This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha by Samuel Logan

Author:Samuel Logan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

The FBI is a law enforcement organization with a long history of combating organized crime. For decades, federal agents have targeted a number of gangs, including the Bloods, the Crips, and the Mexican Mafia, but in 2002, the FBI still had not registered the Mara Salvatrucha. Because MS-related cases still circulated only in local and state courts, the importance of the Mara Salvatrucha as a nationwide threat had not reached the upper levels of law enforcement.

The FBI reached out to local law enforcement by assigning its agents to Safe Streets Task Forces, created in 1992 to target violent crime and gang activity. These task forces used the FBI’s investigative resources, such as a national DNA database, and the bureau’s connection with federal prosecutors, who sought heavier sentences from federal-level criminal statutes.

Location alone determined federal involvement in the investigation of the Joaquin Diaz murder. Denis murdered Joaquin in a federal park, pushing the National Park police to the forefront of the investigation just five days before the attacks of September 11, 2001, forced the FBI to focus on terrorism, not organized crime or even street gangs. Joaquin Diaz’s murder put the Mara Salvatrucha on the federal radar, but it was at a time when people at the federal level who cared enough to look closely at street gangs had no time for anything but terrorists.

Few at the federal level recognized the MS as a national threat. Even at the local level, it was difficult to establish the MS as a gang problem. Because of petty politics, budgetary considerations, and bureaucracy, street gangs were often ignored in the smaller cities and towns where the MS had begun to appear. Benign neglect was the status quo in most of these local jurisdictions. Many police chiefs and mayors preferred to deny there was a gang problem, even when it was clear to many cops on the street that the MS was thriving and growing fast in immigrant communities.

With local leaders in denial, FBI agents working in the Safe Street Task Forces were unable to respond to the MS. Los Angeles alone had embraced its gang problem, while most other cities around the country had not. FBI agents in other cities may have suspected the MS presence in their area, but without local support, they were not able to focus solely on that one gang. The task forces were a cooperative effort, and the FBI could not call the shots. As local leaders looked the other way, the MS spread across the country and built a significant membership in dozens of states before there was any semblance of an organized federal response. Greg and Detective Mike Porter’s growing worry for Brenda’s long-term safety, in part, sparked the FBI’s attention to the MS presence across the country, starting in northern Virginia.

Through the end of the summer and into early fall, Porter and Greg began to believe that Brenda might have been burned. Greg knew he was at the end of his rope after bouncing Brenda from one secure location to another.

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