French filmmaker who made documentary on gangs is killed in El Salvador

Christian Poveda, a French filmmaker and photographer who recently made a documentary about the Mara gangs in El Salvador, was shot dead Wednesday in Tonacatepeque, a rural region north of the capital, police said. He had been shot in the head, reports the Associated Press.

His documentary, "La Vida Loca," which we covered here on La Plaza, showed the hopelessness of life for the thousands of gang members living in El Salvador.

Poveda was a strong critic of policies used by the governments of El Salvador and the U.S., which he saw as having strengthened the gang networks.He described the members of the violent gangs that he filmed as "victims of society."

He spent 16 months shooting the film in San Salvador, and said during an interview with La Plaza this year,  “I knew right from the start that I couldn't film just one character."

“Firstly, they get bored after a couple of months and don't want to be filmed anymore. Or two, they get put in jail, or they get killed.”

We'll be bringing you more on this story, but meanwhile you can watch Poveda talk about "La Vida Loca" in an interview in April.

** Updated: Read our full report on this story here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Support for Los Angeles gang activist Alex Sanchez

Alex Sanchez, the nationally known anti-gang activist who was arrested last month on federal charges of racketeering and conspiracy, is gaining support from "clergy, professors, lawyers, community organizers and youths from Latino, black and Asian communities," writes Esmeralda Bermudez in the latest report on the controversial case.

"They hail the Salvadoran immigrant as a reformed gangster turned peacemaker and believe he is incapable of betraying the community's trust," she writes.

One of Sanchez's supporters, former state Sen. Tom Hayden, said outside court at Tuesday's bail hearing, during which Sanchez, head of the anti-gang group Homies Unidos, was denied bail: "If they wanted my house, they could have it."

You can read Hayden elaborating more about what he describes as a "weak case" from the prosecution  in The Nation, and watch him speaking outside the courthouse on the video below.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutor Elizabeth Carpenter says that Sanchez's supporters have "been duped by his public face."

— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Anti-gang activist accused of gang crimes

An anti-gang activist known nationally in the United States was arrested Wednesday on federal racketeering and conspiracy charges stemming from his alleged involvement in one of the most violent street gangs in the U.S., Scott Glover and Richard Winton report.

Alex Sanchez, executive director of Homies Unidos, a gang-intervention nonprofit with offices in Los Angeles and El Salvador, was among two dozen alleged members or associates of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, also known as MS-13, charged in a 66-page indictment that was unsealed Wednesday.

The defendants, with monikers such as Creeper, Grinch, Pain and Tears, were involved in a variety of crimes, including murder, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion and drug trafficking, over a 15-year period, the indictment alleges. Among the alleged crimes was a plot to kill a Los Angeles Police Department detective who specialized in investigating the gang, authorities said. Gang members had gone as far as choosing a handgun with which to kill Det. Frank Flores, authorities allege, but police thwarted the plot.

Read more of the report here.

Click here to see more recent posts on the Mara Salvatrucha gang.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Photo: Alex Sanchez is executive director of Homies Unidos, a gang-intervention nonprofit group. Credit: Los Angeles Times.

Fiction series on Mara Salvatrucha wins Webby Award

Filmmaker fascination with the violent Mara Salvatrucha street gangs continues, and this time it's a Web fiction series that's garnering attention.

"The Ten Commandments of la Vida Loca, " a Web series of short fiction films that tell the story of two brothers who decide to join the Mara Salvatrucha, will receive the Webby Award for best drama series during a ceremony in New York this evening. You will be able to see clips of the event on the Webby Awards YouTube channel. 

The fiction series was funded by Filmaka, an online global creative organization that focuses on "inspiring and rewarding creativity and talent by providing professional opportunities for directors and writers all around the world," according to its website.

'La Vida Loca' captures daily reality of El Salvador's gangs, or maras

“La Vida Loca” reflects a depressing and hopeless reality. The documentary, by photojournalist and filmmaker Christian Poveda (you can see his bio here), follows some of the members of ''la dieciocho,'' the so-called 18th Street gang in a poor San Salvador neighborhood.

“Little One” is a 19-year-old mother with an enormous "18," reflecting her membership in the 18th Street gang, tattooed on her face. The numbers stretch from above her eyebrows down onto her cheeks.

“Moreno” is a 25-year-old male member of the same gang who works in a local bakery set up by a nonprofit group called Homies Unidos. The bakery eventually folds when its owner is arrested and sentenced to 16 years in jail on homicide charges.

And ``Wizard,'' another young mother and gang member, who lost her eye in a fight, is followed by Poveda during a long series of medical consultations and operations to fit her with a replacement glass eye. She’s shot and killed before the end of the film.

Stories like that, punctuated with funerals attended by silent, heavily tattooed male gang members and wailing young wives, mothers and girlfriends, make up the sum of “La Vida Loca.”

The nature of their existence meant that Poveda had to spread his camera lens wide in the 16 months he spent shooting the film.

Photographer documents Mara Salvatrucha in prison

The intricate tattoos on the faces, chests, arms and legs of members of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gangs of Los Angeles and Central America are on display this month in downtown Mexico City.

The striking, close-up portraits of male gang members and the tattoos that tell the tales of their lives are part of an exhibition in the Center of Contemporary Mexican Culture (Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo) by Spanish photographer Isabel Muñoz. Muñoz took the photographs by spending time in the prisons in El Salvador that are now home to many of the gang members.

