The Mara 18 gang (also known as M-18 or MS-18) is a criminal organization whose members are primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Wilmer Matamoros, a gang leader, poses in prison in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Photo AR
La Mara 18 was created in Los Angeles, California in the 1980s, during the mass exodus of refugees from El Salvador who fled the civil war.
To become a member of MS-18, you had to pass a test, withstand a beating from gang members for 18 seconds, and not fall.
A gang member who got hit in the head by the police. Photo AR
Gang members are considered such for life, with the exception of those who become “calmado” or “calmada”, that is, people who are still considered members, but do not take part in the gang’s activities.
Honduran police special operation
The typical age of new gang members is 12 years old, with some being "conscripted" at the age of nine. Recruitment into a gang at such a young age allows, on the one hand, to prepare replacements for old members who have died or been imprisoned, and on the other hand, it also allows one to avoid the harsh legal sanctions that apply to adults.
Maru 18's activities “extend to many cities in El Salvador, as well as other countries in Central America, most notably Honduras and Guatemala.
The gang's weapons are quite up to par...
Which allows you to engage in fire skirmishes even with such specialists from the Honduran Cobra...
The main rivals of Maru 18 are the M-13 Mara Salvatrucha gang, which consists mainly of immigrants from El Salvador. Mara Salvatrucha (MS13, “Hollywood Locos”) is one of the most brutal South American gangs, which is now actively operating in 6 countries (50 thousand bandits in America - Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and even in Spain)…
Members of M-18 are also involved in the ongoing territorial wars in Mexico with Mara Salvatrucha. The competition is primarily for control of areas near Mexico's southern border, where illegal immigrants enter the United States.
It happens that gang members are found looking like this...
Clashes between the two gangs have become common in southern Mexico, in areas that are often used as routes used to smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States.
Farmers in Honduras are also having a hard time. therefore, we have to arm ourselves against bandits accordingly, up to AK...
In 2005, bloody clashes broke out between MS-13 and MS-18 in several prisons across Guatemala, leaving 31 prisoners dead and dozens injured.
Like Mara Salvatrucha, members of MS-18 are often easily identified by their extensive tattoos, which sometimes cover the entire face. In the United States, officials reacted to such body art in a unique way, depriving those on whom such tattoos were found of work and admission to schools. Some past and present MS-18 members have begun removing their tattoos to prevent them from being identified as gang members. New gang leaders such as MS-13 began to forgo tattoos to avoid additional attention.
Even in the most developed countries, crime rates are often alarmingly high. Thus, in the USA there are about 15 thousand murders a year and more than 5,000 robberies of private apartments and houses every day. However, America seems to be simply an oasis of calm and security compared to the places that will now be discussed.
In recent years, the city has been in economic decline, and this clearly affects the crime level. Over the past 40 years, the lowest number of murders in the city per year was 197, and by 2014 it no longer fell below 30-40 per month. That is, murders are committed on the streets of Baltimore every day - and often more than one. Considering that the city has only 600 thousand inhabitants, this figure is impressive. New York, once considered a crime-ridden city, is now 14 times behind Baltimore in the number of murders.
Poverty and corruption are the main reasons for the criminalization of Brazilian cities, experts say. Brazil's third largest city, Salvador, has 1,800 murders a year. And this is still an achievement after the terrifying figures of the 1990s, when up to 3,000 murders were committed in the city per year, or almost a dozen a day! Responsibility for most of the violent crimes lies with members of the two rival criminal groups that divide the city, the Grupo de Perno and the Comando de Paz, which, ironically, means "peace team."
More recently, Natal was a popular resort among tourists and even hosted matches of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The situation changed instantly: today, according to statisticians, the probability of being killed or robbed just walking down the city street is 65%! The reason is the sharp increase in corruption and the subsequent redistribution of spheres of influence, where interested parties are taking full advantage of the help of local gangs, which became completely insolent when the official “roof” appeared.
Fortaleza is a beautiful city with unique beaches and beautiful architecture, but all this is offset by the highest level of crime and drug use. The murder rate here is about 60% per 100 thousand population, which means that out of 100 thousand passers-by on the street (not uncommon for a city with a population of one million), 60 will not return home today. Robberies are common in Fortaleza, but kidnapping for ransom is even more popular. Usually, criminals do not torture the victim and hand him over to family and friends in exchange for money literally a few hours after the abduction, but this is unlikely to greatly brighten the mood of the abducted person. If you are a good citizen. and especially as a tourist, you are categorically not recommended to go out at night.
