-by Bill Watkins

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Once upon a time, I was close with a few officers over at Hollenbeck Division in Los Angeles, CA. That’s LAPD. One of them, named Guillermo, took it upon himself to “take me to gang school” one morning, got on the dry erase board, gave me some history for about forty-five minutes.

One of those lessons seems pertinent today, when so many people are clamoring about MS-13. “Those monsters!” “They’re sending us their worst people!” “They’re savages!!!” “They use machetes and cut up victims and families!!!” “Egads!” and the like. I think it might surprise the people so scared and up-in-arms about MS-13 that this gang was born not in El Salvador, but in the Pico-Union community of Los Angeles, CA.

Guillermo told me something any website on MS-13’s history will confirm: that in the early 1980’s, El Salvadoran war refugees settled in Los Angeles. Soon, as the story goes, they were picked on and bullied by an established, hardened Los Angeles gang called 18th Street. In the absence of enough LAPD presence or any other deterrent or defense, the El Salvadoran immigrants fought back.

“They remembered how the death squads did it back home,” explained Guillermo. “They got some machetes, copied the death squads’ brutal methods…” And MS-13 was born. So could you say “war” and the absence of good L.A. policing helped create MS-13? Perhaps. But where’s the root? Who or what created that war in El Salvador in the first place? The United States of America couldn’t have had much to do with that, right?

Wrong. The American CIA was all over that place in the 1970’s and 1980’s. One can read about links between CIA and government death squads suppressing dissent, warding off a perceived “communist” peasant-guerilla rebellion. Yes, another Vietnam-type thing, sure, call it another CIA-led war related to the Red Scare. Control. Protecting capitalist U.S. interests at any cost.

So who or what created MS-13? The reader can put pieces together, with our own CIA and LAPD serving as possible culprits. Why point that out? Well, a wise, rebellious rabbi once commanded, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” The next time you jump on the “I hate MS-13” bandwagon, consider the gang’s origin and whether your “hate” is heading the correct way for helpful change in this hemisphere.

There are wise sayings about pulling weeds out by the root instead of just cutting their tops off… If you oppose violence, especially the type MS-13 can bring, consider opposing the violent elements that created the L.A. migrant community’s need for extreme security measures. See the whole picture, appreciate it for what it is, and judge not.