Word: ganges
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...Under the leadership of the National Police, an agency created by the revolutionary government of the 1980s, the Sandinistas are using their status on the street to win the war on the gang problem that has plagued much of Central America. But it's a war they're waging without violence...
With his cap visor pulled low over his face, Jalson Espinoza watches a group of gang members from a rival neighborhood push through a massive throng of Sandinista supporters gathered to hear President Daniel Ortega speak. To the outside observer, many of the other young men in the crowd looked just as tough and menacing, dressed in bandanas and going shirtless to show off their tattoos. But very few of them are true gangbangers, Espinoza says. "You can tell who the real vagos are by the way they walk," he says in a raspy voice, using the Nicaraguan term...
...Espinoza should know. At 26, his street resume makes America's most notorious gangsta rappers look pampered by comparison. In a decade of gang life, Espinoza has been jailed 14 times, shot twice, had his jaw broken with a machete, and lost an eye to a rock fired from a slingshot...
...thug life is a thing of the past, Espinoza says. He has traded in his gang colors for the red and black of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, for which he works as a youth organizer in a rough neighborhood in Ciudad Sandino...
...Nicaragua, a movement that started off channeling youth rebellion into the violent overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 is once again the governing party. And in many poor neighborhoods, the Sandinista Front has more street cred than the local youth gang...