In the 1960s, the city prospered as American companies began mining coal here, and local residents, for the most part, worked for the benefit of American companies for quite decent money. But by the end of the 20th century, the mines closed, and the city, where thousands of people were left without work, was gripped by a wave of crime. The number of murders in Ciudad Guyana is more than twice that of Detroit, and the number of thefts, robberies and rapes here is off the charts.
The capital of salsa and drug cartels, Cali has long held one of the highest murder rates in South America. This city is one of the capitals of regional drug trafficking, and at the same time a place where gangs of drug dealers regularly carry out their showdowns. Dozens of people fall under stray bullets in fights between bandits, and even more become involved in their affairs, only to die later too.
Cape Town police are proud to say that the number of solved murders in the city has increased by 2% in recent years. This, however, is not very impressive when you consider that during the same period the number of murders themselves increased by 4%, and the number of car thefts by 14%. And robberies of residential buildings and apartments are happening without stopping! True, crime is mostly concentrated in poor neighborhoods that are not accessible to tourists, but anything can happen.
Another arena of daily battles between drug cartels for the redistribution of spheres of influence. The murder rate is 70 per 100 thousand population, which seems frightening in a population of 300 thousand people. The worst thing is that no one knows where the next shootout will take place, the victims of which could once again be innocent.
In recent years, the number of murders in the city has quadrupled. Some of the most notorious were the murders of “Miss Venezuela” and another local beauty queen, who was shot directly in the face. According to statistics, 50% of city residents own firearms, and many, without hesitation, are ready to use them in the midst of an ordinary domestic quarrel.
Distrito Central has something to contrast with Venezuelan Valencia: “Miss Honduras” and her sister were shot here in 2014. Murders and robberies are commonplace here, and, again, drug trafficking is the main reason. However, there is also one here. local type of crime, namely maritime piracy. There is a flow of drugs through the sea through Distrito Central, for which pirates are hunting, although they do not disdain peaceful tourist yachts that unknowingly sail into the dangerous waters here.
With a population of 400 thousand people, the number of murders in Maturin is relatively small (for South America, of course) - 505 per year. But the number of drug-related crimes - from illegal trade to thefts and robberies committed by drug addicts - is breaking all records. The reason is simple: Maturin is one of the main transit points for drug trafficking from South America to North America, so almost everything here revolves around this illegal business.
This popular resort is truly life-threatening! In a city with a population of 800 thousand people there are about 1000 murders a year! It is difficult to calculate how many of them are classified as domestic and street violence, and how many relate to drug clan clashes. One thing is certain: the latter are certainly more spectacular. Once, drug cartel killers shot their victim on the beach directly from a jet ski, forcing the whole city to talk about themselves. There is no need to repeat that these guys do not pay attention to whether civilians will fall under their bullets.
Several decades ago, during the civil war, many residents of San Salvador left for the United States. Having settled in Los Angeles, they put together several powerful street gangs. When the war subsided, some of them returned to their homeland and quickly created powerful drug trafficking channels between San Salvador and Los Angeles. This thriving business, which has become almost the main one for the residents of San Salvador, although profitable, is very dangerous: almost 2,000 murders occur every year in this city with a population of two million.
There are no laws in this city and there is practically no police activity. It is run by the drug lords of Honduras, and they rule very brutally: every resident, even not directly involved in drug trafficking, must cooperate with them or die. In a city of less than a million people, there are about 900 murders a year.
This city can be called the murder capital of the world. In 2016, over 20 thousand murders occurred in Venezuela, more than 4,000 of them in Caracas. And this is for almost four million people! However, the reasons for this state of affairs are unclear. Caracas does not have drug trafficking hubs or powerful rival gangs that control the entire city. Most likely, the reason is general poverty, weak government, and the powerlessness of the police and courts: according to statistics, only 8% of caught criminals receive convictions.
April 12, 2012
San Pedro Sula is the second largest city in Honduras after Tegucigalpa. The city is located in the north-west of the country, in the Sula Valley, 60 km from the Caribbean Sea. It is inhabited by more than 600 thousand inhabitants. San Pedro Sula is an important transport center and...a point for the transfer of enormous volumes of drugs from south to north, from Latin America to the United States.
The constant struggle between groups that are trying to control the flow of drugs has led to the fact that the city is considered one of the most dangerous not only in the country, but also in the region.
According to a 2011 UN report, there are 86 murders per 100,000 Hondurans every year. This is 20 times the US level.
