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Sunday, January 4, 2009

Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) Intelligence Assessment

Open Intelligence Review suggests that do to reprisals by peasants in rural Guatemala and Black Shadow death squads and Central American Prison Deaths in El Salvador. A recent raid on MS-13 members in San Francisco with other cities possibly coming up.

MS-13 May be developing news strategies:

They have been very popular in the US and a wide range of talent from marginal to very effective, but they currently have a comparatively decentralized gang culture.

Therefore, MS-13 may be trying to reorganize in the following ways:
  • Evaluate their US talent
  • Merging less promising cliques into other groups with better established drug retail connections
  • Move their more talented leaders into less street-visible Major drug Wholesalers.
  • This would protect their contacts in expensive and hard-to-set-up transit networks from exposure to rival DTOs

Intelligence Questions to answer:

  • Have they may have established a new source of drugs, possibly through Venezuela, or Nicaragua which would cause them to leverage their Central American - US Transit networks?
  • Are they there other signs that they are trying to compete with the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels?
  • Are there signs of efforts to develop more sophisticated operational, intelligence and communication efforts
  • Which MS-13 members are traveling from which cities?
  • How has their crime pattern changed?
  • Are they establishing more sophisticated human trafficking network logistical assets?

Interim conclusion

  • MS-13 is restructuring

Possible final Conclusions

  • MS-13 is simply trying to consolidate and organize recent growth in their numbers in the US, and address attriion in Central America
  • MS-13 is trying to move up the wholesale chain as a DTO
  • MS-13 is trying to Model themselves after more sophisticated multifacited international criminal organizations kie la cosa nostra and are making changes at all levels
-Federico Garcia-Ochoa

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