By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service

PUERTO CORTES, Honduras -- The head of a young girl, hacked off with an ax, was found in a burlap bag in October in this industrial
port on the Caribbean. The bag also contained a note to President Ricardo Maduro from Mara 18, an ultra-violent street gang, saying that
the killing was "in memory" of a gangster who had been killed by police.

That unidentified head, and many other mutilated corpses and body parts that turn up regularly in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, are
evidence of a growing crisis in Central America. Once defined by civil wars, this region is now consumed by a battle against gangs. Their
crimes have terrorized citizens in poor nations struggling to establish peaceful democracies after decades of civil wars.

"These gangsters are just killing machines," said Oscar Arturo Alvarez, the Honduran minister of public security. "They are a threat to the
stability of our democracy. When people see their neighbors being killed and their daughters being raped, they start to believe that
democracy is not working."

The gang violence is closely connected to the United States, which spent billions of dollars on Central America's wars during the 1980s.
Thousands of Central American refugees fleeing the wars streamed into the United States, particularly to Los Angeles, where some joined
or formed notorious street gangs such as Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha.

Since the wars ended in the 1990s, Central America has become fertile ground for gangs. Central American countries have very young
populations, rampant poverty and unemployment, and hundreds of thousands of leftover weapons. Analysts say gangs are an attractive
option for children as young as 10 looking for a place to belong in societies that seem to offer them little else.

The United States, meanwhile, has sharply stepped up deportations of criminal offenders in recent years, sending thousands of gang
members back to their native countries, overwhelming police forces and prisons.

The overall effect has been a poisonous mixing of gangs in the United States and Central America. In the United States, gang violence is
spreading from its traditional home in Los Angeles to cities across the country, including Washington. Two reputed members of the Mara
Salvatrucha were recently convicted in U.S. District Court in Alexandria of murdering a rival gang member. In October, a gang member
was killed and a Metro bus driver was wounded in a gang shootout in Mount Pleasant. Gangs have claimed turf from Gaithersburg to
Manassas.

In Central America, officials said, there are at least 25,000 gang members in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, where the problem is worst. The gangs have also
spread to Nicaragua and Panama. Dozens of gangs exist, and young men and women often are marked with extensive tattoos signifying membership. Some members
are a curious mix of cultures from north and south of the border, including a 27-year-old former running back at a Houston high school who now belongs to Mara 18 in
Honduras.

The gang violence has been catastrophic for Central America, according to interviews across the region with government and police officials, human rights activists and
gang members themselves.

In Honduras, gang members have dismembered at least 14 people recently. They slaughtered a family of nine in August, and in October they killed the mother and
84-year-old grandmother of a boy who refused to join a gang.

In Guatemala, five people were beheaded in a gang-led prison riot last December; officials said gang members in the prison later dismembered a man and forced others
to eat his remains. Four men were beheaded on the streets of Guatemala City in February.

In El Salvador, four women were beheaded earlier this year, including Zuleyma del Carmen Guevara, a 22-year-old university engineering student whose head was
found in a suitcase left at a bus stop.

"All of our dreams for our children have been destroyed," said her father, Victor Manuel Guevara.

In response to public outcry, Honduras and El Salvador have passed tough anti-gang laws in recent months; similar measures are pending in the Guatemalan legislature.
The laws call for long prison sentences for belonging to a gang. In El Salvador, gang members as young as 12 may now be tried as adults.

The new anti-gang laws, promoted as tough measures for tough times, have been widely criticized by human rights groups and critics who say they trample civil liberties.

"It doesn't solve the problem of the gangs," said Luis Armando Gonzalez of the University of Central America in San Salvador. "It just puts young people in jail for
having tattoos or wearing the wrong cap."

'We Are Not Monsters'

One recent morning in the hills of northern Honduras, four members of Mara 18 sat on a small single bed in a cinder-block shack, a remote safe house in a grove of
palm trees.

The group's leader, a 28-year-old with tattoos covering his torso and arms, had two holes in his back from a single bullet, a clean entry wound and ragged exit wound.
He said he had been shot by a police officer three days earlier. He moved slowly, obviously in severe pain.

The three other gang members said they were 27, 20 and 16. None of them gave their names. They wore ski masks and long-sleeve shirts to hide their faces and
tattoos. Because of the increasing government pressure on them, they agreed to give an interview to explain their situation.