San Pedro Sula's murder rate per capita is twice the national average. Local authorities openly say that they are not able to control the situation in the city.
Esteban Felix spent several nights on duty with the city police. He captured his nighttime adventures with a camera.
Attention! The report contains scenes of violence. Not recommended for viewing by minors and people with weak psyches
Latin America. Drug trafficking, criminals and drug wars.
March 9, 2012. San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Santos Euceda, in his son's bedroom, shows a photograph of his son, Jose, who he claims was killed by a policeman.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 9, 2012: A mother displays a photo of her son, Jose Euceda, who she claims was killed by a police officer. The city of San Pedro Sula is plagued by violence and crime. Drug cartels and organized gangs are waging an ongoing war for turf.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 11, 2012. The bodies of Lesbia Altamirano and Wilmer Orbera in a billiard room in Choloma, a suburb of the town of San Pedro Sula. Unknown masked men burst into the establishment and shot the guests of the billiards club.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 11, 2012. San Pedro Sula, Honduras. A man in the Catalino Rivas hospital. He claims that he was attacked by a robber with a knife. San Pedro Sula is the most crime-prone city in Honduras. The city's homicide rate per population exceeds the national average.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 11, 2012. San Pedro Sula, Honduras. A woman was taken to the Catalino Rivas Hospital who was wounded in a billiard room when unknown assailants burst into the establishment and shot club guests.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 10, 2012. San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The man, who was taken to Catalino Rivas Hospital, claims he was attacked with a machete during a robbery.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 11, 2012. San Pedro Sula, Honduras. A man was taken to the Catalino Rivas Hospital who was wounded in a billiard room when unknown assailants burst into the establishment and shot club guests. That night, 19 wounded were taken to the hospital. There were not enough places in the hospital, the floor was covered in blood.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 8, 2012. San Pedro Sula, Honduras. A policeman patrols the streets of the city.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 11, 2012. The raiders killed a minibus driver. Relatives arrived at the crime scene.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 11, 2012. Police are checking the documents of everyone who was in the billiard room on the day of the attack on the establishment by unknown masked men who shot all the club guests.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 10, 2012. City of San Pedro Sula. The mayor of the city, Juan Carlos Zuniga, admits that the local authorities of San Pedro Sula are practically unable to control the crime situation in the city. The city borders Guatemala and is a key international route for drug traffickers bringing drugs from Latin America to the United States.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 8, 2012. Detained at a police station in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 8, 2012. A policeman shows off his old, inoperable pistol. “Local authorities do not have the necessary tools to fight well-armed drug traffickers,” said Juan Carlos Zuniga, mayor of San Pedro Sula.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 8, 2012. A policeman flexes his muscles at the San Pedro Sula police station.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 8, 2012. A policeman stands watch at the police station in the suburb of Guamilito, San Pedro Sula. At this time, a film about police officers is being broadcast on TV.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 8, 2012. A police officer examines tattoos, trying to determine whether detainee Jose Alejandra Carranza belongs to the Mara Salvatrucha group. In the city of San Pedro Sula, members of an influential group like Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) often act brazenly and with impunity after committing crimes.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 8, 2012. Forensic experts examine the body of a minibus driver who was killed.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 11, 2012: Alberto Barrientos was wounded during a raid on a billiards club. He was taken to the Catalino Rivas Hospital, San Pedro Sula.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 10, 2012: A man whose head was hacked to pieces by an attacking robber with a machete displays a prescription from the emergency room at Catalino Rivas Hospital.
Esteban Felix/AP
March 9, 2012. The body of minibus driver Wilmer Barahona. His body hung from his seat belt after he was shot.
Esteban Felix/AP
The second largest city in Honduras and the most dangerous city in the world, according to Wikipedia, San Pedro Sula appeared before us in all its glory after Tegucigalpa. Wikipedia reports about him: - " The city of San Pedro Sula is considered the most dangerous settlement on Earth: for every 100 thousand population there are 171 murders per year. The safest area is considered to be Central (The Ring), and the most dangerous is Rio Blanco."Having found an entry through couchsurfing, we stopped here for two nights to see if it was as dangerous as it was portrayed on the Internet.
Our path from the main capital to the northern capital ran along the steepest highway in the country; it is almost all four-lane and almost unbroken, unlike most other roads in the country.
We got there in only three cars, and the last of them, which, by the way, carried us most of the way, was a military police truck returning with soldiers after some kind of operation. To our surprise, they stopped while we were voting and offered us a ride, having learned that we were going to the same place as them. The fighters did not want to be photographed, so only the antenna of their car is visible in the photo, which kept getting in the way when taking photographs forward from the body.
