US Street Gangs More Vicious Than ISIS

El Salvador has been brought to its knees by gang violence, and the groups have infiltrated the U.S., too.

One of El Salvador’s former guerrilla leaders, who years ago traded olive drab for Irish tweeds and took up residence at Oxford University, can tell you exactly why his homeland is being torn apart right now by gang violence.

He can also tell you what that means to those of us who live under the delusion that the carnage in the streets of San Salvador this month—expected to get much worse this weekend—is not just a local problem in a faraway land.

Central America’s savagery is terrorism, pure and simple, says Joaquín Villalobos, and in many respects it is more horrible than the Middle Eastern brand. “Islamic terrorism decapitates and crucifies in its territories,” says Villalobos in a column for the Madrid daily El País. “In Latin America the criminals hang, decapitate, burn, chop up, and play soccer with the heads of their victims. In both cases terrorism is the method used to maintain authority.”

And Central America’s brand of terror is just around the corner from communities all over the United States, whether in the barrios of Los Angeles or at a derelict shopping mall next to a posh neighborhood on Long Island, as chronicled by Sarah Garland in her 2009 book The Gangs in Garden City.

The Salvadoran pandillas or maras, as the gangs are called, are in Washington State and in suburban Maryland on the fringes of Washington, D.C. Indeed, the FBI’s “National Gang Report—2013” (PDF), the most recent that’s been published, shows the two main Salvadoran groups, MS-13 and Barrio 18, are in just about every corner of this country. And, like other gangs, according to the FBI, they have infiltrated the U.S. military to get training and expand their influence. The feds also say that gang members show up on college campuses.

In fact, the Salvadoran gangs have roots almost as deep in the United States as they do in El Salvador itself. They started to grow in the 1980s, as hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled the civil war there, arriving in the U.S. to live, often without documents, on the margins of society. An estimated 40 percent of the population eventually “went north,” legally or illegally, to live and work.

You can read the rest @
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/31/the-street-gangs-more-vicious-than-isis.html

We are deluding ourselves if we think this is not a serious problem that can only get worse.

And what is the US government doing? Nothing effective, to be sure. We have no meaningful immigration policy.