The Most Dangerous Gang in America

The signs of a new threat in northern Virginia emerged ominously in blood-spattered urban streets and rural scrub. Two summers ago the body of a young woman who had informed against her former gang associates was found on the banks of the Shenandoah River, repeatedly stabbed and her head nearly severed. Last May in Alexandria, gang members armed with machetes hacked away at a member of the South Side Locos, slicing off some of his fingers and leaving others dangling by a shred of skin. Only a week later in Herndon, a member of the 18th Street gang was pumped full of .38-caliber bullets, while his female companion, who tried to flee, was shot in the back. The assailant, according to a witness, had a large tattoo emblazoned on his forehead. It read MS, for Mara Salvatrucha, the gang allegedly responsible for all these attacks.

At the nearby headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents — many of whom live in these communities — fielded the reports with mounting alarm. But Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, wasn’t terrifying just northern Virginia. “They were popping up everywhere,” says Chris Swecker, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division. “It seemed like we were hearing more and more about MS-13.” Then one day last fall, FBI Director Robert Mueller called Swecker into his office. “You have a mandate to go out and address this gang,” Mueller told him. Mueller declared MS-13 the top priority of the bureau’s criminal-enterprise branch — which targets organized crime — and authorized the creation of a new national task force to combat it. The task force, which includes agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), aims to take on MS-13 much as the FBI once tackled the Mafia.

Composed of mostly Salvadorans and other Central Americans — many of them undocumented — the gang has a uniquely international profile, with an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members in 33 states in the United States (out of more than 700,000 gang members overall), and tens of thousands more in Central America. It’s considered the fastest-growing, most violent and least understood of the nation’s street gangs — in part because U.S. law enforcement has not been watching as closely as it might have. As authorities have focused their attention on the war against terrorism, MS-13 has proliferated. In the FBI’s D.C. field office, the number of agents dedicated to gang investigations declined by 50 percent. “There was a definite shift in resources post-9/11 toward terrorism,” says Michael Mason, assistant director in charge of that office. “As a result, we had fewer resources to focus on gangs,” though he adds that the bureau made up for any shortfall by leveraging resources from other agencies. In recent weeks, authorities have made strides against MS-13: a gang leader accused of orchestrating a December bus bombing in Honduras that killed 28 people was arrested in Texas in February, and a recent seven-city sweep by ICE netted more than 100 reputed MS-13 members. But Robert Clifford, head of the new national task force, says “no single law-enforcement action is really going to deal the type of blow” necessary to dismantle the gang. No one is more interested in busting up MS-13 than leaders of the Latino community, who live with the fear and fallout of the gang’s savage actions.

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