Word: pedro
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...homeboy invasion, local gangs got by with knives or primitive steel-pipe guns. They got drunk and maybe smoked a little grass. But that all changed under the deportees' murderous influence. The pipe guns were replaced with AK-47s and Uzis, and the marijuana with crack, which in San Pedro Sula sells for only $4.25 a "rock." Now, gang members aspire to have a teardrop tattooed on their cheek, to signify they've killed a rival. The new-look gangs quickly began shaking down grocery shops, factory girls and bus passengers for "taxes." They hijacked buses for drive-by shootings...
...gang hit was ordered in Los Angeles, but the blood was spilled thousands of miles away in Honduras. On October 7, in the Central Penitentiary of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the prison homeboys of the "MS" gang cranked up the volume of their dormitory's TV set. It was the day of the big Honduras-Jamaica soccer game, and the blasting soccer commentary covered the screams of ex-gang leader Geofredo Cortes Ortiz as two ornately tattooed MS members - both Hispanics from the U.S. - dragged him into the bathroom and hacked him to death with machetes. Their homeboys then joined...
...Outgunned and underfunded local police forces are overwhelmed by this lethal American export. Tiny El Salvador has over 55,000 gang members, including some 10,000 deportees. San Pedro Sula, a city of half a million Hondurans, has over 35,000 - and only one police officer who handles gangs. "About all I can do," says Magdalenys Centeno, "is see who shows up at the gang funerals and take their photos." According to Centeno, almost all the leaders of local gangs Control Machete, The Junk, Poison, Crezi Kids, MS and 18 are deportees from the U.S. "They're much more violent...
...fundamental obligation to protect our American citizens from the threat posed by gang violence." And however ill-equipped Central American countries may be to cope with these criminals bred in U.S. cities, other governments have an obligation to take back their nationals, says the INS. But as San Pedro Sula's regional director of criminal investigations, Pastor Ortiz, complains, "If American police with all their resources can't control the gangs in their cities, what can we do? We have nothing...
...many of the vigilantes are simply local men pushed too far by the gang- bangers' reign of terror. Last Spring in Villanueva, a shantytown on the edge of San Pedro Sula, homeboys, high on crack, raped and killed a young teenage girl and her mother, hacking their breasts off. The screams brought neighbors who, according to Villanueva police chief Valentino Sandoval, "more or less lynched the gang". After that, there was no shortage of armed men volunteering for nightly anti-gang patrols...