Like any American teenager, Brenda Paz spent much of her time with her friends. They would go to parties, listen to music, and show off their cars late into the night. But Brenda and her friends belonged to the Mara Salvatrucha--the MS-13--the most violent gang in America, and in addition to enjoying the things that all teenagers do, her friends were thieves, drug dealers, human traffickers, and murderers.
A street gang that began in Los Angeles in the 1980s, the Mara Salvatrucha has spread across the United States and Central America with startling speed, boasting tens of thousands of members. They deal ruthlessly with competing gangs and any members who display disloyalty, often leaving a trail of dismembered corpses in their wake. They are poised to surpass the Mafia as the country's most organized criminal network. And by operating within the insular Central American immigrant communities, the Mara Salvatrucha has been able to easily elude law enforcement.
All that changed when Brenda Paz turned informant for the FBI, exposing the incredible scope of the gang's operations. But Brenda's cooperation with the FBI was only the beginning. What followed is an extraordinary story of strength, intelligence, and incredible courage.
This is for the Mara Salvatrucha takes us into a dark and violent world that few people have seen, but is closer than you think.
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Samuel Logan is an investigative reporter based in Latin America. For the past 3 years, he has reported on gang activity across the U.S. and central America. Originally from New Orleans, he lives in Brazil with his wife and daughter.
Samuel Logan is an investigative journalist with over 11 years of experience in Latin America. His work focuses on black markets, organized crime, street gangs and other matters of national and human security. He is also the founder and editor of Southern Pulse | Networked Intelligence, a not-for-profit human intelligence organization focused on security, politics, and energy in Latin America.
He is a senior writer for the International Relations and Security Network, and he maintains a personal website - used by researchers and journalists from around the world who write about security in Latin America.
Samuel is regularly invited to provide briefings to US Intelligence Agencies, NGOS, and Universities around the United States.
His work has attracted members of the Inter-American Dialogue, the Eurasia Group, the RAND corporation, Control Risks Group, The Olive Group, StratFor, the European Security Institute, the International Crisis Group, agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs and Border Patrol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, analysts with US Southern Command, the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the Federation of American Scientists, Blackwater USA, and other organizations that maintain open channels of dialogue with him about the drug trade in Latin America and other matters pertaining to security in the Western Hemisphere.
The Council on Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, the Gerson Lehrman Group, The Nation magazine, France 24 Television, Swiss World Radio, National Public Radio affiliates and others have interviewed him about topics pertaining to the organized crime and the drug trade, and he maintains regular contact with correspondents who work for the British Broadcast Corporation, the Financial Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Economist magazine, and the Washington Post.
Samuel has lived and worked in Latin America for nearly twelve years. He has lived in Mexico and Central America and a number of South American countries. Samuel has a MA in International Policy and has studied the economics of black markets, organized crime, and Latin America's criminal groups for nearly a decade. He has written extensively on organized crime in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Central America, and Mexico. And with Jonathan Franklin, Samuel has published City of Death for Maxim, Addict Village for Penthouse, and Birds of Prey for Men's Vogue.
I picked this up because MS-13 is very active in my area (DC/Maryland/Virginia) and I was curious to learn more about how they operated on a national and international level, what their history is, what their main rackets are, what the structure is, what the command and control is, and so forth. However, this is not a book that's going to give you very much of that. Rather, it is a detailed account of the sad story of Brenda Paz -- a teenage MS-13 member whose 2003 murder was a very high-profile news item in the region.
Investigative reporter Logan uses Brenda's story as a way of writing about MS-13, and the book follows her for about two years, starting roughly from the time she moved to Texas to live with her uncle's family until her murder. Her relatives apparently didn't give her a whole lot of nurturing or attention, and as a result, the otherwise extremely bright and bubbly Brenda drifted into gang life. She quickly made friends with a local MS-13 clique, became the girlfriend of their leader, and was jumped in as a member. She spent a little less than a year with the gang, mainly in Texas and Virginia, before she decided to cooperate with police rather than serve jail time. Her apparent photographic memory made her a treasure trove for the cops, and she gave countless interviews to law enforcement officials from all over the country, culminating in a lengthy video-taped session that was adapted into a training video for police on MS-13. Naturally, a number of MS-13 people began to suspect her of being an informant, and as a result of a series of farcical bureaucratic errors and her own hubris, she was killed.
