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Father Greg Boyle keeps a grim count of the young gang members he has buried. Number 151 was Jonathan Hurtado - 18 and fresh out of jail. Now the kindly, bearded Jesuit mourns him.
"The day he got out I found him a job. He never missed a day. He was doing really well," says the Catholic priest, who has worked for 20 years against Los Angeles' gang culture.
But Hurtado made a mistake: he went back to his old neighbourhood in east Los Angeles. While sitting in a park, he was approached by a man on a bike who said to him: "Hey, homie, what's up?" and shot him four times.
"You can't come back. Not even for a visit," says Boyle.
The priest's Los Angeles, where daily slaughter is a grim reality, is a world away from the glamorous Hollywood hills, Malibu beaches and Sunset Strip. His Los Angeles is where 120,000 gang members across five counties battle over turf, pride and drugs. It is a city of violence as a race war escalates between new Hispanic gangs and older black groups, each trying to ethnically cleanse the other.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has referred to his city as "the gang capital of America", has launched a crackdown on the new threat.
The latest front is the tiny strip of turf known as Harbour Gateway, a nest of streets between shopping centres and office blocks. It was there, just before Christmas, that 14-year-old Cheryl Green died. As she stood on a corner talking with friends, two Hispanic members of the neighbourhood's 204th St gang walked up and opened fire, killing Green and injuring three others, targeting them because they were black.
Traditionally the outside view of LA gangs has been of black youths like the Bloods and the Crips and has focused on Compton and South-Central and the culture of gangsta rap. But Hispanic gangs are in the ascendant, spreading across America. They have names like Mara Salvatrucha, La Mirada Locos and Barrio Van Nuys.
Last year there were 269 gang-related killings in LA. Green's murder was the latest in a line of killings by the 204th Street gang. In 1997, 11-year-old Marquis Wilbert was killed on his bike. In 2001, Robert Hightower, 19, was killed. In 2003, Eric Butler, 39, was shot dead trying to protect his daughter from being harassed.
There are streets that blacks have been forbidden to cross. Green's death brought the gang war between "brown and black" to public awareness. This month a summit will be held called the Black and Brown Strategy Meeting which aims to head off a race war.
Green's death sparked Mayor Villaraigosa's crackdown. The police published a list of the 11 worst gangs, including 204th St and vowed to go after them with police, FBI agents and injunctions to stop members meeting. An extra 50 police were assigned to anti-gang duties in San Fernando Valley. In south LA, a team of 120 detectives and 10 FBI agents has been set up. An extra 18 officers have been put into Harbour Gateway.
But Angelenos have seen it all before. The city's history is littered with anti-gang initiatives, and what the new effort shows is just how widespread the gangs have become. They have spread into the San Fernando Valley, an area previously famed for suburban prosperity. Last year one area of the north Valley saw a 160 per cent rise in gang crime.
Publishing the "hit list" could backfire. In the warped gang subculture, being on the list is a badge of pride. The lesson of the 204th St gang seems apt. They number only a few dozen but killing blacks has spurred them from obscurity to enviable notoriety.
Yet there is hope. Alfonso "Chino" Visuet, 23, was sucked into the gang life as a teenager. "People who join a gang are always running away from something. They flee to the gang."
Not any more. He works for Father Boyle's Homeboy Industries, a project that helps people leave gang life. It provides jobs, an education, pays to have gang tattoos removed and gives counselling. It aims to remove the circumstances that lead to crime: poverty, abuse and unemployment. It is staffed mostly by former gang members and has spun off a bakery, a silkscreen printers and a restaurant.
"You have to address the lethal absence of hope. I have never seen a hopeful person join a gang," Boyle says. It worked for Visuet. He starts university this year and wants to be a probation officer.
Boyle and others have mixed feelings about the crackdown. In the past decade the main anti-gang scheme, LA Bridges, has spent more than US$100 million ($144 million) yet keeps no record of whether those it helps return to gang life.
The list of 11 gangs, critics say, was drawn up deliberately to present a 'balance' by covering the whole city. Politicians use the presence of a high-profile gang to act tough on law and order and police chiefs use it as a way of upping manpower.
- OBSERVER
Welcome to Gangland
Los Angeles has an estimated 720 gangs with about 120,000 members.
Police say 11 gangs and their 900 members committed more than 1700 violent crimes last year, 6 per cent of all the violent crime.
Violent gang-related crime increased 14 per cent in 2006 despite a citywide decrease in crime over the past five years. Police say street gangs were responsible for 56 per cent of the city's 478 murders in 2006.
Latino Influence
Six of the targeted gangs are predominantly latino and five are predominantly black.
The Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, gang formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s to protect immigrants escaping civil war in El Salvador.
The gang has 50,000 members in at least six nations.
- REUTERS
