Gangs: How Does MS13 Work?

Have you heard of MS-13?

Mara Salvatrucha, commonly abbreviated to MS-13, is a street gang composed mainly of Salvadorans, but founded in the United States. It is seen as one of the most violent and notorious in all the Americas.

Until recently, they terrorised the tiny Central American country of El Salvador, causing it to be one of the most dangerous countries in the world, and a hotspot for murders and many other forms of criminality.

Now, in 2024, the question as to how the gang works could be answered quite concisely: by rotting in prison. But that doesn’t tell the full story.

Although the gang problem in El Salvador was seemingly largely resolved by President Nayib Bukele’s nuclear response, and with the creation of a vast and controversial prison system, it doesn’t mean the gang nor its structures has completely disappeared.

Let’s explore.

From the City of Angels to the City of the Saviour

MS-13 was established in Los Angeles by immigrants from El Salvador in the 1980s.

Many of the would-be members were refugees who fled a brutal Civil War in their country between left-wing and right-wing factions, a conflict which claimed around 75,000 lives and which lasted from 1979 until 1992. A large number of these Salvadorans — along with Guatemalans fleeing their own country’s civil war — were undocumented, and their numbers included large numbers of minors. Due to a combination of this and general prejudice, many were unable to find jobs in the US, which led to a rise in criminality and contributed to the formation of the gang.

Their prospects of undocumented central Americans in the US improved somewhat with the landmark legal case American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh, which began in the late 1980s and was brought against the Immigration and Naturalization Service and others by several religious groups and human rights organisations. The lawsuit eventually ensured that the Guatemalan and Salvadorans’ refugees asylum requests had to be assessed once more, given that discrimination and prejudice had impacted their initial requests and that — in 1984 — only 3% of Salvadoran immigrants had succeeded in receiving asylum.

However, one of the provisions of the case was that asylum requests and the right to settlement would be excluded for people with a conviction for an aggravated felony. Barred also from a renewed assessment were Salvadorans who’d migrated to the US between 1990 and the end of the suit in 1991. And while the suit sought to minimise rates of deportation even for individuals whose asylum requests were rejected, it was determined that this would not extend to those who’d committed a crime of so-called ‘moral turpitude’: typically either one which resulted in a sentence of at least 6 months, or which meant that the individual posed a national security risk or threat to public safety.

But by then, fairly severe convictions were exactly what many of the gang-affiliated individuals in the US had. And only one year after the conclusion of the suit, the civil war in El Salvador ended. With the perceived threat subsided, many Salvadorans whose asylum was rejected were shipped straight back to a war-ravaged country with precious few functioning state structures in place. Thus, the small Central American country became the breeding ground for what would become one of the most notorious gangs in the world.

And perhaps one thing that has faded into the background with the recent downgrading of the threat posed by MS-13 is how bad they were. They were really bad.

Infanticide — or the killing of children — was common, as was femicide, with around one in 5,000 Salvadoran women killed in 2016 alone. The gangs would commonly recruit children to take part in their criminal activities, which typically revolved around trafficking and extortion. As the years went on, MS-13 would begin to get into feuds with other Salvadoran gangs — most notably Barrio 18, also founded in Los Angeles — as well as Mexican gangs, having been recruited by groups like the Sinaloa Cartel to aid in their conflict with Los Zetas.

The gang also gained notoriety for the intimidation and violence it would use towards objectives such as extorting payments from legitimate or illegitimate businesses in so-called MS-13 territory. According to the US Department of Justice, this would include rapes and other forms of witness intimidation. Bored gang members in El Salvador would shoot at passers-by, often children, safe in the knowledge that they would not be held accountable for their actions — such was the level of power that the gang held for many years.

By far, the biggest revenue stream for the organisation came from the illegal trafficking of various goods, as well as narcotics. Stolen vehicles would be taken from the United States for resale to Central America, and MS-13 also participated in weapon smuggling and illegal firearm sales. The gang is believed to be a major retail distributor of drugs in some parts of the United States such as Texas, and is also believed to operate travelling theft crews which steal over-the-counter medications for later sale on the illegal drug market. There have also been reports of MS-13’s involvement in human smuggling.

