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Territorial gangs and their consequences for humanitarian players

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2010

Oliver Bangerter
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Abstract

Territorial gangs are among today's main perpetrators of urban violence, affecting the lives of millions of other people. They try to gain control of a territory in which they then oversee all criminal activities and/or ‘protect’ the people.

Such gangs are found to differing degrees on every continent, although those given the most media attention operate in Central America. The violence that they cause has a major impact on the population in general and on their members' families, as well as on the members themselves.

Humanitarian organizations may find themselves having to deal with territorial gangs in the course of their ‘normal’ activities in a gang's area, but also when the humanitarian needs per se of people controlled by a gang justify action.

This article looks at some courses of action that may be taken by humanitarian agencies in an environment of this nature: dialogue with the gangs (including how to create a degree of trust), education, services, and dialogue on fundamental issues. Such action only makes sense over the medium to long term; it may have a very positive impact but only allows the symptoms of a deep-seated problem to be treated.

Type
Urban violence
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 92 , Issue 878: Urban violence , June 2010 , pp. 387 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © International Committee of the Red Cross 2010

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References

1 Max G. Manwaring, Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency, March 2005, available at http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub597.pdf (last visited 7 June 2010). One can go along with the author when he says that gangs are a serious security problem for states, but not when he goes on to assert that they seek to topple them. That takes no account of the fact that the gangs to which he refers have no political programme, or of the fact that they present no real threat to the states even if they are more numerous than the uprisings that preceded them. Manwaring states that the gangs in El Salvador have 39,000 members, which represents more than ten times the number of combatants in the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) during the war (approximately 3,500); the FMLN gained control of 20% of the national territory, far more than these ‘maras’. Even if account is taken of the fact that there are two dominant gangs, those maras would be powerful enough to topple the state if they really constituted an insurgency.

2 This is not a legal category, unlike the categories of non-international armed conflict, internal disturbances, or internal tension. It is used here to cover non-conflict situations in which organized violence is used by at least one of the parties.

3 The events of May 1968 in France are a good illustration.

4 In Bolivia in 2009, for example.

5 The youth gangs in the French suburbs should be included in this category, although some of them seem to be trying increasingly to procure firearms or even war weapons.

6 Bandits blocking roads in Central Africa, the Aryan Brotherhood (an American prison gang), and Cosa Nostra are thus midway between territorial gangs and criminal groups. Arkan's Tigers, who were originally supporters of Red Star Belgrade, became a pro-Serbia armed group in the conflict in Bosnia; their leader had a previous criminal record.

7 At different times in their history, most of these groups have been parties to a non-international armed conflict and to a situation of internal violence; some of them have changed several times: they were not set up at the official start of a conflict and have frequently not been disbanded at the official end of a conflict.

8 They may also act as an environment fostering the development of armed opposition groups, such as some tribal militias in Darfur.

9 All groups described carry out activities that are prohibited under national law and may therefore be qualified as ‘criminal’ by an external observer. However, we all instinctively recognize that there is a difference between a group of bank robbers or drug traffickers and the other categories listed.

10 Although crime is governed by national law, some types of criminal activities are also subject to specific rules under international law; these activities include piracy, which is defined in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; drug trafficking – United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988 (Vienna Convention); and human trafficking – Annex II of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.

11 See American National Gang Intelligence Center, National Gang Threat Assessment 2009, Washington, DC, which distinguishes between three categories of gangs operating in the United States: street gangs, prison gangs, and motorcycle gangs. Including the last category makes sense from the perspective of criminal repression and because they share a fair number of organizational features. However, their dynamics are different from those of the other two categories in the sense that they do not control any physical territory and do not aspire to do so. That constitutes a major difference for humanitarian agencies, although that way of viewing things may seem strange to security forces. Readers interested in motorcycle gangs may refer to the writings of Arthur Veno on such gangs in Australia and to a recent article by Bruni, John, ‘Cycles of violence: Australia's outlaw motorcycle gangs’, in Jane's Intelligence Review, January 2010, pp. 38–43Google Scholar.

12 Two gangs that comprise mainly Afro-Americans and that are involved in drug trafficking and other criminal activities. The Bloods have between 7,000 and 30,000 members in the USA, spread over 123 towns in 33 states; the Crips have 30–35,000 members in 221 towns in 41 states (see National Gang Threat Assessment 2009, above note 11, p. 25). These two gangs are more a collection of subgroups with the same culture than a centralized organization.

