Wherever we go, we recruit more people. There's no way they can stop us. We're going to keep on multiplying.
There is little reason to believe that the Latino gangs described in preceding chapters will disappear anytime soon. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that they will continue to grow in size, disperse with the larger migrant stream, become more sophisticated, and strengthen their ties to domestic and transnational organized criminal groups.
Increased law enforcement attention, federalization, and international cooperation may have slowed gang proliferation, constrained some of their criminality, and prevented the immediate emergence of a new “Mafia” similar to the Italian LCN. The evidence is mixed. But the fundamental social and economic problems out of which Latino gangs emerged and which supply their ranks continue largely unchanged. Moreover, the integration of Latino street gangs into transnational drug-trafficking networks has bred a hybrid gang strain, grafting the emotional ties of the old barrio gang to the cynical imperatives of criminal enterprise. That strain is not likely to be less resistant to law enforcement than other elements of the transnational drug-trafficking system, all of which have adapted and survived decades of the “war on drugs” with no end in sight.
This forecast is bad for any number of reasons:
• The very existence of gangs poisons and distorts public discourse about immigration and crime.
• Gangs prey first on their own communities. But they have a corrosive effect everywhere they touch. This effect ranges from the blight of graffiti, through a panoptic array of violent crimes, to widespread fear of violence in public places, such as parks, shopping malls, schools, and recreational facilities.
• There is no immunity for the majority population. Clients of the drug traffickers that gangs serve come from all levels of society, all communities, and all ethnicities.
• The potential—even likelihood—of a highly organized Latino mega-gang (along the lines of the LCN) continues to lurk just beneath the surface.
The transnational nature of gangs like MS-13 and 18th Street poses challenges to national security beyond that of criminality. The networks in which Latino street gangs serve as critical links and nodes not only move drugs and human beings north. They also are directly involved in the traffic of firearms south from the relatively unregulated civilian markets of the United States. These smuggled guns have become an important part of the arsenals of armed groups in Mexico, for example, where even fifty-caliber antiarmor sniper rifles made in America and sold in its civilian market have been used in assassinations and armed attacks on public authorities. Not a few regional experts believe that the violence of such armed groups—directly against governments as well as against public order in general—threatens to destabilize democratic governance in Mexico and Central America. Moreover, although there has been no publicly documented instance of a street gang directly aiding a terrorist group against the United States or its interests, there is no persuasive reason to believe that the criminal networks and smuggling routes in which the gangs are involved could not be put to evil use by terrorists, with or without the gangs’ direct knowledge. (Some law enforcement officials believe that this has already happened.)
This unsettling future invites the question, what can be done about it? Any real examination of that question demands confrontation with deep questions about the culture and politics of the United States. Skeptics would say that the current addiction of politicians to media-driven sound-bite bromides and poll-driven policy formulations based on “triangulation” of voters’ topical sentiments does not bode well for either the process of confrontation or its likely outcome.
The first confrontation needed is an honest dialogue about who the United States is as a nation and where it is going, without conflating the question of gangs and immigration. Noted critics of “Hispanization,” such as Huntington, and fearmongers of the reconquista, such as Buchanan, have given up on the idea of the United States as a “melting pot,” because it no longer produces the sterling ingots of Anglo-Saxon culture with which they are comfortable and that they believe made the United States what it is. The products cast from the stream of the southern migration are darker and more varied—the dreaded “multicultural” other—than the sterling variety imagined to be quintessentially and indispensably “American.” Critics argue that this darker coinage threatens the very meaning of the United States as a nation. A patchwork and incoherent national debate has emerged out of these propositions. Is it true that the melting pot in fact no longer “works?” If the melting pot does not work, what are the implications? Should the United States stem the tide or celebrate diversity?
One need not have the answers to these questions to understand that the use of Latino gangs as a stalking horse is intellectually dishonest—because so removed from the facts of immigrant criminality—and is only slightly less offensive than the racist predicates of the American immigration policy that discriminated against “Southern Europeans” in the last century. (Ironically, some of the descendants of these erstwhile “threats” to the American soul—the grandchildren of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, and other “Mediterranean types”—are busy minting new versions of the old arguments, as if their forebears stepped off of the Mayflower itself.) If anti-immigrant advocates do not like Latino social or political culture, let them be honest enough to say so and say why. But please let them not pretend that the “inherent” criminality or “violent nature” of Latin Americans, supposedly made tangible in Latino gangs, is the wellspring of their wish to slam shut the golden door.
