I've come to the conclusion there is only one solution: legalize
"Murdered schoolboys shake Salvador’s gang truce" September 09, 2012|Marcos Aleman, Associated Press
The schoolboys went missing on a Thursday, and it took nearly three weeks for police to discover the mass grave. On July 11, a police investigator, wearing a ski mask to hide his identity, dug up the dead, the youngest 15. One of the mothers stood weeping as the corpses were pulled out, along with curious traces of food and silverware.
Gen. David Munguia Payes, El Salvador’s minister of justice and security, said the killings were the work of the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, one of two notorious Salvadoran gangs that regularly visited schoolyards to recruit kids — often by force.
Why not just put a recruiter inside the school?
The police investigator pointed at the buried remnants of a meal. The MS-13 recruiter, he said, had probably tried to persuade the youths to join the group using the usual method: a big meal with cake and soft drinks.
When they resisted, he said, they were stabbed to death.
Six months after El Salvador brokered an historic truce between two rival gangs to curb the nation’s daunting homicide rate, officials are split over whether the truce actually works. In March, MS-13 and its rival, Barrio 18, vowed to end the killings and the forced recruitments in exchange for better conditions for incarcerated gang leaders, who run their operations from behind bars. The government transferred 30 bosses of each gang from the maximum security Zacatecoluca prison, nicknamed “Zacatraz,’’ to ordinary jails, where they would impart orders to their minions on the street, purportedly to stick with the truce.
The gangs, which also operate in Guatemala and Honduras, are seeking truce talks in those countries as well.
But Carlos Ponce, an expert on crime for the Salvadoran Attorney General’s Office, says the truce is a sham.
“It’s all a lie, the gangs continue to operate, people continue getting killed, people keep disappearing and the gangs get stronger and stronger,’’ he said....
An estimated 50,000 Salvadorans belong to the street gangs that have terrified citizens and left this small Central American nation of 6 million with one of the world’s highest murder rates, behind neighboring Honduras....
Related: Honduras
“I think that the truce is a real farce,’’ said Max Manwaring, a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. “The gangs hold all the cards, and they’ve been operating out of the jails for years. The jails have become graduate schools for gang members, and the government is simply grasping at straws.’’
We call them intelligence agencies here, and the only farce is the drug war.
Salvadoran security officials have been powerless to contain the violence fueled by gangs, which formed in the jails of California and spread to Central America as their members were deported by the U.S....
Where print cut it.
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Also see: Slow Saturday Special: Slimy Salvadoran War Criminal
Secret Service inquiry turns to El Salvador trip last year
Did they have our war criminal in tow?