13 For Timor-Leste, reference may be made to James Scambary, A Survey of Gangs and Youth Groups in Dili, Timor-Leste, 2006, available at: http://www.etan.org/etanpdf/2006/Report_Youth_Gangs_in_Dili.pdf (last visited 7 June 2010) or to Austcare and Small Arms Survey, Timor-Leste Armed Violence Assessment (TLAVA), Groups, Gangs, and Armed Violence in Timor-Leste, TLAVA Issue Brief No. 2, April 2009, available at: http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/files/portal/spotlight/country/asia_pdf/asia-timor-leste-TLAVA-IB2-En.pdf (last visited 7 June 2010).

14 This group is often described as a sect because of its religious beliefs; however, it behaves like most of the gangs in the world in terms of controlling territory and relation to the state. See Commission of Inquiry into the Post Election Violence (CIPEV), Final Report, 2008, p. 27, which refers to ‘Mungiki, which up through the 1980s had been largely a cultural cum religious cult in the Kikuyu inhabited parts of the Rift Valley. Later it metamorphosed into a Mafioso style gang that grew and eventually became a shadow government in the slums of Nairobi and in parts of Central Province’. Like the gangs in Jamaica and Timor-Leste, it is partly supported by politicians in exchange for services (ibid., pp. 104, 121–123).

15 For an overview of some gangs in Chicago from 1904 to the present, see John Hagedorn, A World of Gangs, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 2008, pp. 65–83.

16 To a lesser extent in Canada and the United Kingdom.

17 In Russia (and the USSR, historically), they are referred to as the ‘Kazan phenomenon’, following the studies by Alexander Salagaev of that town. See, for example, Alexander Salagaev, Alexander Shashkin, Irina Sherbakova, and Elias Touriyanskyi, ‘Contemporary Russian gangs: history, membership, and crime involvement’, in Scott H. Decker and Frank M. Weerman (eds.), European Street Gangs and Troublesome Youth Groups, AltaMira Press, Oxford, 2005, pp. 169–191. For China, reference may be made to the studies by Lening Zhang: for example, Zhang, Lening, Messner, Steven F., Lu, Zhou and Deng, Xiaogang, ‘Gang crime and its punishment in China’, in Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1997, pp. 289–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Frequently, but not exclusively, young men.

19 In the words of a popular piece of rap music, quoted by Pablo Dreyfus et al., Small Arms in Rio de Janeiro: The Guns, the Buyback and the Victims, a study by the Small Arms Survey, Viva Rio and ISER, December 2008, p. 116.

20 The role of demobilized combatants is obvious in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and also in Sierra Leone.

21 When a young man is immersed in a culture in which he is taught that the use of violence is one way (or the only way) of gaining respect and of becoming respectable, there is a considerable risk that he will consider violence as the norm.

22 The American magazine Don Diva is an interesting example, despite the formal denials by its editors.

23 The influence of these items is very real but has more to do with the type of violence than with the emergence of violence as such (interview between the author and a researcher on the causes of extremist violence, Geneva, Switzerland, January 2009).

24 United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth, New York, 2007, p. 1.

25 Such as on 30 May 2002 against a cash transport vehicle belonging to Brink's at Penne-sur-Huveaunne (RPG) and on 3 July 2008 in Cassis against another cash transport vehicle, this time belonging to Loomis (explosive).

26 Including on 17 October 2009, when a helicopter was shot down over the favela Morro dos Macacos. The state head of military police, Mario Sergio Duarte, said after this affair that the police had already seized grenade launchers, .50 calibre machine guns (12.7 mm) and anti-aircraft missiles. The percentage of machine guns among the weapons seized by the police in Rio de Janeiro increased almost fourfold between 1981–1992 and 1993–2003 (0.32% to 1.2%), and the total number of weapons seized has also increased; see Patricia Silveira Rivero, ‘The value of the illegal firearms market in Rio de Janeiro city: the economic and symbolic value of guns in crime’, in P. Dreyfus et al., above note 19, p. 65.