One half of the exhibition takes an aesthetic approach to its subject, with many of the photos snapped against a white background to bring out the images of spiderwebs, women and gravestones that pattern the skin of Muñoz's subjects. But the beauty really is only skin deep, when we consider what we know about the Mara Salvatrucha gangs.

The Maras are reportedly responsible for a large percentage of homicides, robberies, kidnapping, drugs and arms trafficking across Central America and Southern Mexico. Here in Mexico, rights groups say that undocumented migrants passing through the country to the United States are being increasingly victimized by these criminal networks, with kidnappings on the rise.

The Mara Salvatrucha gangs formed on the streets of Los Angeles but huge swaths of their members have been deported back after serving time in the U.S to countries in Central America. You can read a 1994 report from Tracy Wilkinson on the gangs in El Salvador here. 

Deporting them home has merely sent their criminal tendencies south and, far from eradicating the groups, has helped expand them into international networks. Data from the police in El Salvador attributes more than 30 percent of murders committed in that country to these gangs -- that’s more than 850 murders annually, according to information at the Mexico City exhibition.

"There are no exact numbers on how many young people are involved with the Maras in Central America," reads the text on one of the walls at the exhibition. But security agencies in the region. "Interpol, the FBI and the federal police talk of around 70,000 youngsters being enrolled in these groups in Central America, with a large part of them in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

"However, there is evidence that that number has grown in the last few years with the expansion of the phenomenon to other regions and that their mode of operation had become more complex and virulent."

Those photographs don't look so pretty now, right?

--Deborah Bonello

Images: Both of these images are taken from the exhibition "Las Maras" by Spanish photographer Isabel Muñoz currently showing in Mexico City's Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo. Courtesy of Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo.

Click here to see an archived multimedia project on the MS-13 gangs in Los Angeles and Central America by The Times' Luis Sinco.

U.S nationwide gang sweep nets 1,700 arrests

More than 1,700 alleged gang members and their associates, many of them illegal immigrants, were arrested during a four-month nationwide crackdown that spanned 53 cities, including Los Angeles and San Diego, federal officials said today.

"We've inflicted significant damage on various violent street gangs in every part of the country, from Wichita to Sheboygan," said Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"And that has made our communities immeasurably safer."

California led the arrest totals with 430 during the course of the operation, which ran from June 1 to Sept. 30 and included 28 states. Of those arrests, 168 were made in Los Angeles, 96 in San Bernardino, and 81 in San Diego. Texas came in second with 271 arrests, reports Cynthia Dizikes.

Operation Community Shield mostly targeted Latin and Central American street gangs, including Surenos-13, MS-13, 18th Street Gang and the Latin Kings, Myers said. The alleged gang members were mostly foreign-born, with many involved in serious crimes including robbery, extortion, rape and murder, according to ICE officials.

Read the rest of the report on a sweep of gang arrests here, and click here for more about gangs.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Police launch gang crackdown in Santa Ana

In response to an escalation of violence -- including three shootings in a 24-hour period last month and an increase in arrests of gang members with guns -- Santa Ana police have launched a three-day operation targeting gang members and encouraging residents to report crime in a 2-square-mile area southwest of the Civic Center, writes the L.A. Times' Tony Barboza.

Although crime in this city of 350,000 has fallen in recent years, the latest increase has centered in several neighborhoods of mobile home parks, apartments and single-family homes in the city's core, eliciting fears that those gains could be eroding.

Although aggravated assaults, which include shootings and stabbings, have gone down since last year, police said, homicides are up, with 18 so far this year compared with 11 by this time last year. More than half the killings were gang-related.

This is the latest of many crackdowns against gangs -- many of them black or Latino -- in California. Here's a report on a push against Latino gang violence in San Clemente -- another part of Orange County.

Click here to read the full dispatch about the gang crackdown in Santa Ana.

Click here for a recent Opinion column by Rocky Delgadillo, the Los Angeles city attorney, on how combating L.A.'s gang problems is a global, not local, challenge.

For all posts on gangs, click here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Los Angeles needs to go global to fight gangs, says Rocky Delgadillo

Rocky Delgadillo, the Los Angeles city attorney, oversees the enforcement of 57 gang injunctions, including ones against the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. In Opinion today, he talks about how combating Los Angeles gangs is not a local challenge, but an international one.

"The two fastest-growing and most powerful gangs in the world are homegrown products of Los Angeles. The Mara Salvatrucha gang, or MS-13, and the 18th Street gang, known in Central America as Mara 18, sprang up in Pico-Union and the densely populated neighborhoods around MacArthur Park. But unlike many local street gangs, these two were entrepreneurial: They recruited Central American immigrants across the city and then expanded farther -- throughout Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Conservative estimates put MS-13's ranks at 20,000 and 18th Street's at 30,000 worldwide.

"Stopping street gangs is no longer a local matter -- a point driven home to me during a symposium in El Salvador. During the conference, two points of consensus emerged. First, MS-13 and 18th Street have become an international concern -- indeed, even Interpol is now involved in the fight. Second, past strategies to handle these gangs have failed."

Read the full Opinion piece here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Defusing black-brown tension

Is black-brown tension in L.A. something to be concerned about, asks Dust-Up?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson says elected officials haven't done enough to stop racially motivated violence. Joe R. Hicks says our leaders must address illegal immigration to decrease black-brown tension.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is "The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House."

Joe R. Hicks is vice president of Community Advocates Inc. and a KFI-AM (640) talk-show host. He is a former executive director of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Click here to read more on what they have to say about black-brown tension and illegal immigration here.