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LOS ANGELES - The pair of helicopters flew in a tight circle, an LAPD chopper close in, with a media craft higher up. It was a familiar pattern to those used to watching for signs of trouble.
They seemed awfully close to my street. Indeed, they were more or less directly over my building, a scenario that I understood when I discovered the block in mid-town LA, south of Hollywood, had been cordoned off by police cars after reports of shots being fired.
A teenager had been fatally shot in the face. He died shortly afterwards at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre.
A homicide detective with the LAPD's Hollywood Division would only confirm that two suspects were in custody and that the crime was gang- related.
The victim, Gerardo Canenguez, 19, was likely a member of the Vista Boys, a local Latino gang. He and a companion were out riding their bicycles when they likely encountered rival gang members.
After Canenguez went down, the shooters fled on foot down my street.
The victim's friend chased the assassins, firing repeatedly from a pistol, an episode witnessed by my neighbour and her little girl. It was around 11.30am. The perpetrators would have run past a building site tagged with Vista Boys graffiti, signs that are found on many local street corners and pavements. The discerning eye will also notice something else: an MS or sometimes MS13, sprayed by taggers from a rival crew.
In the estimated 1000 gangs that roam Los Angeles County, the Vista Boys are a penny ante outfit. MS are of a different order altogether.
Their full name is Mara Salvatrucha, literally Salvadorean gang [M is the 13th letter in the alphabet, hence the numerals], one of the most feared outfits in the megalopolis, spawned from Central American immigrants, many of whom fled the vicious conflict in El Salvador during the 1980s when the United States deemed the nation a hot zone in its war against communism.
"There was a huge influx of Salvadorans," explains Bruce Riordan, who directs anti-gang operations for the Los Angeles city attorney's office. "Mara Salvatrucha began in LA and have spread throughout Central America. They have a huge presence in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica. It's of major concern to law enforcement."
A close examination of local tags suggests the Vista Boys sprayed over MS-13 signs. Tagging can definitely lead to violence. Serious gangs take tagging seriously. It is their territory. If you cross out MS graffiti, it's an act of war. If so, Gerardo Canenguez may have paid the price.
In a city weary of gangs, Canenguez's death never made the local news cycle. Latino, black, Asian and white gangs have long battled for grassroots supremacy in LA. Owning turf means controlling drug sales. Teen boys are ripe for recruitment. In my area, parents move rather than see their children succumb to la vida loca, the crazy life, of gang violence.
But beyond LA's mean streets, MS and the 18th Streeters have morphed into a major international, and to some extent overlooked, scourge.
Riordan believes they are "the new and emerging organised crime in America". This is an alarming trend to US law officials only too aware that three hours south of LA, just across the border in Mexico, open warfare exists between rival narcotraffickers and officials, with near daily executions and firefights.
Today, Mara Salvatrucha has its tentacles into drug and weapons smuggling, human trafficking, murder, theft and other crimes. In 2004, the FBI created a task force specifically to combat Mara Salvatrucha, whose exploits include killing 28 people, mostly women and children, in a machine gun attack on a bus in Honduras in December 2004.
Ironically, criminal convictions in the US, and subsequent deportations, have facilitated the spread of gangs. El Salvador's gang problem is so severe that MS followers are housed in a separate prison to members of the 18th Street gang, perhaps Mara Salvatrucha's deadliest LA rival.
"Both prisons are largely controlled by the inmates," says Riordan. "The army and police keep prisoners in, but day-to-day operations are largely run by the inmates. You need gang approval to get access. It's believed that inmates have access to cell phones. This is a real problem. You can run a criminal organisation with a cell phone.
"The warring gangs are reshaping crime as a transnational phenomenon."
The Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Centre [TTCCC], a think tank at George Mason University in Washington DC, is blunt in its assessment: "Transnational crime will be a defining issue of the 21st century for policymakers, as defining as the Cold War was for the 20th century and colonialism was for the 19th."
The centre's director, Dr Louise Shelley, says transnational gangs have been major beneficiaries of globalisation. "They take advantage of increased travel, trade, rapid money movements, telecommunications and computer links, and are positioned for growth."
Last month, top law enforcement officials from the UK, EU, Hong Kong, US, Japan and South Africa, assembled at Britain's Ditchley Foundation, reached a sober conclusion. "The consensus was that transnational crime is more of a threat than terrorism," says Shelley, one of the attendees.
To many people beyond, say, the front line of gang warfare, the impact of transnational crime is insidious. The Ditchley conference compared it with climate change: while aware of looming danger people are loath to change habits. Faced by public outrages such as 9/11 or the European transport bombings, governments often give terrorism priority. "Gangs are extreme capitalists," says Riordan. "The profit motive is number one."
Indeed, the parallels between terrorism and transnational crime - which sometimes intersect - are striking. "Both groups frequently operate in decentralised cell structures, tend to target civilians and use similar tactics such as kidnapping and drug dealing," a US congressional report, Transnational Organised Crime, noted in March 2006.
Drugs are a common source of cash for both. Since NATO forces invaded Afghanistan, poppy cultivation and opium production has soared, with significant profits going to the Taleban. During the past two years, Colombian officials and the US Navy and Coast Guard have seized 13 semi-submersibles - able to travel underwater but not dive or resurface like a real submarine - said to have been funded by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, or FARC. The 17m long vessels, which could carry up to 5 tonnes of cargo, were likely intended for use in smuggling cocaine, a trade at which FARC is expert. Elsewhere, Hezbollah, like FARC designated a terrorist organisation by the US, is alleged to have laundered money in South America's wild west Triple Frontier region, where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay converge. And, in 2005, Honduras and El Salvador even claimed Mara Salvatrucha had meet with al-Qaeda, an allegation that was never proven.
Despite these threats, Shelley believes the US has dropped the ball, focusing on terrorism even as the transnational crime threat grows.
In this sense, 9/11 was a boon to criminals. "Up until 2001, there was some understanding," says Shelley. "Terrorism swept everything away. The [poor] analysis on transnational crime is just appalling."
Riordan concurs, noting that anti-
gang budgets plummeted by as much as 75 per cent in Los Angeles, giving organised crime an opportunity to expand, although funding has returned to roughly pre-9/11 levels.
Law enforcement's problem is catching up, an issue that will focus minds at a summit of Latin American police chiefs scheduled in LA next month.
What to do? "It's an international crisis that requires international co-
operation," warns Riordan.
Unless resources are made available "the crime will continue to grow". He notes that Interpol has set up an anti-gang division. Shelley says better intelligence is needed [Ditchley suggests strangling options for using dirty money], but agrees international co-
operation is not easy in a globalised, sometimes corruptible, world.
Then there's the problem of small countries - several Caribbean nations spring to mind - that host criminals whose cash flow can dwarf national revenues.
It sounds like the challenge nations face in combating terrorism, although Shelley believes fighting crime poses fewer threats to civil liberties - a debatable issue. The ultimate challenge in this new criminal universe, as far as safety goes, is who gets the edge: criminals or law enforcement?
Mexico's urban warfare is a stark warning of what happens when crime wins. "We'll certainly be unable to eradicate transnational crime," says Shelley. "But were not even stemming its growth." She believes the public has yet to understand the enormity of this "growing threat".
A few days after Canenguez died, an impromptu memorial, made from candles and flowers, appeared at the spot where he was slain. It quickly disappeared. Meanwhile, the MS graffiti has mushroomed, testimony to the seemingly inexorable growth of a criminal cancer whose clout stretches far beyond Canenguez's tiny piece of turf.