27 Estimates of the number of members in the largest gangs in Timor-Leste, particularly the Seven Seven and the Persaudaraan Setia Hati Terate (PSHT), vary between 20,000 and 50,000 members. In every case, the Timo-Leste army is said to comprise 1,500 regular soldiers and 1,500 reserves, the police perhaps 3,000, and the United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) 1,552 men in uniform plus a thousand civilians (source: United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (UNDPKO)). Gang members therefore far outnumber the security forces present in Timor-Leste.

28 See National Gang Threat Assessment 2009, above note 11, p. 26.

29 Nicaragua is just one example among many: see Dennis Rodgers, ‘An urban gang moves from social to economic violence’, in José Luis Rocha and Dennis Rodgers, Gangs of Nicaragua, Managua, 2008, p. 83. The most common sources of money among the gangs are drug trafficking, extortion, and the money provided by political players.

30 See the opinion of Anika Oettler, ‘Prologue’, in J. L. Rocha and D. Rodgers, above note 29, p. 6: ‘The term “gang” is generic and non-specific. A quick overview of the literature shows that it can refer to a range of phenomena, from spontaneous youth peer groups to organised criminal collectives’.

31 Dennis Rodgers, ‘The gangs of Central America: major players and scapegoats’, in J. L. Rocha and D. Rodgers, above note 29, p. 169, emphasis added.

32 In Rio, nine functions may be identified, with different names: dono, gerente geral, sub-gerente, soldado, fiel, vapor, olheiro, and endolador; see Luke Dowdney, Children in the Drug Trade: A Case Study of Children in Organised Armed Violence in Rio de Janeiro, 7Letras, Rio de Janeiro, 2003, p. 48.

33 For figures on a gang's income and expenses related to the war with other gangs, see Levitt, Steven D. and Vekantesh, Sudhir Alladi, ‘An economic analysis of a drug-selling gang's finances’, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 115, No. 3, August 2000, pp. 755–788CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 This dividing line is far less obvious for an external observer; the existence of ‘wannabees’ (an American term also used in South Africa) – young people who copy the cultural codes of the gangs in their neighbourhood without belonging to a gang – leads to some confusion. Some gangs have institutionalized the status of ‘prospective member’, as sort of halfway stage between civilian life and membership of the gang, such as the Mongrel Mob in New Zealand, for instance, which calls them ‘prospects’. See Tuhoe Isaac and Bradford Haami, True Red: The Life of an Ex-Mongrel Mob Gang Leader, True Red, Pukekohe, New Zealand, 2008. The Mongrel Mob is, moreover, one of the current examples of the (slow) transformation of a gang into a criminal organization. In addition, some features of the culture associated with the gang may be shared with a far larger group: rap or hip hop music – even ‘gangsta rap’ – is also listened to widely outside the gangs; see Andre Standing, The Threat of Gangs and Anti-Gangs Policy, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) paper 116, 2005, pp. 10, 12–13. Furthermore, to make the matter even more complicated, there are often a large number of intense connections between a gang (or some of its members) and the police, or the civil society. Some experts estimate that territorial gangs need the complicity of elements within the police force to survive and prosper. These connections may be formed through corruption, but also thanks to support from important political figures.

35 See ibid., p. 2; the gangs in South Africa often require rape or murder to be committed as an initiation.

36 L. Dowdney, above note 32, pp. 123–125.

37 The last scene of the documentary La Vida Loca by Christian Poveda shows one instance of such aggressions in the Mara 18. Girls are in principle put through the same initiation, but in some maras and other gangs they can avoid being beaten up by agreeing to be ‘sexed in’, in which case their status is that of a second-class member. One American example is described by Miller, Jody, ‘Gender and victimization risk among young women in gangs’, in Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 35, No. 4, 1998, pp. 445–446CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 These are not all the reasons for joining a gang; they vary too much from one individual to another and especially from one country to another for us to try to draw up an exhaustive list as part of this article.

39 The use of postcodes to define gang membership is one example; MS 13, one of the maras from El Salvador that also exists in the USA and in a large part of Central America, has made use of a hand sign known as ‘the devil's horns’, which originated in heavy metal culture.

40 Wearing clothes of certain colours allows members to recognize each other, to impress the local people, and to recognize the enemy, all without doing anything illegal that might bring the law down on them. In the USA, the colours are, for example, red for the Bloods, blue for the Crips, and black and gold for the Latin Kings. In Brazil, red is unsurprisingly the colour of the Comando Vermelho.