Initiations, Culture, and Leadership

MS-13 would often recruit poor or vulnerable teenagers, and its initiation process was similarly brutal to its various other practices.

Joining would require being “jumped in” — being subjected to a vicious 13-second beating by existing members. The number 13 features prominently in the group’s symbolism, being the alphabetic numeral representing the letter ‘M’ for ‘Mara’, and commonly featuring in gang slogans, graffiti, tattoos, and the MS-13 abbreviation. New members would also be expected to start by “getting wet” — in other words, carrying out a crime, often a murder, on behalf of the gang.

Leaving would be dangerous, potentially even lethal, as according to the BBC, some factions were known to murder members who attempted to leave. It would also be rather hard, since large chest — and often face — tattoos would brand members for life. In many ways, joining the gang therefore amounted to a deal for life.

Despite this, MS-13’s membership ballooned over the decades. A 2008 FBI threat assessment put the size of the gang at between 8,000 and 10,000 members in the US alone, making it one of the largest criminal enterprises in the country.

Unlike other major international crime organisations, MS-13 operates largely without a clearly-defined leadership structure. Instead, it is made up of a number of loosely-affiliated cells known as clicas, which vary in size and operate in a specific area or territory. Depending on the size of the cell, it may be part of a larger collective known as a programa, which in turn is led by a council of veteran gang members. Each clica is responsible for its own recruitment, and this allows both a level of autonomy and — above all — high turnover of members, but comes at the expense of authority, coordination and the sophisticated chain-of-command present in other Central American gangs and cartels.

Part of the high turnover of members is also probably necessary due to the fact that the gang and its members are rather distinctive, and have made for clear-cut targets for law enforcement. Aside from the distinctive tattoos worn on visible parts of their bodies (including the face), gang members could be suspected by their nationality. Salvadorans represent a rather small population in the US and the population, perhaps unfairly, came to be associated with the gang as it gained notoriety. Another identifying element is the MS-13 gang sign, a distinctive gesture which resembles the sign of the horns made by fans of metal, and which is believed to have its origins in the close association of the group’s early members with the California heavy metal scene.

Álex Sánchez was a former MS-13 member who was interviewed about his experience for Insider magazine’s True Crime podcast in 2024. His experience seemed to mirror much of what was known about the gang’s rise, as well as its culture and structures.

Arriving in the US shortly after the outbreak of the civil war in 1979, Sánchez joined the gang at an early age and described the fraternal bonds offered by membership to impoverished — and often homeless — youths, its regular use of machetes as an instrument of violence (principally because they were cheap), and rapid descent into territorial disputes and feuds with other gangs. He was arrested several times, and was quickly deported when the war in El Salvador ended in 1993. There, Sánchez described how the evolving conflict between the gangs in LA had found its way back to the Old Country, with the gangs’ overt violence simply replacing the brutality of the civil war, resulting in that the safety of everyday citizens quickly spiralled out of control, unimpeded.

As the threat posed by the group rose in the 2000s, the Salvadoran government took measures which they hoped would contain its power. This included the introduction of La Mano Dura and Super Mano Dura — translating to the Firm Hand and Super Firm Hand — from 2003. The policies saw increased police raids in gang-held areas, greater engagement of the military, and tougher sentences for suspected gang members. This appeared to have an effect on MS-13 and its now-major rivals, Barrio 18, who agreed to a truce which saw a reduction in the scale of murders. El Salvador reported a 14% fall in homicides in 2004.

