18th Street gang

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18th Street gang graffiti

The 18th Street gang , even Eighteen street , XV3 transition , Mara18 or BEST ( big Eighteen street ), is a Latino - gear that acts in much of America. Its membership is estimated at 8,000 to 20,000 in Los Angeles alone .

history

The 18th Street Gang developed in the 1960s in the Rampart Police Department of Los Angeles. Street". The Clanton Street Gang , which controlled large parts of the police district , was already operating on this street . As more and more Latinos came to the US, the number of Latino gangs there grew. Young Latinos wanted to join the Clanton Street Gang, but were not accepted as they only accepted Mexicans. That is why the young people founded the 18th Street Gang, in which ethnicity did not play a role. The gang developed rapidly through many illegal immigrants (in 1995 60% of the gang members were illegal immigrants) and as a result, its importance grew. Although 18th Street does not require a Mexican ethnic background, the majority of its members are Mexican. During the civil war in El Salvador , many Salvadorans emigrated to the USA and joined this gang or the Mara Salvatrucha . Many of them were illegal immigrants and were sent back to their homeland to continue the gang.

The gang has been active in Canada, the USA, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Spain since the 1990s. The gang is enemies with the Bloods and Crips , their biggest rival is the Mara Salvatrucha .

Cinematic reception

  • Christian Poveda (Camera & Director): La vida loca. The corridor of death. Ascot Elite Home Entertainment (distributed by Universum Film), originally published in 2008, with German subtitles 2010

The journalist Christian Póveda accompanied the gang for two years and shot the documentary La vida loca in 2008 . In 2009 he was murdered with four head shots.

Web links

Commons : 18th Street Gang  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ It is estimated that there are close to 20,000 members in Los Angeles County / Some estimates of the 18th are as low as 8,000
  2. ↑ Gang Crime in Hollywood cut in half in first four months of 2004 ( Memento from May 22, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Los Angeles Times: May 15, 2005 , in an op-ed by attorney Carol Platt Liebau - “Of the membership of the notorious 18th Street gang, estimated at 20,000, fully 60% are illegal aliens, according to a 1995 report by the state Department of Justice. "
  4. ↑ California's Most Violent Export - by Investigator Al Valdez Orange County District Attorney's Office ( Memento from September 10, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  5. ↑ In the early 1990s, President Bill Clinton began deporting back to El Salvador hundreds of Latino gang members who had illegally made their home in the US. The deportees brought LA ​​gang culture with them to a country flooded with weapons from a decades-old civil war.
  6. ↑ Latin gangs rule Spain's streets (Feature) ( Memento from August 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (October 8, 2008, English)
  7. ↑ Documentary about El Salvador "La vida loca" cost the director his life , Die Welt, January 23, 2010