The second confrontation needed—one more directly related to gangs and their criminality—is an honest look into what U.S. national polity has become with respect to crime and criminals in general and gangs in particular. One might fairly conclude that U.S. national policy differs from the often-criticized Mano Dura policies of Central American governments only in degree, not in character. We in the United States talk a lot about prevention and intervention, but in reality, we have off-loaded the problem of street gangs for all intents and purposes to our law enforcement agencies. These state instruments are infinitely better funded, more efficient, and more effective than those of our poor southern neighbors. Gangsters in the United States also enjoy the benefit of a criminal justice system—courts and prosecutors—that by and large respects the primacy of law over arbitrary action. Our prisons are somewhat less nightmarish. We do not have vigilante death squads. But, in essence, we as a nation act on the widely endorsed premise that crime is a question of personal morality and can and should be dealt with as a police matter, not by social engineering. Put another way, the way in which we deal with gangs would look very different if the basis of our national policy included the premises that every child should have a sound and efficient education, that every drug addict should have access to effective treatment, that every person willing to work should have a job, and that prisons should rehabilitate (not warehouse) offenders.
Whether the “police state” approach, the “welfare state” approach, or a more balanced blend of the two would ultimately result in a safer and more stable society is by no means an answered question. The current approach may be politically penny-wise but culturally pound-foolish. One can easily construct a notional future or thought exercise in which the arcs of street gangs and drug abuse and trafficking, prison warehousing and offender reentry, transnational criminal and perhaps terrorist organizations, and weakened democratic governments to the south converge in such a way as to result in extraordinary criminality, violence, and disorder within the United States.
Putting aside the idea of confronting ourselves and our national character, what “practical” steps might be suggested? If we continue to rely on law enforcement as our principal means of dealing with gangs, then we should be “in for a dime, in for a dollar.” This means consistently allocating the resources necessary to do effective gang suppression at every level—local, state, and federal. Low-grade on-again, off-again antigang programs are like incomplete antibiotic regimens. Taking a lower dose than that prescribed or quitting before the infection is eradicated only strengthens the infecting organism and makes it more resistant to the next round. The gang organism likewise adapts. The single most frequent complaint that I heard from federal agents and local law enforcement officers alike is that commitment to fighting street gangs is episodic and subject to “reallocation” with the next “fad” crime.
Beyond law enforcement, it seems obvious that our national immigration policy needs to be rationalized. The economic and cultural stabilization of Latino immigrant populations is fundamental to the building of communities willing to come forward, cooperate with law enforcement, and confront the gangsters within their midst. Hounding ten million (more or less) undocumented immigrants into fearful hiding and breaking up their families cannot help construct such communities. The putatively “antigang” and “anticriminal” sweeps in which ICE specializes are the lowest grade of antibiotic being administered today, ensuring little in the long term but relocation of the infection and its resurgence elsewhere.
So where does the answer lie? Is it in community programs of prevention and intervention, like the challenge program that gave Daniel Ochoa a chance at a new life? Or is it in tough foot-on-the-neck gang suppression, like Miami-Dade's MAGTF, the FBI's National MS-13 Gang Task Force, and RICO prosecutions?
The fate of the early Cuban youth gangs lends a supporting model to advocates of prevention and intervention programs, demonstrating, on the face of it, that gangs can disappear if youth have real alternatives. The unique Cuban experience in the Miami area, however, has only limited applicability to the problem of entrenched street gangs in severely and chronically marginalized communities like those of Los Angeles, Chicago, and entire Central American nations. It is difficult to see how a local gang intervention or prevention program on a scale that might be funded in today's political climate could reverse such global phenomena as the decline of manufacturing, the rise of service industries, and the export of jobs. Even if Congress decided to fund prevention and intervention programs, unless they were created on a scale rivaling that of the Marshall Plan for reconstructing Europe after World War II, could such programs achieve results comparable to what happened to Miami's early Cuban gangs?
Even given such an unlikely commitment and real funds, what would be the specific elements of such plans? What viable enterprises could be created to ensure not just make-work jobs but real ladders of opportunity? What educational facilities would be needed to provide the skills and abilities needed to be successful in those jobs? At the same time, how would the multibillion-dollar illicit drug industry be shut down or, at a minimum, unhooked from its primary retail distribution network, the street gangs? What would be done about the constant influx of illegal aliens that perpetuates the marginality of entire communities and vast numbers of youth, as in East Los Angeles?
In sum, the problem of Latino street gangs is not something that stands apart from some of the deepest problems of American society generally. It is, rather, woven tightly into the most fundamental challenges that the nation faces in law, culture, and economics. The degree of economic foresight and social engineering required for such a happy end as the elimination of street gangs is staggering—even if one were persuaded that the nation would support such government engineering.
Nonetheless, la esperanza nunca muere (hope never dies). One may hope that out of the controlled collision of our national debate about the knot of these problems, some useful initiatives will emerge. If they do not, we are in for a long and violent ride.