Prize and Praise for MS-13

National Public Radio #BookConcierge - Best Books 2020

“A lot has been said about the Mara Salvatrucha, the gang known as MS-13. Most of it has been wrong. For this book, perhaps the most complete look at MS-13, Steven Dudley looked at the historical, political, cultural and financial elements that came together to create one of the world’s most notorious criminal organizations. Both a scholar with research expertise and a journalist who’s reported for NPR, The Washington Post, The Economist and the BBC, Dudley has written a book that engages fully with the darkest, most violent side of the gang – while also recognizing that some of its members are victims of circumstances beyond their control. An incredibly informative, harrowing read.” — Gabino Iglesias, book critic and author of Coyote Songs

2019 Columbia Journalism School and Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard’s J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award

“This timely and incisive work, speaking directly to the mission and purpose of the Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards, centers on one immigrant Salvadoran family that represents the complexities of the story of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), the notorious gang that is the US government’s number one target in its efforts to rid the country of ‘criminal aliens.’ Without ever minimizing the brutality of this gang, the book dispels many of the myths surrounding its history and power. More important, [MS-13] is the story of flawed US and Central American policies over many years and the exploitative and unequal systems they create.” —Prize judges: John Duff (chair), MacKenzie Fraser-Bub, and Lucas Wittmann

"Steven Dudley's great contribution in this landmark account of MS-13 is to take a subject that has been sensationalized and mythologized and politicized beyond recognition and, through painstaking reporting and clear-eyed analysis, capture a truth that is less exotic—but more fascinating—than the headlines. Rather than default to easy alarmism or xenophobic caricatures, Dudley captures the origins of the gang as a human story of migration and migrant communities, and a policy story, about the unintended consequences of US policy. By detailing the experiences of gang members and victims alike, he anatomizes the complex, fluid dynamics of this elusive transnational network. A startling book." —Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing: A True Story  of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

"Steven Dudley’s MS-13 is a remarkable feat of reporting; the ways in which the United States is complicit in the creation and preservation of MS-13 might well keep you awake deep into the night, as it did me. I can’t shake this book, or the feeling that we have doomed so many young men to a life of violence. We have to do better for them, for our children, and for our collective future.”—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“In MS-13, Steven Dudley skillfully cuts through the hype and the clichés to tell the dirty, true story of the gang—from its painful birth in Los Angeles to its bloody adolescence in El Salvador to the showdown in the Trump era. People need to read this thorough investigation to find a better way.”—Ioan Grillo, author of El Narco and Gangster Warlords

“Steve Dudley’s clear prose in MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang helps untangle the murky world of the gang, its little-known history and its origins. Dudley’s time spent with gang members offers keen observations on the complex nature of the gang's social, criminal and economic structures that few have had access to. It offers a real view of the gang’s formation and internal workings rather than the simplistic description of gang members as the embodiments of evil. As Dudley shows, the gangs formed, grew and evolved for many reasons, and its members are not cartoon gangsters but real people dealing with harsh realities that often result in great harm and loss amidst repeated cycles. Dudley also provides vital details and context for the 2012 truce that brought the gang its first real taste of political power. He chronicles the U.S. policies that make the problems worse rather than better and shows the fundamental inability by Central American nations or the United States to deal with this rapidly evolving reality.”—Doug Farah, author of Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror and Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the Man Who Makes War Possible

“Steven Dudley’s latest book is a historical treatise moved forward by a series of captivating narratives that present a wholistic, unifying perspective on the Mara Salvatrucha. Where other authors have stopped short in their own work on this mysterious gang, Dudley’s research presses deeper into the past, and walks father into the countryside of El Salvador and neighborhoods of Los Angeles to bring to the conversation a thoroughly researched and reported body of work. In one read, MS-13 counterbalances many of the wrong assumptions made about the gang among politicians and law enforcement while highlighting some of the most often obfuscated truths about the realities of what it means to be a Mara Salvatrucha, from wannabe to homie, and then desperate to escape a gang that never lets you go.”—Samuel Logan, author of This is for the Mara Salvatrucha

"Ripped straight from the headlines, MS-13, is one of the year’s most important books, a gripping meticulously reported account of the rise of one of the world’s most notorious street gangs. Author Steven Dudley spent years studying MS-13. With his remarkable access, Dudley skillfully weaves in the story of gang members to show how MS-13 grew from a social network to a criminal enterprise that President Trump has blamed for the rise of violent attacks in communities across the United States. After relatively humble beginnings in Los Angeles in the 1980s, it has spread to more than a half-dozen countries and become the focus of law enforcement in the United States and Central America. In spite of these efforts, MS-13 remains a threat. But Dudley does more than chronicle the history of the gang. He uses MS-13 to tell a larger story of flawed U.S. policy that has helped the gang flourish."—Mitch Weiss, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Broken Faith and Tiger Force

Reviews

New York Review of Books: A “thorough and useful new book.”

