Word: gangs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Earlier this week as well, gang members are suspected of killing the photographer and documentary filmmaker Christian Poveda, who spent years chronicling their activity and evolution. Poveda was shot in the head, killed, say police, by the very gang members he had been filming earlier in the day. Gang related deaths average about 10 a day throughout the country, according to local newspaper accounts, which splash news of the mayhem across their front pages daily...
...most famous exports of El Salvador are rivals. Unfortunately, they are also ferocious gangs: Mara 18 and the Mara Salvatrucha. They have exported their gang culture - learned by expatriates returned from undocumented existence in the big cities of the United States - to other countries in Central and South America, re-exporting their influence back to the U.S., moving beyond petty thievery, flashy tattoos and thuggish violence, to drug-trafficking and large-scale extortion...
...last three decades, successive Salvadoran governments have tried to curtail the two Maras. In the 1990s the Salvadoran government instituted a policy that became known as the Mano Duro (Strong Hand), that saw thousands of gang members jailed. But Mano Duro has not stopped the gangs. Corruption at the highest levels of government has allowed many leaders to go free or conduct business from behind bars. Saul Turcios Angel, also known as the "Pitbull," ran a kidnapping and extortion ring as part of Mara Salvatrucha. He escaped from a Salvadoran prison last year and was apprehended in Nicaragua earlier this...
...inspiration for both Cincinnati and Chicago's programs was Boston's Operation Scrap Iron, which began 15 years ago. Now called Ceasefire, Scrap Iron shifted gang intervention from police work to a more elaborate behavioral approach that has two prongs: using law enforcement to aggressively get the message of zero-tolerance for homicide to individuals known to be violent or believed to have the potential for violence; and using trusted people in the community, who know the streets and the personalities in them, to convince potential felons to put down their guns. "One of the things we recognized is that...
...place where they can talk without feeling they are violating the unwritten "stop snitching" street code. That approach involves putting social workers in the street to directly confront the violence. "There are credible messengers who can go in and influence change in behaviors," says Tio Hardiman, director of the gang mediation arm of Chicago's program, also called CeaseFire. "Some of these guys used to run the streets and they have backbone and fortitude and they let them know they should be putting the shooting behind them, and the data we have is backing up our claims...