But in reality, the period of lull was simply intended to allow the factions to consolidate and focus on recruitment, restructuring, and activities such as extortion. The homicide rate rebounded and reached a new high in 2005. When this became clear, the government appeared to take a new line on the problem through the Pinochet-style approach of simply shooting up the gang members where possible. But these extra-judicial killings just drew the ire of the public and resulted in a further boost to the recruitment of the organisations, and a greater distrust of the state security forces.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Mano Dura and the policies of following administrations failed and by 2015, El Salvador had a murder rate which outranked even the body count at the height of the civil war. Everyday freedoms were suppressed by the gangs, private enterprise was crippled by the constant extortion, and the streets became particularly unsafe for women and children. All this came at a great cost not only to citizens’ safety but also the economy of El Salvador which, at 24 billion US dollars’ GDP in 2016, was comparable to struggling African country of Zimbabwe, and had become reliant on remittances being sent home from the vast Salvadoran diaspora in the US and elsewhere.

It seemed that the gangs had brought El Salvador to its knees. But this would all change in the 2020s, with the rise to power of Nayib Bukele.

The Rise of President Ironfist

Bukele was elected President of El Salvador in 2019.

Although he is now well known — especially in the Americas — for his uncompromising charge against the country’s gangs, and for introducing a model that Latin American governments with a similar gang problem have sought to emulate, it was only three years into his Presidency that Bukele truly unleash his plan of action against the criminal groups. In the intervening period, Bukele had laid the groundwork for the measures that would facilitate his objective — including overhauling the legislature and the Supreme Court to his favour.

Now, even so, there didn’t appear much likelihood that a strong handed approach against the gangs would work. These were, by now, so powerful that it was not believed that even a robust and incorruptible state would be able to do away with them in one fell swoop. The Guardian commented in 2020 that:

The maras will not simply be killed off or arrested away. Neither will the consequences of their continuing evolution be walled off behind national boundaries, increasingly intertwined as they are with the currents of illicit supply and demand that tie producers to the US, the world’s largest market for illegal drugs.

But a breaking point came in 2022.

Although the rate of homicide had been falling for several years, it spiked massively over a single weekend in March that year, during which eighty-seven people were murdered. It was believed by many that the killings — most of them random — were a response to increasing crackdowns by Bukele’s government on gang activity. Following the violence, an extraordinary session of the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly met and put in place a so-called ‘state of exception’. More of Bukele’s reforms were quickly passed, and he came for the gang hard.

Members of Bukele’s party Nuevas Ideas passed laws which increased prison sentences for convicted gang members by three hundred percent, to at least twenty years — and at least forty for gang lords. The age of criminal responsibility was also reduced: previously sixteen years, children as young as twelve were now subject to imprisonment for gang affiliation.

According to Diario El Mundo, a Salvadoran newspaper, between March 2022 and October 2024, the government arrested more than 82,000 people — in other words, around 1.2% of the entire population of about 6.3 million. The government published its figures on the 3rd of October 2024, further declaring it had arrested 463 people in only the previous fifteen days. All this might sound crazy, but the country’s defence ministry estimated in 2019 — the year that Bukele took office — that of the 6 million or so population, a startling 500,000 Salvadorans were in some way involved or dependent on the gangs. It was also estimated that in 2020, the number of active members of MS-13 (alone) in El Salvador was something close to 60,000.

So Bukele rounded them up and set about constructing well-lit, gargantuan prisons with a tight security apparata, into which convicted or suspected members of the gangs would be flung en masse for arbitrary lengths of time.

The challenge for El Salvador’s President was also to ensure that the individuals would stay in custody, which he accomplished by slapping them with the aforementioned prison terms (which could run up to several hundred years) and bulwarking the prisons with a Warhammer-style force of personnel.

The prison conditions are hardly idyllic. Lights remain on at all times, meaning that even at night, inmates are subject to constant light intrusion, no doubt causing sleep deprivation. Prisoners in Cecot, a maximum-security institutions and the largest prison in all of Latin America, are only allowed to leave their cells for 30 minutes a day to exercise, and the cells are both overcrowded and stifling — temperatures can reach 35 degrees celsius during, something exacerbated by poor levels of ventilation. Latrine facilities are lacking too, and food provision is minimal.

Of course, Bukele’s rampaging response has received some severe criticism. For one thing, it is highly doubtful whether all of this is in any way constitutional, since Bukele overrode parts of the Salvadoran constitution to freeze gang members’ rights to a criminal defence, inviolability of correspondence, as well as laws restricting terms of legal detention.

