Word: ganges
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...many white candidates in that race railed against the "pimps and gang-bangers" who she said were behind the city's post-Katrina crime wave. And when Democratic U.S. Rep. William Jefferson was indicted on corruption charges last June, a group calling itself Justice for Jefferson raised charges that his prosecution was racially motivated - an accusation the Congressman did little to dispel during his successful reelection campaign...
...Rather than adopting the disastrous heavy-handed anti-gang polices of neighboring Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, which have actually led to an escalation of violence and repression, the Nicaraguan police several years ago launched an intervention program aimed at engaging young men to turn them away from gang life. Since the program began in 2003, police claim that gang membership has declined dramatically. According to official statistics, 42 gangs have been demobilized and almost 4,000 of their members have been reintegrated into society. Of the 62 gangs that existed here four years ago, only 20 remain, with...
...need more jails or laws in Nicaragua, we need more opportunities for young people," says Commissioner Hamyn Gurdi?n, head of the police effort to demobilize gangs. Gurdi?n - who during the 1970s, at age 16, had gone into the mountains to join the Sandinista rebels - says that guerrilla experience, shared by many police officers, helps them to empathize with gang members and identify personally with the three-step demobilization process: cease-fire, disarmament and social reintegration. "That experience made us sensitive to their problems," he said. "Their life, the lack of opportunities they have, that is what it was like...
...fashioned Nicaraguan nationalism may also have helped keep the gang culture at bay, since the major transnational gangs that terrorize Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras - the Mara Salvatrucha and the M-18 - are essentially foreign, originating in Los Angeles. Mauricio Bustamante, 19, spent three years living in Guatemala spying on M-18 for the Salvatrucha before returning to Nicaragua and getting involved in his old local gang, the Cumbas. He says that Nicaraguan gangs have rejected the culture of the Salvatrucha and M-18 in keeping with the Nicaraguan spirit of resistance to foreign intervention...
...strongest pillar of support for the anti-gang efforts of the National Police, however, comes from within the community. Many gang members still live with their mothers and grandmothers, who can play a key role in the demobilization and reintegration process, Gurdi?n says. "My mother told me she wanted nothing to do with me after the fourth time I got arrested," says Espinoza. "But once she saw that I was trying to get out of the gang, she immediately started to support me again...