The 18th Street Gang, also known as "Barrio 18" or the "M-18," is one of the largest youth gangs in the Western Hemisphere. Like its better known rival, the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), the Barrio 18 has cells operating from Central America to Canada, including the United States. With thousands of members across hundreds of kilometers, and interests in a number of different illicit activities, Barrio 18 is one of the more significant emerging criminal threats in the region. Still, it is questionable how far its different units are coordinated across borders, or even within the same city.
Origins
The Barrio 18 first emerged as a small-time street gang in Los Angeles. While some accounts trace its origins to the late 1950s, the gang began to take its current form in the 1980s and early 1990s. It earned particular notoriety for its role in the riots in that city following the acquittal of the police who brutally beat Rodney King, an African-American motorist.
Originally, the group’s many cells, known as "cliques," were the exclusive province of Mexican immigrants in Southern California, and dominated neighborhoods such as MacArthur Park. However, as other Latino nationalities joined the immigrant population, the Barrio 18 began to recruit members from a variety of backgrounds, a development that would facilitate the group’s spread into other nations, particularly in Central America.
Efforts by US law enforcement to slow the gang’s growth have not proved effective. In the late 1990s, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) task force, along with local law enforcement, took down some of Barrio 18’s foremost leaders. However, this did not so much handicap the gang as give them another base from which to operate and recruit new members: federal prisons. Despite efforts to isolate gang leaders from their contacts on the outside and from their fellow prisoners, Barrio 18 bosses like Francisco Martinez, alias "Puppet," devised ways continue running criminal activities from the inside.
Barrio 18 spread south into Central America and Mexico largely as a function of a change to US immigration policies in the 1990s, which increased the number of criminal charges for which a foreign-born resident could be deported to their country of origin. The new policy was applied aggressively to gangs in California, where a large percentage of Barrio 18’s members are not US citizens. The deportations led to a sudden influx of Barrio 18 members in Central America and Mexico. As a result, some argue that US policy helped Barrio 18 spread internationally.
The response of Central American governments to the rise in gang activity has also proven to be largely counterproductive. In the early 2000s, beginning in El Salvador, the governments began passing more stringent laws that criminalized mere "association" with gangs. These so-called “mano dura,” or “iron fist,” policies only encouraged the gangs' growth by concentrating many members in prison, pushing them to reorganize and regroup.
Following a series of violent incidents in prisons between the Barrio 18 and its rival, the MS-13, Salvadoran officials separated inmates from the two gangs from each other. The leaders increased their control over criminal acts, such as extortion, from inside the prisons. On the outside, they branched into kidnapping, petty drug trafficking, and contract killings. They also began to operate in a more sophisticated manner, laundering money through small businesses such as car washes, and trying to control community and local non-governmental organizations in order to influence policy at the highest levels.
Modus Operandi
Like the MS-13, Barrio 18 is organized into semi-autonomous cells, called "cliques." While there is a hierarchy within the cliques, there is no military-style, top-to-bottom chain of command for the estimated thousands of members across North and Central America. In some regions, Barrio 18 cliques dedicate themselves to controlling territory and defending it against any incursions by rival gangs. Elsewhere, focused less on turf and more on profit maximization, they operate in territory controlled by rivals, peddling drugs and controlling brothels, and pay a quota to the dominant gang in order to do so. Throughout the region, Barrio 18 is known for a strict insistence on loyalty in its ranks, and often kills to punish transgressions.
The gang poses the greatest threat in Central American nations like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where weaker governments and larger gangs (relative to the population) have turned the "mara" phenomenon into a significant threat to national welfare by systematically extorting public transport systems and entire communities.
In the United States, in contrast, the estimated 30,000-50,000 members of Barrio 18 have adopted a more defensive posture. The group operates in dozens of cities across an estimated 20 states. Many of its members are located in California, but the Barrio 18 also has a presence in other western cities like Denver.
In California, the gang has a close relationship with the Mexican Mafia, or "La M," a street gang which also has a strong presence in US federal prisons. In many cases, the leaders of Barrio 18 cliques, called "shot-callers," also report to the Mexican Mafia. Authorities allege that these groups, along with other members of an international alliance of gangs called the Sureños (for their Southern California heritage), run drugs from Central America to the United States. However, while much of the drug peddling in US cities is controlled by street gangs, the evidence that the Barrio 18 is part of an international distribution network is anecdotal.
Still, the gang has its hand in a number of different criminal enterprises across the length and breadth of its territory, among them murder-for-hire, drug sales, prostitution, extortion, and kidnapping. The latter two are especially common in Central America, where the relatively open criminal landscape and weak police forces created space for extortion rackets and kidnapping gangs, filled in part by Barrio 18 in the 2000s.
Barrio 18 has also allegedly linked up with some of Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficking networks. Despite Barrio 18’s Mexican roots, the gang is not one of the strongest organizations in Mexico, but may have links with groups like the Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel based on its presence in the United States and Central America (where the Mexicans have been increasing their presence in recent years). Nevertheless, the disperse, undisciplined, and horizontal nature of this organization does not bolster the theory that it has integral links to transnational organized criminal groups.
This may change in the future, however. In March 2012, Barrio 18 leaders and their rivals in the MS-13 agreed to a nationwide "truce," which was mediated by local NGOs and the Church and facilitated by the government. As a result of this ceasefire, the homicide rate in the country plummeted. Whereas El Salvador saw about 13 or 14 murders a day in the beginning of that year, this fell to around five a day, on average, in the following months. However, the leaders of both gangs have proven alarmingly adept at using their now heightened profile to their advantage, fuelling concerns that the initiative could provide a means of increasing their criminal sophistication and overall influence in the country.
"The MS-13 and 18th Street Gangs: Emerging Transnational Gang Threats?" Congressional Research Service, 30 January 2008. (pdf)
Alex Alonso, "18th Street Gang in Los Angeles County, www.streetgangs.com.
Steven S. Dudley, "Drug Trafficking Organizations in Central America: Transportistas, Mexican Cartels and Maras," Mexico Institute, May 2010.
Ana Arana, How the Street Gangs Took Central America, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005.
Max G. Manwaring, A Contemporary Challenge to State Sovereignty, Strategic Studies Institute, December 2007.
United States Department of Justice, National Gang Threat Assessment, 2009.
- Organized Crime Groups
- Barrio 18
- El Salvador