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Are gangs global, or not?

YURI CORTEZ/AFP An interesting report was released this week by the Technological Institute of Mexico and the Washington Office on Latin America, a lobbying organization. It attempts to debunk the much publicized theory that street gangs such as MS-13 are proliferating around the globe. “[O]nly a small minority of gang members … possess transnational ties,” the ...

By Mike Boyer

February 9, 2007, 2:27 PM

YURI CORTEZ/AFP

YURI CORTEZ/AFP

An interesting report was released this week by the Technological Institute of Mexico and the Washington Office on Latin America, a lobbying organization. It attempts to debunk the much publicized theory that street gangs such as MS-13 are proliferating around the globe. “[O]nly a small minority of gang members … possess transnational ties,” the report concludes. “This idea that gangs are like an infection spreading from country to country through a process where the leaders send out missionaries to colonize new areas is fundamentally untrue,” one of the study’s authors told the Washington Post.

On the technicalities, that’s true. But in the larger sense, it’s not. Gangs may not be going global in order to secure new turf, but that doesn’t mean that none of them are transnational in nature. Andrew Papachristos, a bright young researcher at the University of Chicago, pointed this out nearly two years ago in FOREIGN POLICY:

[V]ery little evidence suggests that gang proliferation is associated with calculated entrepreneurial ambitions. A more plausible explanation is that when people move, they take their culture with them. […]

In a recent survey of more than 1,000 gang members, the National Gang Crime Research Center found that about 50 percent of gang members believed that their gang had international connections. Analysis conducted by this author suggests the rate is considerably higher for Hispanic (66 percent) and Asian (58 percent) gang members, who are more likely to be immigrants.

The movement of gang members overseas not only spreads gang culture but also helps to establish links between gang members in different countries. When Lito, a member of Hector’s Latin Kings gang, ran into trouble with the law in Chicago, his family sent him to live with an aunt in Mexico. There, he quickly became a go-between for gang members in the United States looking to avoid detection and for Mexican immigrants searching for jobs in the United States. The Latin Kings, in fact, turned these connections into a lucrative business by manufacturing fake ID cards. A 1999 investigation of several Latin Kings recovered 31,000 fraudulent IDs and travel documents.