…Steven Dudley, a journalist who has been following MS-13 closely for a decade for InSight Crime, a well-sourced investigative nonprofit based in Washington and Medellín, emphasizes the difference between a street gang and a mafia in his thorough and useful new book MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang.

MS-13 is the only street gang ever to have been declared a “transnational criminal organization” and sanctioned by the Treasury Department. In January the US Department of Justice indicted fourteen MS-13 leaders on terrorism charges. But Dudley writes that the group is “greatly misunderstood” and should not be compared to more sophisticated and centralized cartels and mafias like the Zetas in Mexico or the Yakuza in Japan:

While the MS-13 does have an international presence, it is a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing, not international drug trafficking or sophisticated corruption. 

Street gangs are vastly less lucrative than mafias, and the money they make comes from their control over territory, to the degree that they are able to block outsiders from certain areas and “tax” (extort) business owners unlucky enough to have shops, bars, or restaurants there. In LA in the 1980s MS-13 did get into the crack business, in a limited way, but the gang was and remains more likely to earn money by extorting drug dealers in the areas they control than by trafficking drugs themselves…

Dudley tells the especially revealing story of a teenager, Cristian, who left El Salvador in 2013, at thirteen, because he was under pressure to join Barrio 18. His mother had fled the country earlier, after Cristian’s father was shot by an assassin, and Cristian rejoined her on Long Island, where she worked the graveyard shift at a movie theater. In high school, trying to learn English, he felt lost. A well-meaning teacher connected him with another Salvadoran student, who turned out to belong to MS-13. Cristian resisted his pressure to join but acted out all the same in a few garden-variety teenage ways: yelling at a teacher, getting a few (nongang) tattoos. School officials reported Cristian to ICE, who detained him. “Authorities had no clear criteria nor any way to test who was a gang member,” Dudley writes. They eventually concluded that Cristian was not a member, but by that time he had turned eighteen and was no longer shielded from deportation under a special program, and was sent back to El Salvador. Members of Barrio 18, including his cousins, wanted to kill him because they heard he had joined MS-13 in Long Island. MS-13 wanted to kill him because they heard he was posing as a member.

The Economist: “Mr Dudley’s book is uniquely comprehensive. Years of research have yielded a shrewd analysis of the structural forces that created the gang, which Mr Dudley calls ‘the bastard child that no one wants to acknowledge from an affair that most choose to ignore.’”

…How a group of metalheads in Los Angeles in the 1980s evolved into a gang that terrorises three countries is the subject of “ms-13” by Steven Dudley, founder of Insight Crime, a site that covers organised crime in Latin America. The story begins with El Salvador’s civil war, which between 1980 and 1992 left 75,000 people dead and over 1m displaced. Like the guns Ronald Reagan’s administration sent down for use against leftist guerrillas, the gang is an American export. Mara Salvatrucha (“Salva” for El Salvador, “trucha” for “savvy”) first referred to a group of refugees in Los Angeles with tastes for crack and heavy metal. When they took to wielding machetes, America started deporting them.

Back in El Salvador, ms-13 thrived on the same ingredients that drove the previous generation to take up arms (minus the ideology): poverty, impunity, a culture of violence, lots of young men and too few opportunities. Salvadoreans living under gang control call their teenage overlords los muchachos (“the boys”), a euphemism once used for the guerrillas. Acknowledging the parallel, Mr Dudley suggests that the term “insurgency” properly captures the gangs’ weaponry and political capital.

As with rebels of earlier decades, El Salvador’s response hardened the hoodlums. Consecutive presidents packed the prisons, but with virtually no rehabilitation they became gang training grounds. Then, in 2012, an ex-guerrilla forged a short-lived truce between gangs and the government that halved the murder rate but horrified elites and the American embassy (the mediator is now in jail). Still, it set a precedent. Deals continued in secret: support from ms-13 probably swayed the tight presidential election of 2014. Yet official policy reverted to all-out war against the gangs, fuelling a new exodus of migrants to the Mexican-American border, including numerous children. Mr Trump claimed, falsely, that many were gang members.

The best reporting on ms-13 is by local journalists, including El Faro, which has churned out cinematic dispatches from gang-torn barrios for more than a decade. A recent string of murders on Long Island led to a spate of stories in America, including a Pulitzer-winning series by ProPublica, a non-profit news outfit, which showed how Mr Trump’s immigration policies have inflamed gang tensions. But Mr Dudley’s book is uniquely comprehensive. Years of research have yielded a shrewd analysis of the structural forces that created the gang, which Mr Dudley calls “the bastard child that no one wants to acknowledge from an affair that most choose to ignore”.