But one of the biggest criticisms of the prison system is the high levels of inmate-on-inmate violence suspected there. One human rights observer commented that the prisons appeared to be used “to dispose of people without formally applying the death penalty”, to which Amnesty International added that El Salvador is experiencing the “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence”.

The Associated Press reported in 2024 that at least 261 people had died in state-run prisons since the beginning of Bukele’s crackdown on the gangs two and a half years earlier. Of those, 88 were the result of an undefined “criminal act” — possibly an attempt to escape — while 87 were due to illnesses, and 14 were due to unspecified “acts of violence”. No cause of death was identified for the remaining 72.

Bukele’s tactics were also criticised by Álex Sánchez in his Insider interview, pointing to the failure of past zero-tolerance initiatives such as La Mano Dura — which doubled El Salvador’s prison population but failed to bring the gangs down — and stating that mass incarceration was likely only to further radicalise some young people, especially those arbitrarily detained, rather than bringing an end to the problem.

But despite negative press, Bukele’s government has proved highly popular in El Salvador, especially in the wake of a tumbling homicide and general crime rate. The homicide rate — according to government figures — collapsed all the way down to 2.4 per 100,000 people in 2023, from a high of a hundred and six eight years before. Concurrently, El Salvador’s GDP has risen sharply, increasing from 24 billion USD in 2016 to 34 billion in 2023. This brings its GDP ahead of countries like Jamaica, Guyana, and Nicaragua, and only marginally behind neighbouring Honduras, a much larger country with more natural resources and about 4 million more people.

And although El Salvador’s GDP per capita is still weak, at around 5,300 USD and far short of the regional average, it is predicted that the country will continue its sharp economic rise in the coming years — possibly bringing the prospects of everyday Salvadorans up with it.

Bukelism has since been exported to other countries suffering similarly gang crime deluges, and Bukele himself romped to reelection in February 2024, having previously succeeded in removing the constitution clause prohibiting second terms for presidents.

Current Status of MS-13

Still, like with any criminal organisation, MS-13 has shown a distinct capacity for regeneration.

Even if Bukele succeeds in stamping out the organisation in El Salvador — which, as the pace of recent arrests seemingly indicates, is not a given — an organisation with roots as deep as Mara Salvatrucha has other means at its disposal.

In its current form, the gang is most present in the US. MS-13 members routinely continue to be implicated in murders across multiple states, from California all the way to Massachusetts.

This is hardly a new development. MS-13 — with its ferocious reputation and involvement in several high-profile crimes in the US — has been on the radar of American administrations for some time. The gang was identified as a significant threat in the 1990s, and the first special FBI task force was convened to target the gang in 1994.

But dealing with the organisation entails a sort of quagmire for the US.

President Bukele’s freedom to hit pause on constitutional rights might fly in El Salvador, but it would definitely not work in the US. The ability to arbitrarily detain individuals is something curtailed in the US legal system, and no President nor District Attorney would have the option to throw children in prisons for heavy sentences, although — notably — some room for detention has been documented under the protocols of ICE — the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The best that the US could do is to deport Salvadoran nationals back to El Salvador, which is exactly what it has been doing, and which gathered pace with the establishment of the FBI’s MS-13 National Gang Task Force, established in 2004. But aside from historically only exacerbating the situation in El Salvador, much to the ire of its citizens and government, this would not be an option for ethnic Salvadorans who are US citizens — and, as a reminder, the US works under a jus soli system of citizenship, whereby anybody born in the US or its overseas possessions is an automatic citizen, even if their parents were only temporarily visiting. There are around 2.5 million ethnic Salvadorans in the US, according to the Pew Research Center, around 36% of whom are US citizens, and only around 1.3 million being born in El Salvador.

Now, it is important to recall that only a tiny fraction of Salvadorans are in any way connected with the gang. Still, the size of the gang — given the long years of freedom it enjoyed in El Salvador — is certainly very substantial. In 2018, it was reported that MS-13’s presence in the US had swelled to 10,000 members. The same year, in his first State of the Union address, President Donald Trump railed against “the savage gang MS-13”, and called on Congress to “finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed MS-13, and other criminals, to break into our country.”