While this picture from inside the gang is often very vivid and interesting, it's not particularly in-depth.... Most of what you learn about MS-13 are the basics that have been covered in any number of magazine, television, and newspaper profiles over the last few years. I guess if you had never heard of MS-13, it provides a very solid overview, but it felt pretty skimpy to me. To be fair, writing about closed gangs is not exactly easy, and it's next to impossible to get a truly in-depth anthropological picture of one. Logan does good work with the material he has, spinning Brenda's story into a compelling tragedy and cautionary tale. Ultimately, however, she comes across as yet another teenager without strong family involvement in her life and exceedingly poor decision-making skills.
Logan uses one stylistic device that I didn't care for, and that's inventing what people are thinking when there is absolutely no way he could know. I understand that this is an established practice in some forms of narrative non-fiction, but it really bothered me when in the midst of his retelling of a murder, we are told what thoughts are running through the victim's mind as he's about to die. It's really unnecessary, and is the kind of sensationalistic device that undermines the credibility of the book.
Speaking of sensationalism, by the end of the book, it's still not clear to me why MS-13 is regarded as dramatically more violent than any other gang with cliques throughout the country (such as the Bloods and Crips). No data is provided in the book to make such a case, and the anecdotal examples, while horrific, don't strike me as dramatically different from those perpetrated by other gangs. On the flip side, I do think MS-13 represents a very different and more serious problem than classic American gangs, if only for their international networks. Details about this international dimension are severely lacking in this book -- such as the exact nature of their partnership with Mexican drug traffickers, a proper investigation of the rumor that they have connections with Al Qaeda, and their influence in Central America (in fact, their most infamous crime -- a mass killing in Honduras -- isn't mentioned in the book). Still, this is a nice narrative introduction to MS-13 in America that fills the need for those with an interest in street gangs.Read more ›
Anyone doing research or teaching about gangs and delinguency will tell you how difficult it is to encounter relevant teaching material about Latino gangs in the Southwest. The language and cultural divide separates us from full access to the internal "narratives" and subcultural forces that operate within Latino gangs -- especially the most violent versions like the MS-13, the Mara Salvatrucha.
This is an ironic situation for academics, given that the fundamental roots of criminological and delinquent theories describing gangs are strongly rooted in Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin's analysis of gang subcultures in New York -- primarily Puerto Rican and Dominican.
And yet few know much about the Latino gangs concentrated along the southwest border of the USA. Many have a general understanding of MS-13 -- the ritualized elaborate tattoos especially on faces, their roots in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and a reputation for brutal violence etc.
Samuel Logan's book will fill the knowledge gap for anyone teaching delinquency or advanced courses about gangs and street crime. It will be especially useful for people interested in the role of women within violent gangs. The author is a veteran international reporter , and presents a detailed picture of a Mara Salvatrucha gang from the narrative of view of a female chivato -- (informer). Many sociological ideas are nicely illustrated here -- "sexing-in" vs. "jumping-in" etc. The best thing is that most students will love the book because it's tale of abandonment, alienation and teen angst will resonate on a personal level....
Logan's book is an excellent complements to the recent movie, "Sin Nombre" about Mara Salvatrucha gangs and their distorted internal code of "honor" and their relationship to women and family. That movie was written and directed by Cary Fukunagawho rode the rails with migrants from Central America.[...].Read more ›
This is an incredible story written in a tense and gripping way that leaves you glued to the book. The expression that fact is stranger than fiction certainly holds true in this frightening account of gang life. This is a must-read.
I have struggled with the decision to post a review of this book, as I do not like to disparage the work of emerging writers. That said, I feel obligated to counter the glowing praise this book has received from other reviewers.
Though the author is described as an investigative journalist, this book is, at best, creative non-fiction: it does not contain a single reference! As if that weren't bad enough, the author appears to believe that he has insight into what a range of individuals - from criminal suspects to law enforcement officials to murder victims - feel at any given time, including the moment of their deaths. What I find most egregious is the author's gross generalizations and pseudopsychological musings on the factors that draw young latinos to MS-13, namely the unsubstantiated claim that children reunited with their parents upon relocating to the united states are unloved and unaccepted, and therefore turn to a life of crime.
Compelling as the story may be, the writing is repetitive, simplistic, and mediocre at best. It reads more like a first draft than a complete work.
This book explores the life of Brenda Paz, MS-13 member and police informant. It really isn't an expose on the inner workings of the gang. The author's style is simplistic and at times a little presumptuous. What form of clairvoyance does he have that can read the thoughts of people killed years before the publication of this book? If you're not familiar with Brenda's story, I suppose it would be an interesting read. But there's really nothing new here, all the things the author brings up have been portrayed on TV documentaries and in other publications. D+, maybe C-