His sources include police reports from murder trials, testimony from asylum cases and scores of interviews with current and former ms-13 members. Many, he observes, were just children when they evolved from “victims of circumstance, caught in a system that marginalises, vilifies and destroys them” into victimisers who destroy the lives of others. Scarcely a year separates the day one wins $35 in a breakdancing contest and the day he gets into a knife fight with Barrio 18 members.

Mr Dudley does not shy away from the violence—a brutal passage describes how gang members rape and murder women perceived to have slighted them—but nor does he sensationalise it. “ms-13 members were, to put it simply, not good criminals”, he writes. Their facial tattoos and lack of discipline made them easy targets for ambushes and wiretaps…

Shelf Awareness: “A deep dive written in plain prose backed by years of research, MS-13 is a remarkable resource.” 

Steven Dudley's MS-13 comes when an educated voice is needed on the subject of the gang's impact on world violence and, equally importantly, political maneuvering. Dudley is abundantly qualified to write on the subject as the co-director of InSight Crime, a foundation dedicated to studying organized crime. Dudley works with numerous investigators and contributors to offer a more complete and accurate view of how organized crime works and its impact on public policy.

MS-13 is specifically about the Mara Salvatrucha, the ruthless street gang that has spread across countries and continents. Dudley details the origins of MS-13 and its operations, both generally and through specific experiences of a few individuals. "These stories allow us to trace the history of the gang from its beginnings in Los Angeles to its export to El Salvador and other Central American nations, and back again." The sections of the book (origins, maturation, efforts to extricate) mirror life faced by members who are enveloped, become serious, then try to leave.

Dudley addresses the Trump administration's comparison of the gang to Al-Qaeda as a means to rid the U.S. of "criminal aliens." While MS-13 is a threat that trades on its reputation for brutal murders, it is also greatly misunderstood, its power erroneously likened to much more sophisticated groups. Dudley's reporting is unsurprisingly complex, with extraordinary sections on methodology and notes, bibiography and index following the main text. A deep dive written in plain prose backed by years of research, MS-13 is a remarkable resource for thorough understanding. --Lauren O'Brien of Malcolm Avenue Review

Small Wars Journal: “Extremely well written and extensively researched…the work greatly helps to de-sensationalize and de-politicalize the gang and show that more nuance must be brought into our understanding of MS-13’s organization and the behaviors and actions of its individual members.” 

The main emphasis of the work focuses on MS-13’s inherent contradictions and disputes the Trump administration’s extreme demonization and politicalization of the gang—comparing it to al-Qaeda and overplaying the “criminal alien” immigration threat components that it represents—in order to pander to that administration’s voter base (p. 15).  At the same time, though, the brutal nature of the gang and the devastating effects it has on communities is recognized (p. 15).  Specifically, Dudley states:

…While the MS-13 does have an international presence, it is a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing, not international drug trafficking or sophisticated corruption.

In fact, the gang is perhaps better described as a loosely knit social and criminal community that reinforces its bonds via extreme versions of individual and collective violence. And it is as much the result of bad individual decisions as it is the result of flawed US and Central American policy, and the exploitative and unequal economic systems they foster (p. 16).

The work chronicles the lives of various MS-13 gang members—most notably Norman and his family (their names have been changed to protect their identities), the Sanchez brothers, and others.  The streets of Los Angeles and regions within El Salvador represent the primary geographic focus of the work, with the lives of the main characters, fragmentary immigration stories, and the history of MS-13 (as well as vignettes of the civil war in El Salvador) playing out.  Of necessity, the gang’s great rival—18th Street (Barrio 18)— is also touched upon within the work, as is gang life in prisons and the initial struggle against La Raza in El Salvador, the role of the Mexican Mafia (La Eme) in controlling the gang in Los Angeles, US national policy towards MS-13, and a host of related subject matter.  Consequently, the gang’s presence in Honduras, Guatemala and to a lesser extent Mexico, as well the US Eastern Seaboard and Texas and other states are either not focused upon or only tangentially addressed.

The cover of the work is simple yet effective—it shows the palm-laden image of North Hollywood Boulevard.  The book has been very well received, having won the J. Anthony Lukas Award and getting significant media attention and praise. It is written for mass market appeal, with a storytelling focus upon the lives and experiences of its main characters, rather than specialized academic or public security professional sectors which make it an engaging journalistic read.

The author’s ideological orientation is centrist trending left which imbues the work with a skeptical view of human governance in both its autocratic (Salvadoran) and even democratic (United States) variants in relationship to society’s underclasses and cast offs.  This gives the impression that MS-13 members (and often their dysfunctional families) are victims of global capitalism that should be pitied—while the abused become conditioned (even groomed in a sense) to become the next generation of abusers.  These broken individuals suffering PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and a host of other mental and physical maladies perpetuate the deadly cycle of despair, criminality, and, often, outright barbarism…

In summation, MS-13 is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on this street and, in the case of the Northern Triangle of Central America, prison-based transnational gang. The book is extremely well written and extensively researched and benefits from Dudley’s many years of investigative focus upon MS-13. The work greatly helps to de-sensationalize and de-politicalize the gang and show that more nuance must be brought into our understanding of MS-13’s organization and the behaviors and actions of its individual members.

