smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US.
We allege that during a meeting with a co-conspirator,
Hernández declared that he wanted, and I quote,
“to stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”
On the one hand, it does appear as if it’s sort of like a clan
that has set up drug trafficking enterprises while they were in power.
Honduras is becoming a more prominent area
for transit of drug trafficking operations,
so they latch on to this for money purposes,
of course they can make money.
And they can use some of that money for their campaigns,
and they latch on it for political purposes.
The war on drugs drives corruption everywhere it's fought.
But actual heads of state being charged with trafficking
is a big deal, even by those standards.
And it’s exactly this narco-corruption
that has contributed to the street gangs being able to take hold
and commit mass murder with near impunity,
leading to ever more people fleeing to the US.
The sheer number of killings on a daily basis here
is quite extraordinary.
We know for certain of at least three murders every night we stayed.
One continuous theme running through all of this
is the disproportionate number of women being killed.
It’s why so many families are leaving.
If you don’t have institutions that are robust, well funded, independent,
then you are laying the stage
not just for high-level corruption that we see or drug trafficking
but also the very violent, low-level criminal activities
that gangs represent
and the ancillary problems that come with it,
including things like migration.
So while the former president of Honduras
gets charged with cocaine trafficking,
narco-corruption still destroys societies in Central America,
and gangs like MS-13 continue to turn the streets into war zones.
As much as cynical American politicians
may like to label them “terrorists” or “cartels”,
none of this will stop until they realize the root of the problem
is the war on drugs they launched.
We’d like to congratulate drugs
for winning the war on drugs.