41 Members of maras in Central America (MS 13 and Mara Salvatrucha) often have elaborate visible tattoos – even on their faces – that indicate their membership of the gang and their status. When members of rival gangs are in the same prison, these tattoos become a focal point of conflicts. In South Africa, the Numbers use tattoos to show to which gang a member belongs (26, 27, or 28) and his rank.

42 The murder in December 2003 of Brenda Paz, a 17-year-old woman who was a former member of the gang MS 13, can be explained by the fact that she had agreed to work with the FBI.

43 To be expecting a child is often considered a good reason to leave a gang, as long as that does not imply becoming an informer. See also José Luis Rocha, ‘The hand that rocks the mortar launcher’, in J. L. Rocha and D. Rodgers, above note 29, stating that, in the case of Nicaragua, both conversion in an evangelical church and university studies are often a way out (p. 35).

44 The state is often absent or represented solely by a police force that is either in collusion with gangs or adept at carrying out large-scale operations for media purposes without having any major impact on the gangs. The emergence of territorial gangs and especially their continuation is also due to the breakdown of the policing system. That does not rule out a nominal police presence in some places or formal patrols, but the stronger a gang feels, the more it will resist even that.

45 The massacre of twenty-eight bus passengers in Honduras on 23 December 2004 was the response by the MS 13 gang to government plans to reintroduce the death sentence. The most impressive example of an attack on the state was given by the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in Brazil in May 2006: in response to the transfer of its imprisoned leaders (to cut them off from the organization), the PCC organized riots in more than 70 prisons and nearly 300 attacks on public infrastructure in the state of Sao Paulo.

46 It would be wrong to take account only of the statistical view of things. Admittedly, ‘where the groups’ dominion is absolute, as in the comando-dominated favelas of Rio, burglary, mugging, and street violence … become astonishingly rare'. However, the security established by the comandos is relative: it concerns common law crimes but is not sufficient for people to feel safe, if only because of the threat of heavy-handed police raids caused by the gangs: according to a former resident, ‘This type of security, as in public order, sure, OK. Now, security as in a feeling of physical integrity, the people don't feel safe with the drug trade …’. See Benjamin Lessing, ‘Demand for firearms in Brazil's urban periphery: a comparative study’, in P. Dreyfus et al., above note 19, pp. 112–113.

47 From the point of view of efficacy, a mixture of the two would seem to be most frequently adopted by the gangs, relying both on violence or threat and the quest for support by means of ‘popular’ actions in the area of protection or justice; a gang needs at least passive support from the local people, especially during police action or war with another gang. Outside prison, very few gangs try to obtain it solely by terrorizing the people.

48 On the videos that are said to be from the PCC in Brazil, references are found to Chiapas, to Venezuela, to Bolivia, and to the Indians in Brazil, all of which are referred to as causes that have the backing of the PCC; however, it remains to be shown that this stems from a political conscience. The main or only claim of the PCC's ‘statutes’, available at: http://www.midiaindependente.org/pt/blue/2006/05/353333.shtml (last visited 7 June 2010), is to change conditions in some places of detention.

49 Cockayne, James and Lupel, Adam, ‘Conclusion: from iron fist to invisible hand – peace operations, organized crime and intelligent international law enforcement’, in International Peacekeeping, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2009, p. 158CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Geneva Declaration, Global Burden of Armed Violence, Geneva Declaration Secretariat, Geneva, 2008, p. 71. The rate was calculated for 2004, the last year in which the NGO had access to the data of 201 countries.

51 Broken down as 8.0 for women and 109.5 for men, according to Bulletin No. 13 of the Observatory on Violence, January 2009, pp. 3 and 5, available at: http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_661.pdf (last visited 7 June 2010).

52 These figures are available on the website of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) at: http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Crime-statistics/Criminal_justice_latest_year_by_country.20100201.xls (last visited 7 June 2010) and are based on the most recent criminal data, between 2003 and 2008.

53 According to many interviews, membership of a gang offers both a form of protection and potential victimization; see, for example, J. Miller, above note 37, pp. 429–453.

54 We have considerable anecdotal evidence of this from interviews; it is also confirmed by one of the rare studies providing figures: see S. D. Levitt and S. A. Vekantesh, above note 33.