They took us to S-P-S almost to the address and on the first day we didn’t see the city, but the next day, using a hellish minibus, the size of an Uzbek Damas and accommodating up to 14 passengers, we quickly arrived, avoiding traffic jams on the sidewalks safe and sound to the city center.
Well, the city, as a city, is very civil. All sorts of houses, shops, nothing unusual, except slot machines made of plywood...
There are parks even without homeless people.
Supermarkets, sculptures,
leaky bins,
a few resting gentlemen,
everything in general, like everywhere else in Central America. There are no gangs, shootouts, or corpses in sight. The central square is quite a decent cathedral,
McDonald's,
Even the wipers are trying to clean something up.
Bank buildings stand proudly,
fountains are flowing,
Nothing unusual is noticeable on the streets, all the trash is on the newspaper pages
However, we expected this, that we wouldn’t just see anything on the streets, which is a good thing, life is more valuable. I made a T-shirt as a souvenir from the most dangerous city with his name and that’s enough.
By the way, this photo is against the backdrop of the railway station, which is now defunct, of course. One monument to a rotting steam locomotive remained somewhere in the bushes and that’s all.
There's a market on the roads now,
and homeless people sleep on the platform,
This is their main hangout spot.
Well, in general, everything here is civilized and safe outwardly. By the way, there are plenty of hotels and even tourists. We were probably not the only ones interested in visiting this city.
And they took care of the disabled and ordered ballot boxes from the Chinese, with clever inscriptions. Straight Europe
But in some places there are socially unprotected citizens.
And everything shines even better than in the capital.
In general, for a tourist who comes here for one day and does not specifically visit all sorts of slums, the city is very safe, but not interesting, gray, like the whole of Honduras. I don’t know why, but Honduras seemed to us the most boring country in all of Central America. We visited the three largest cities of Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula and Choluteca and did not find anything interesting in any of them. Only nature remains. If we ever come back here again, we’ll go to Mosquitia in Honduras, it’s probably more interesting there, but for now we’re heading for Guatemala.
Honduran authorities recently carried out a mass relocation of members of the country's notorious criminal gangs to a new maximum security prison. Shocked media published photographs of cells abandoned by criminals: they bear little resemblance to ordinary places of detention - rather, they resemble small, cozy apartments. Look at the conditions in which members of famous gangs lived carefree.
Last week, 773 prisoners were transferred from the old, overcrowded San Pedro Sule prison in the town of Tamara, near Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, to the new El Pozo 2 prison in the town of La Tova, in the department of El Paraiso. The rooms abandoned by the prisoners can hardly be called cells... How do you like this 52-inch plasma?
This is the kind of prison comfort that members of the famous M-13 gang created for themselves.
The cells had furniture and all necessary household appliances: air conditioning, mixer, coffee machine, refrigerator with food and much more.
In their free time, prisoners organized video game tournaments - for example, they played FIFA and GTA.
The prison had a specially equipped visiting room: with a large mirror, dim lighting and a huge bed. The locals called this room “Kama Sutra”. During visiting hours, prisoners had intimate meetings with their wives and girlfriends. But only the most privileged gang members could use such a rest room.
All the prisoners in this prison are members of well-known criminal groups in Honduras: Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18, which compete with each other. The transport of prisoners was accompanied by police officers under the leadership of Honduran President Juan Orlando. In the photo: a mirror framed in the shape of the number 18 (the sign of the Barrio 18 gang) and portraits of the deceased leaders of the group.
The crime rate in Honduras is the highest among Central American countries. More than 17,000 people are held in 30 Honduran prisons, where riots and escapes are common and prisoners live by their own rules.
After being transferred to a new prison, the sweet life for prisoners will end (at least for a while). In this regard, Honduran President Juan Orlando stated: “We will continue to prevent prisons from becoming centers for the organization and preparation of all types of criminal acts. The transfer of those held in San Pedro Sula indicates the birth of a new reality.”
MS-13 is the oldest Latin American gang, with more than 20 thousand members. It appeared in Los Angeles two decades ago, when immigrants from El Salvador poured into the States en masse, where a brutal civil war broke out, killing 100 thousand people. Now MS-13 is a world-famous group with a complex branched structure. It is involved in various types of criminal business, its fighters are extremely cruel and try in every possible way to intimidate enemies or authorities. A distinctive feature of the MS-13 gang: during torture and murder, they often use a machete.