Out of the Mountains by David Kilcullen Page B

Narco-trafficking gangs have displaced traditional street gangs based on local turf identities and known as pandillas . The narcos use the city (with its central location, transportation links, and excellent access to the U.S. market) as a smuggling hub. This pattern spiked in 2004 – 5 as cocaine traffickers responded to counternarcotics successes in Colombia and the Caribbean by opening new Central American routes, taking advantage of the existing gang structure in Honduras, and hiring local groups as enforcers. The cartels pay local gangs in cocaine, creating a domestic drug market in the city, and competition to control this new domestic market accounts for another large part of the city’s violence.
    Another key illicit flow is that of money. Narco-traffickers such as the Mexican Sinaloa cartel came to San Pedro Sula in the mid- 2000 s in part because it was an ideal money-laundering location. The opportunities afforded by legitimate businesses, the city’s prime location astride the major licit and illicit flows into and out of Honduras, and a weak government that could be co-opted for money laundering led to a rapid deterioration in the city’s governance institutions, further increasing opportunities for money laundering.
    An influx of deportees from the United States is another key driver of violence. In 2012 alone, the U.S. government deported more than thirty-two thousand Hondurans, of whom almost half were violent criminals (many were gang members belonging to groups such as MS 13 and the 18 th Street gang), and all arrived by air in San Pedro Sula. This has been happening for several years, and it creates an enormous inflow of trained, blooded, organized violent criminals who fit directly into the gang structure of the city. In many cases, gang members who have already been deported are on hand to meet deportees as they arrive at the airport, and embed them straight into the local gang system. MS 13 and 18 th Street are United States gangs (both originated in Los Angeles) that were involuntarily transplanted to Honduras through deportations, reconstituted themselves from the flow of deportees, expanded to control drug trafficking routes, and together with Los Olanchanos, the third major gang in the city, have come to dominate the system of violence in San Pedro Sula.
    Violence has surged as all these groups—local gangs, narcos , and deportees from North American gangs—have responded to the strong incentive of controlling territory and dominating key nodes in the city’s flow system, especially transport routes and hubs. Controlling territory is the key to exploiting the city’s licit economy (the flow of textiles in and finished clothing out), taking advantage of the city’s central position in the Honduran economy, and dominating its illicit economy (the flow of transnational cocaine through the city, as well as the local drug smuggling, money laundering, and extortion rackets). The violence is increasing, in part, because this competition is relatively new, so a pecking order has yet to emerge and gangs haven’t yet settled into defined spheres of influence or territorial control. Another key factor is that since this is an open system with a continuous inflow of weapons and fighters, there’s no prospect that the competition between gangs will burn itself out. At the same time, the gangs’ growing income lets them buy more sophisticated and powerful firearms. As a result, the microhabitats where gangs actively compete—the bloody boundaries of gang turfs—are by far the most violent in the city. Much of this is gang-on-gang violence: apart from kidnapping and extortion, the major risk to ordinary citizens is that of being caught in the crossfire.
    For its part, the city’s government doesn’t have the capacity to handle the massive influx—thousands of weapons and new gang combatants per year, along with billions of dollars in cocaine—as