The Mara

It is the Ides of March, the middle of the month in Roman reckoning. I am wary of those with a lean and hungry look, as Caesar should have been, and I think I see some. Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, is across the parking lot from Big Pink, the condominium block where I live.

Carol is the evening lady from the desk in the lobby, and she says can hear them talking at night when she walks to her car at midnight. She wishes she had a parking place closer to the entrance. They scare her.

I don’t know if the voices she hears are really members of the Mara. There are people who sleep in the bushes in between the service drive and Route 50, after all, and their only crime is being deranged and homeless.

But the Mara is clearly present in the housing complex in back of the building, and in the sullen young men in the little Japanese sedans. It is a violent gang, maybe one of the worst in the country. They are a product of the doctrine of unintended consequences. The civil war in El Salvador stopped the advance of Sandinista-style Marxism, and it produces a wave of refugees who settled in Los Angeles. It may be over, but it is a conflict that keeps on giving.

M-13 may have started in LA, but the authorities say it is in thirty-one states now. Naturally, I am most concerned about the members that are in mine, across the parking lot in the garden apartments that are prime for development. The buildings need work, and have been rentals for years, mostly catering to the hard-working families who do the work that we don’t want to do anymore. They fled El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala to get here, and so did the Mara.

The Buckingham commercial area at North Glebe Road and North Pershing Drive is the closest retail area to Big Pink. For a strip mall ,it has a rich history, and the distinctive architecture remains. It was built in 1938, along with the surrounding garden apartment community.

Walking to the CVS Pharmacy is a little like walking in San Salvador. Men work on their trucks and children play on the common lawns. The parking lot of the Hispanic market on the corner is filled in the morning with men looking for day labor.

I am no xenophobe, and I like the ethnic diversity of this part of Arlington, the junction between the North and South Counties, the no-man’s land between the rich and the poor. It is not surprising that the biggest Latin-American gang in the country should have members in this neighborhood.

The police say that there may be as many as 2,000 members of the Mara in Northern Virginia. With the skyrocketing real estate market, just about everything is being gentrified, and the poor are being pushed out of their rented units here. So the gang is spreading west into Fairfax County, out to the new blocks of apartments being constructed in Chantilly.

That used to be a two-day ride on horseback, back in the day.

The Mara has been in the news here, but below the radar for most of the busy folks rushing in and out of the capital. The gang specializes in violent crime, mostly against other immigrants. Car thefts and robberies, mostly. Their trademark is the machete attack.

A young man was hacked almost to death outside the Merrifield theater complex where my sons used to go to the movies when they were in high school. One of the gang members is alleged to have worked at the Rain Forest restaurant in the upscale mall next to our office building in Tysons Corner.

There was a similar hacking in Alexandria last year, and a killing in a suburban home in Maryland around the same time. The year before, a woman named Brenda Paz was found floating in the Shenandoah River near Woodstock, right after she voluntarily left the federal witness-protection program. She had been pregnant, and she was suspected of ratting on the gang.

Yesterday, a Mara Salvatrucha gang member slashed his attorney’s arm with a razor blade in court in California, adding to the jitters in the judicial system across the nation.

That was the same day the Immigration and Customs Enforcement guys announced a major roundup of gang leaders. Over a hundred people were arrested by ICE agents over the past month, including twenty-five here and ten more in Maryland. Dozens more illegal aliens have been deported, some of them associated with other gangs like the South Side Locos, or the SSL.

The ICE might be getting somewhere with the Mara, but they have a long way to go. There could be five or six thousand members in the metro area, according to ICE officials, and there are cells all up and down the I-95 corridor, from New York to Miami.

There was a time when I did not think of M-13 when I drove through a little town like Durham, North Carolina, but now I do.

ICE was one of the new organizations created when the Department of Homeland Security was established, a merger of two separate agencies that did not communicate very well. Now they do.

Maybe there is something to this homeland security business after all.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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