"What we want is for our rights to be respected and not to be treated like animals, because we are not monsters," said the gang leader. He said gang members have
been pursued by police, and at times by vigilante groups, who kill them on sight.

"It is like hunting human beings," he said. "It is a death sentence without anyone noticing it."

He insisted he and his gang kill only members of the rival Mara Salvatrucha. The gang members said all the butchering blamed on them had been committed by
members of drug cartels and other powerful organized crime groups. They said police, in their zeal to crack down on gangs, have framed them in an attempt to make
them look worse than they are.

Members of Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha have been meeting privately with government officials since August, when Congress passed the new anti-gang law, which
calls for jail terms of up to three years for gang members and up to 12 years for gang leaders.

Masked gang leaders held an extraordinary news conference in September, asking to meet with the president and acknowledging "mistakes." Maduro, a
Stanford-educated businessman, said he was willing to meet with them, but said he would not pardon any violent crimes.

Five days later, the head showed up in Puerto Cortes. Last month, five gang members with automatic weapons killed two women in a disco and scrawled "Maduro, we
don't want dialogue" on the walls. And the body of another young girl was discovered chopped into eight pieces and stuffed in plastic bags with a profane note to
Maduro.

Still, Alvarez, the security minister, said the new laws were working. He said that they have forced gangs to the negotiating table and that, since August, violent crime
was down sharply and 220 gang leaders have been arrested. He said many more have fled the country -- including some who have gone illegally to the United States,
where he said they feel safer.

El Salvador has also experienced a dramatic drop in crime since a government crackdown last summer, said Ricardo Menesses, the national police chief. He said 4,330
gang members have been arrested since last summer and face two to five years in prison for such membership. The country's new anti-gang law is supposed to end in
the spring, but officials said they would seek to make it permanent.

The Rev. Romulo Emiliani, the Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop in San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, said the new anti-gang laws "treat the fever and
not the infection."

He said creating government rehabilitation and retraining centers makes more sense than jailing thousands of teenagers. Those who have killed should be imprisoned, he
said, but those who have committed lesser crimes should be helped back into society with job training programs.

"We have to rescue them, not eliminate them," said Emiliani, who has become the most important liaison between the gangs and the government.

He said the gangs have arisen from Central America's social ills. "The gangs," he said, "are not the cause of a great national tragedy, they are the consequence of one."

FBI Anti-Gang Offensive

Central American leaders said U.S. policies are making their problems worse.

In the past year, the FBI has launched a new offensive against Mara 18, Mara Salvatrucha and other gangs in the United States. Officials here said that will only
increase deportations and send more gang members into their countries.

In the mountainside safe house in Honduras, one of the gang members said he joined Mara 18 in Houston. A lanky 27-year-old with a buzz cut and "18" tattooed
prominently on his face, he said in perfect English that his parents took him there when he was 3 because "my family was looking for something better and that's where
they could find it."

Through his ski mask, he said that his father found work as a heavy machinery mechanic and that his mother managed an apartment complex. He said it was a typical
middle-class existence, "a good, normal life" in Houston, where he was a running back on his high school football team. But he said Mara 18 was a major presence in his
neighborhood, too. He said he hung around the gang members "for as long as I can remember," then officially joined when he was 18. Then, he said, he killed another
gang member in a fight, and his life unraveled.

Facing murder charges, he fled to Honduras by bus and joined with local Mara 18 members. He said that his parents still send him money to live on and that, for three
years, he studied business administration at a local university.

Because his tattoos marked him as a gang member, he said, the university would not allow him to stay. He said he wants to finish school and start his own small
company, maybe selling clothes. Two of the others said they would like to be lawyers someday. But the gang member from Houston said that cannot happen until the
government stops arresting gang members simply for being gang members.

"I just want my rights to be respected," he said.

Like the other gang members interviewed, he said he does not consider himself a criminal. He said that while he would have no problem killing another gang member, he
would never "hurt an innocent person."

"Here they don't care if you've committed a crime," he said. "They want to judge you just for your tattoos."

With Bishop Emiliani sitting at his side in his mountain hideout, he said, "Some day I will look for God and some day I will change. But I don't want to get out of the gang.
This is my family."

                                               © 2003