Library Journal: “An outstanding book for true crime readers.”

Dudley has written the definitive account of MS-13, the violent international crime organization. This panoramic narrative ties together the gang’s formation in Los Angeles, by immigrants from El Salvador seeking protection from other gangs; Dudley also examines MS-13’s links with the Mexican Mafia and relevance to American immigration and foreign policy. The book benefits greatly from the perspectives of a gang leader, a recruit, the Salvadoran military, and U.S. federal and state agents. Like a deadly virus, MS-13 has mutated, and Dudley provides a chilling, even-handed account of its origins. Norman, the gang leader seeking asylum in the United States, is at the center of Dudley’s work. He grew up amid violence in El Salvador, embraced MS-13 as a new family, and ultimately tried to leave it. This volume is more complete than its predecessors—such as Samuel Logan’s This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha and Juan José Martínez d' Aubuisson’s A Year Inside MS-13—and reflects the author’s deep knowledge of the subject, derived from his local reporting and codirection of a government funded three-year study of MS-13 in the United States.

Publishers Weekly: “For anyone who has ever wondered why and how gang members are made, Dudley has the answers.”

Journalist Dudley, who spent the last two decades covering crime in Latin America, brings his expertise to his chilling debut about the street gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Started more than 40 years ago in Los Angeles, the gang consisted of mostly teenage Salvadoran boys who wanted to forget the violence of their home country and its civil war by drinking and playing loud music. But it grew into a vicious group known for brutal murders. After gang members were rounded up, sent to U.S. prisons, and then deported, they recreated the gang in El Salvador and spread to other Central American nations. Dudley personalizes the history of MS-13 in a boy he calls Norman, a typical gang member, who as a child in El Salvador turned to the gang to protect him from the army, the war, and domestic violence. Eventually, Norman fled to the U.S. to get out of MS-13, but he has lived in fear ever since. For anyone who has ever wondered why and how gang members are made, Dudley has the answers. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (September)

Kirkus Reviews:  “Trenchant history of the gang whom Donald Trump has called as dangerous as al-Qaida.” 

MS-13, which takes its name from the enigmatic Spanish phrase “Mara Salvatrucha,” is now 40 years old, and it has members throughout the U.S. as well as El Salvador. Owing to a vicious civil war between a government backed by the Reagan administration and communist guerrillas, tens of thousands of Salvadorans fled to the United States, with a particularly strong presence in Los Angeles. Two refugee brothers founded MS-13 to protect their community from other gangs—and then, over time, discovered that they could gain power and wealth by controlling segments of the drug trade and other criminal enterprises. Now, journalist Dudley writes, MS-13 is a loosely organized gang that “had grown by coming at their enemies in waves, like a marabunta, or army of ants, as the street gangs were baptized so many years ago in El Salvador.” The gang is marked by several signatures, including heavy tattooing and a tendency to kill their victims with machetes, chopping them to bits. Like any gang, Dudley observes, MS-13 is both a product of its environment and a shaper of it, strengthening social bonds “via violence and predatory criminal acts.” Gang life is also far from romantic, as he reveals, marked by excessive drug and alcohol use, that constant violence, and, often, homelessness—landlords are reluctant to rent to gang members who treat their properties as “a crash-pad, a party-place, a meeting spot, a stash house, a torture chamber, a brothel or all of the above.” The gang is also dominant in places such as LA, New York, and even Washington while its members travel freely back and forth to El Salvador, bribing the authorities to look the other way.A clear-eyed account of a criminal enterprise that is undeniably a threat to civil society wherever it turns up. 

Other Work

Journalist

As co-director of InSight Crime, Dudley has written dozens of articles on crime and corruption in the Americas, among them an investigation into illicit financing of elections in Guatemala, a deep dive into elites and organized crime in Honduras, and chronicles of the development of the Zetas in Mexico.

author

In addition to an earlier book, Walking Ghosts, which tackled how the FARC rebels created a political party that was slaughtered by right-wing opponents, Dudley also did a documentary that followed a lawyer for drug traffickers between Miami, Washington, DC, and Colombia.

Policy Analyst

Working with InSight Crime, American University and the Woodrow Wilson Center, Dudley has produced numerous policy reports, including on Mexico’s self-defense groups in Michoacán, the trafficking of fentanyl through Mexico to the United States, and the evolution of the MS-13 in the Americas.