MS-13 gang brutality grabs headlines while its influence in Houston and U.S. may be waning

Estuar Quinonez's bullet-riddled body and 25 bullet casings were found in Missouri City's Buffalo Run Park on June 16, 2016.

The 16-year-old, a member of the MS-13 street gang, had been cooperating with Houston police after witnessing six homicides by the gang, police say. Five alleged MS-13 members were charged with capital murder in Quinonez's slaying.

The killing demonstrates the gang's ruthlessness, but comes as experts and law enforcement agree there are indications the gang membership has decreased in Texas.

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Investigators say the men lured Quinonez into the park after his killing was given a "green light" from Omar Torres, who remains in Harris County jail after being charged for a February 2016 murder.

One of the men charged - Douglas Alexander Herrera-Hernandez - was extradited to Houston in August 2017, where he had already been charged with a July 9 murder outside of an apartment complex on the city's southeast side.

Filed late last month, the charges come as the MS-13 gang re-emerges in the national spotlight because of a continued wave of brutal gang slayings and increased attention from politicians, including President Donald Trump.

The president has previously called MS-13 "animals" that "have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields" - violence that the Trump administration has used as part of their justification for sweeping immigration crackdowns and a proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

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In Houston, the gang has in recent years garnered headlines for its gruesome tactics, including a February 2017 killing of an 18-year-old woman that police later said was part of a "satanic" ritual.

Last April, Gov. Greg Abbott infused a Harris County tactical operations center with $500,000 to fight gang violence in response to a spate of killings by my MS-13 members.

But many experts say the gang's influence - and fears of it - are highly exaggerated. Its roughly 10,000 U.S. members account for only a small portion of the total, 1.4 million gang members the FBI estimates live in the country.

MS-13's Texas membership, meanwhile, dropped this year to about 500 - less than 1 percent of the state's total 100,000 gang members, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety's annual gang assessment.

Last year, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said there were about 350 members in Houston, though he said the actual number is probably higher.

MS-13's decline in the U.S. is due in part to renewed focus by local law enforcement, said Michael Paarlberg an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and an associate fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies.

The gang started in 1980s Los Angeles as the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, a relatively nonviolent group of Central American refugees with a shared love for metal music. Its penchant for brutal violence didn't come until years later, when it coalesced under the MS-13 moniker in the California prison system, he said.

Today, the gang is primarily based in El Salvador, from where its leaders oversee local "cliques" around the United States and some other counties.

Because of that - and despite its designation as a "transnational" gang - Paarlberg said MS-13 has never truly been able to coordinate as one, cohesive criminal enterprise. Rather, he said, many local gangs simply borrow the MS-13 moniker.

"The gang is structured in a very loose way," he told the Chronicle. "It's really not just one gang. They franchise the name, and the name carries a certain amount of weight. But that doesn't mean they're coordinating with some kind of national network."

And despite its members' penchant for brutal killings, Paarlberg said MS-13's true "bread and butter" has always been extorting members of local, often-undocumented communities.

"The political atmosphere seems to suggest that this is a gang that is highly coordinated, primarily committing violent crimes targeting average citizens - which is often code for white, native-born citizens - when that's really not true," Paarlberg said.

Hurdles for police

Law enforcement officials say that combatting the gang - and the panic surrounding it - has become more difficult due to various efforts to eliminate so-called "sanctuary cities."

Earlier this year, Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 4, which allows authorities to ask about a person's immigration status during stops, and requires local agencies to comply with federal immigration officers to detain any person suspected of being in the country illegally.

MS-13 members accounted for roughly 0.4 percent of all arrests made by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in 2016, CNN reported at the time. Through December 2017, ICE had reported 796 MS-13 arrests -- a one-year, 83 percent increase that some experts said was due to the subjective nature by which some arrests were linked to the group.

Multiple studies - including one from the Center for American Progress - have found that sanctuary cities are generally less violent, with lower rates of unemployment and poverty, which experts have credited in part to trust between communities and police.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo has joined state and national law enforcement officials in routinely decrying such laws for what they say is a chilling effect on local immigrant communities. Just last month, Acevedo said an investigation into the killing of a mother and the kidnapping of her young baby in a northwest Houston apartment complex was complicated by fears among the predominantly Hispanic community there.

"We have to fight the perception that HPD is interested in the immigration status of people who might be victims or witnesses," Acevedo said Friday. "That's a problem, because now (witnesses) might not come forward because (they) know that a distant relative might be entangled with MS-13 or some other violent street gang."

That, coupled with the Houston clique's growing notoriety for killing witnesses, makes policing MS-13 doubly difficult.

"A community is only as safe as the willingness of the people living in that community to participate in trying to keep people accountable," Acevedo said, also noting that witness killings are generally rare. "The sooner we come together with law enforcement, the sooner we can get these criminals off the street."

Sgt. Clint Ponder, of HPD's gang division, mostly declined to comment specifically on MS-13, in keeping with department policy meant to prevent giving gangs notoriety.

Ponder did, however, say that fears of gang violence are "absolutely" exaggerated, particularly in communities far-removed from the small, confined areas wherein such groups normally operate.

He also pointed to community development programs and public services like job training and counseling as a way to keep young, would-be gang members from turning to crime.

"As a general rule, they all prey on their own community - they really do," Ponder said of Houston's various gangs. "Honestly, it's poor people preying on poor people. There is no big organization going on where they go out and say, 'Hey, let's attack the people in Sugar Land.'"