You see, it would appear that instead of being shunted out of the US to Central America as was once the case, MS-13 has come to largely find a home on American soil. Suspected members of the gang have been arrested not only in El Salvador, but in places like Virginia, Maryland and New York. Of the many current or former MS-13 leaders sought by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, two have been arrested to date — and both were arrested within the United States: one in Houston, the other in southern California.

All this is hardly surprising. Given the rampage of Bukele against the organisation in El Salvador, it is as if the opposite effect has taken place to what occurred in the 1990s and 2000s, and which led to its flourishing in the country in the first place.

It is now believed that MS-13 has fled back to the US, and has a presence in around 46 US states. According to Insight Crime, there may be as many as 20 MS-13 clicas operating in Los Angeles alone, a further 12 in Greater Washington, and 10 in the New York district of Long Island.

But its presence in the US is not all. MS-13 members have also been arrested in Mexico, and its presence in that country is upheld by established links with criminal factions such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Mexican Mafia. The group has a presence in other nearby countries too. The highest-ranked of the many MS-13 leaders currently on the run is believed to be Yulan Adonay Archaga Carias, a native and — most likely — resident of Honduras, a neighbouring country to El Salvador.

Back in the US, the question of gang violence linked to immigrant populations has become a ferocious theme in American political discourses, with Republicans and Democrats trading blame. Many Republicans have pointed to so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ as hotbeds of criminal gang activity, blaming the Democrat Party for enabling these. In fact, accusations of being weak on immigration have been a common weapon used against the Democrats since at least the 1990s, during which time Democrat President Bill Clinton sought to display a robust position on the issue with the notorious Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

Trump, in particular, frequently lambasted his predecessor, Barack Obama, for his supposedly-permissive attitude on immigration which led to the proliferation of gangs such as MS-13.

And while this accusation is likely exaggerated by Trump and other Republicans, a 2017 paper featured in the US Department of Justice federal online library stated that policies attributable to the Obama administration led to a ten-fold increase in crimes in the United States committed by MS-13. With that said, the author’s sympathetic descriptions of Trump’s heavy rhetoric and reference to the MS-13 members as ‘common thugs’ would seem to indicate a certain political partisanship — although the term was echoed by New York governor and Democrat Andrew Cuomo in a statement from the same year, in which announced measures to curb the group’s presence on the East Coast.

Nevertheless, the threat of MS-13 remains large in the US. In 2023, there remain multiple MS-13 leaders, members, and associates besides Carias who are wanted by both the FBI and DHS.

Each government agency is offering ten thousand dollars for information leading to their arrest and conviction.

Key Takeaways

• MS-13, a notorious gang, originated in Los Angeles among Salvadoran refugees fleeing civil war.
• The gang’s brutal initiation and criminal activities, including trafficking and extortion, terrorized El Salvador.
• President Nayib Bukele’s harsh crackdown significantly reduced MS-13’s influence in El Salvador but faced criticism for human rights abuses.
• MS-13 has regenerated in the US, with members active in multiple states and links to other criminal organizations.
• Despite Bukele’s efforts, MS-13’s deep roots and adaptability pose ongoing challenges for both El Salvador and the US.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is MS-13?

MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, is a street gang composed mainly of Salvadorans but founded in the United States. It is known for being one of the most violent and notorious gangs in the Americas.

Where and when was MS-13 established?

MS-13 was established in Los Angeles by immigrants from El Salvador in the 1980s.

What are some of the criminal activities MS-13 is involved in?

MS-13 is involved in various criminal activities including trafficking, extortion, infanticide, femicide, and the illegal trafficking of goods and narcotics. They also engage in human smuggling and witness intimidation.

How does MS-13 recruit new members?

MS-13 often recruits poor or vulnerable teenagers. The initiation process involves being ‘jumped in,’ which is a vicious 13-second beating by existing members. New members are also expected to ‘get wet’ by committing a crime, often a murder, on behalf of the gang.