55 The use of human shields is far rarer (or less well documented) than threats by other gangs.

56 By means of theft and/or taxes.

57 A. Standing, above note 34, p. 18, notes that, in Cape Town, identification is both geographic and racial.

58 Although it goes beyond the scope of this article, another challenge presented by gangs should be mentioned here: how should one assess asylum claims caused by, or otherwise related to, gang activities? This has been considered by several organizations, quite recently by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in its document Guidance Note on Refugee Claims Relating to Victims of Organized Gangs, UN Division of International Protection, Geneva, March 2010, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4bb21fa02.html (last visited 7 June 2010).

59 Dialogue with a gang is no picnic.

60 A. Standing, above note 34, sheds light on the possible gaps between the external image of the gangs and reality.

61 For example, through educational or vocational training or through social programmes.

62 The gangs have several ways of gathering information; the simplest and the most systematic is to post lookouts throughout their territory; the arrival of an external player is very unlikely not to be reported.

63 Unless the gang is given enough money to buy weapons, combatants, and alliances, but that is outside the humanitarian field.

64 National Gang Threat Assessment 2009, above note 11, p. 12, estimates that, in the neighbourhoods most at risk, 29.4% of girls and 32.4% of boys consider themselves members of a gang. That is the highest estimation of which we are aware and it leaves a sizeable majority of 70% for those who are not members.

65 The NGO Fight for Peace arranges sports activities, particularly related to boxing, but also runs vocational training and courses and provides support for youth councils in the favelas in Rio (see http://www.fightforpeace.net, last visited 7 June 2010). The ICRC and the Honduran Red Cross organized art classes for 2,000 young people in disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Tegucigalpa in 2008 (ICRC, Annual Report 2008, ICRC, Geneva, p. 315). This is involvement in social work rather than humanitarian emergency relief, which requires very different methods.

66 The solution to the problem of gangs requires concerted action by the state, which ensures decent conditions for all inhabitants and effective long-term security by the police. Heavy-handed approaches, such as those dubbed by the authorities in El Salvador Mano Dura and Super Mano Dura, appear only to have a short-term positive impact and seem, conversely, to increase the level of violence over the medium term. In Haiti, the United Nations mission finally disbanded the gangs as the result of a long-term intelligence campaign; see Cockayne, James, ‘Winning Haiti's protection competition: organized crime and peace operations past, present and future’, in International Peacekeeping, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2009, pp. 77–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 CAMEP, a state service responsible for the drinking water supply and hence also for repairing the equipment.

68 After several years of attempts, the United Nations Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) tackled the problem, starting by establishing a good intelligence network. That allowed it to target key individuals in the gangs and to arrest them, thus displaying its superiority over the gangs. At the end of 2007, the main gangs had been disbanded and there was a substantial improvement in the situation of the local inhabitants.The leaders were being held in the Port-au-Prince prison but the earthquake on 12 January 2010 allowed nearly 4,200 prisoners to escape. Fewer than 200 of them had been neutralized on 10 March, and the gang leaders went back to their neighbourhoods, with differing outcomes: some of them were lynched in Cité Soleil and others given a hero's welcome in Martissant. Perhaps they will take advantage of the confusion following the disaster to try to re-form their gangs and to take control of some neighbourhoods again. Various clashes between groups in February and kidnappings in March suggest that attempts of that kind are being made, although the gangs are still far weaker than they were in 2005; see International Crisis Group (ICG), Haiti: Stabilisation and Reconstruction after the Quake, 31 March 2010, p. 10, available at: http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/latin-america/haiti/32_haiti___stabilisation_and_reconstruction_after_the_quake.ashx (last visited 22 June 2010). If those endeavours were to prove successful, the ICRC should certainly envisage resuming the dialogue where it was broken off in 2007. At the time of writing (April 2010), this does not, however, seem to be the most likely scenario.

69 Interview with an ICRC delegate returning from a second mission to Haiti, Geneva, 8 April 2010.

70 Provided that there is no obligation on the part of the medical personnel to report cases of gunshot wounds to the police.

71 In Haiti, until 2007, it was not unusual for a gang leader to punish one of his men for having ‘gone beyond the limits’ with the local people. Some punishments went as far as execution.