What is the structure of MS-13?

MS-13 operates without a clearly-defined leadership structure. It is made up of loosely-affiliated cells known as clicas, which vary in size and operate in specific areas or territories. These clicas may be part of larger collectives known as programas, led by councils of veteran gang members.

What measures has El Salvador taken to combat MS-13?

El Salvador has implemented various measures to combat MS-13, including La Mano Dura and Super Mano Dura policies, which involved increased police raids and tougher sentences. President Nayib Bukele has also implemented a state of exception, increasing prison sentences and reducing the age of criminal responsibility.

What is the current status of MS-13 in the United States?

MS-13 is most present in the US, with members routinely implicated in murders across multiple states. The gang has a presence in around 46 US states, with multiple clicas operating in various regions.

How has the US government responded to MS-13?

The US government has responded to MS-13 by establishing task forces and deporting Salvadoran nationals back to El Salvador. However, the ability to arbitrarily detain individuals is curtailed in the US legal system, making it challenging to fully eradicate the gang.

What is the impact of MS-13 on El Salvador’s economy?

MS-13’s activities have crippled private enterprise through constant extortion and made the streets unsafe, particularly for women and children. This has had a significant negative impact on El Salvador’s economy, which has relied on remittances from the Salvadoran diaspora.

What are the prison conditions like for MS-13 members in El Salvador?

The prison conditions for MS-13 members in El Salvador are harsh. Prisons are well-lit at all times, cells are overcrowded and stifling, and inmates are only allowed to leave their cells for 30 minutes a day to exercise. There are also reports of high levels of inmate-on-inmate violence.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: Gangs: How Does MS13 Work?
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39645640
• https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/10/how-the-us-helped-create-el-salvadors-bloody-gang-war
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68244963
• https://apnews.com/article/bukele-el-salvador-gang-crackdown-prison-deaths-9d14cbb1ea35175d75d007f6faade61f
• https://diario.elmundo.sv/nacionales/el-regimen-de-excepcion-ya-permitio-la-captura-de-82963-personas#google_vignette
• https://www.fox26houston.com/news/ms-13-gang-leader-cesar-lopez-larios-arrested-bush-airport-houston
• https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/21/us/senior-leader-ms-13-arrested/index.html
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58e8f6p3yh0
• https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/mara-salvatrucha-deadliest-street-gang-america
• https://qns.com/2018/08/four-suspected-ms-13-gang-members-detained-pending-trial/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/01/31/trump-is-wrong-about-ms-13-and-his-rhetoric-will-make-it-worse/
• https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/30/el-salvador-gang-violence-ms13-nation-held-hostage-photography/
• https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/12/el-salvador-policies-practices-legislation-violate-human-rights/
• https://pix11.com/news/local-news/long-island/gov-cuomo-speaks-in-brentwood-about-ms-13-gang-activity-day-after-ag-sessions-announces-visit/
• https://www.wola.org/analysis/amid-rising-violence-el-salvador-fails-address-reports-extrajudicial-killings/
• https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/13/el-salvador-women-deported-by-trump-face-deadly-welcome-street-gangs
• https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-high-ranking-ms-13-leaders-arrested-terrorism-and-racketeering-charges
• https://insightcrime.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/MS13-in-the-Americas-InSight-Crime-English-3.pdf
• https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/03/us/ms-13-gang-explained-street-gang-international/index.html
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/460457/gross-domestic-product-gdp-in-el-salvador/
• https://www.foxbaltimore.com/news/local/ms-13-gang-member-who-entered-us-illegally-three-times-arrested-in-annapolis-raul-orlando-ramos-guido-who-is-a-citizen-of-el-salvador-was-captured-in-annapolis-on-july-1-by-us-immigration-and-customs-enforcement-ice-officials-ice-describes-ramos-g
• https://lawandcrime.com/crime/ms-13-leader-convicted-in-string-of-senseless-murders-including-teen-server-left-unrecognizable-after-she-disparaged-gang/
• Hero image source by Jengod / openverse, by-sa.

Related Coverage