January 2006 Archives

Correspondent Lisa Ling documented the experience of filming this special from El Salvador to Los Angeles. Below are accounts of some of her chilling experiences, including finding out that she and her crew had been targeted for kidnapping and touring MS-13 controlled territory in Los Angeles with an active MS-13 member. Lisa Ling Growing up in Los Angeles, it’s hard not to notice the graffiti that covers the sides of buildings, walls, fences and trucks in many parts of the city. It looks like meaningless scribble, but it’s used to mark territory. Though it is home to Hollywood and the entertainment industry, large swaths of the city are also claimed by violent street gangs. If you’re a gangster and walk into territory claimed by a rival gang, you could be shot to death without question. Although there are over 100 known gangs in L.A., my encounters with gangsters had been pretty limited. I thought I could identify them by their shaved heads, baggy pants and tattoos, but then “gangsta” style became cool and it became impossible to single out individuals as bonafide “bangers.” A gang called “White Fence” controlled the area where I was working in the ‘90s. I’d also known about the gangs plaguing the L.A. streets, particularly the big ones like the “Bloods,” “Crips” and “18th Street.” I recall hearing about a small Salvadoran gang with a really long name – Mara Salvatrucha – that was considered somewhat insignificant relative to the bigger more established gangs. For those reasons, law enforcement paid little attention to it and focused their efforts at suppressing other gangs. Big Mistake. In a very short period of time, Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, has arguably become the biggest and most dangerous gang in the world. In the 1980's a law was enacted that would deport non-U.S. citizens convicted of serious crimes back to their home countries after serving their sentences. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of criminal offenders, including thousands of gang members, being returned to countries that had never encountered gang problems – such has been the case with El Salvador. Rather than return to the U.S., many gang members stayed in their home countries and brought gangbanging culture with them. Law enforcement officials (who’ve served as journalistic sources for me in the past) have kept me up to date on the issues keeping them the busiest. Over the last couple of years, several of my gang detective colleagues urged me to take a deeper look into MS-13 because members were starting to show up in many different parts of the U.S. and other countries. They were also beginning to perpetrate heinous acts of violence in areas that had never experienced such things before. The gang started to grow so fast that a federal task force was created to deal specifically with MS – a big deal considering that it started as a small L.A. street gang. My first foray into the world of MS came through a 20-year-old active member whom I call "Jester" in the show. He was jumped in (members viciously pound and kick the individual for 13 seconds, for the purposes of initiation) when he was only eight years old. Just a year later, at age nine, Jester was sent to “attack the enemy” – to walk up to a group of six rival gangsters and open fire. He was so scared he closed his eyes. After the shots went off, he saw that one guy had fallen—whether he survived is unknown. Jester says it’s the only time he ever felt sad or scared. He’s shot nearly twenty others since then. According to Jester, it’s either “him or me.” If he doesn’t shoot the enemy, the enemy will shoot him. I found out that several weeks after my interview with him, he and his homie were arrested for murder. When I got the call from a law enforcement officer, I felt sick. I had gotten to know Jester and he took me into his world, and now he was locked up and facing murder charges. He and his friends told me many stories of having to “do what they had to do,” in order to protect themselves and their neighborhoods. At the time I couldn’t distinguish between big talk and their reality. I guess it was their reality. Gangs operate as businesses in the criminal world. What’s disturbing is how young the recruits are and how vulnerable they are to indoctrination. The young boys are made to prove themselves through violence, and the faster one becomes a killer, the faster he or she will move up the ranks. Gangs are families who raise their kids to kill. With a presence in 33 U.S. states and more than five other countries, right now the MS-13 family is the biggest of gang operations. Law enforcement is reigning in on their operations, but as soon as MS is weakened, there will be others anxious to fill the void.

Brad Moon Snakes inspire both fear and fascination in us, and rightly so. Venomous snakes and even some non-venomous snakes—such as the giant constrictors—can be lethal to humans and animals much larger than the snakes themselves. How strong are giant constrictors and how do they take down such large animals? I joined a team from National Geographic Explorer to find out. It’s constriction, not suffocation… Constriction is a method snakes use to subdue their prey, by coiling their muscular bodies around their otherwise unwieldy victims and squeezing, the constriction prevents even their largest prey from biting or kicking their way free from the snake’s grasp. Constriction was a critical evolutionary innovation that enabled snakes to expand their diets, which now range from ants to antelopes. It also enabled snakes to diversify in body form—without constriction, snakes may not have evolved into the species we have today. Traditionally it was believed that constrictor snakes killed their prey by suffocation, by squeezing their victims so tightly they could no longer breathe. But suffocation can take up to several minutes, which can give a prey animal plenty of time to fight back, and we now know that prey animals are often killed much faster than that. A second explanation for how constriction kills so quickly is that it squeezes the blood vessels closed and causes the circulation to stop. If constriction is strong enough to squeeze the blood vessels closed in the body of a prey animal, then the animal’s circulation stops immediately, which causes the tissues to run out of oxygen and die in seconds rather than minutes. More recent observations on wild anacondas and their prey in the Venezuelan llanos, revealed that they can break the necks of prey animals as large as caimans, capybaras, and deer. These observations suggested that giant constrictors can be extremely strong, but their actual strengths had never been determined. How strong is strong? Before this project, only the strength of small constrictors had been studied. Several years ago, I measured the pressures exerted during constriction by snakes that were approximately 3 ft long and 1.5 inches thick. Constriction pressure is a good measure of a snake’s strength and it is one of the key components that restricts prey movement and kills it. To measure the pressures, I used small balloons attached to a prey animal and connected by tubing to a pressure transducer that gave a digital readout of the constriction pressure exerted by the snake’s coil. I discovered that even small constrictors can squeeze with pressures up to 4 PSI (pounds per square inch). This is strong enough to squeeze blood vessels closed in mice and kill them by circulatory arrest. This result was very important because it showed that the traditional explanation of constriction causing suffocation was probably wrong. The difference is crucial, because circulatory arrest kills prey animals much faster than suffocation, making it a safer and more surefire method for the snakes. But large prey animals such as capybaras and deer are much stronger than mice and rats, and so, much more dangerous to the constrictors. How do constrictors subdue such large prey animals? To find out, we traveled to the llanos region of Venezuela in search of a large anaconda (Eunectes murinus). At Rancho Doña Barbara , we measured constriction by an anaconda that was about 18 feet long and 6 inches thick. This star performer was an amazing animal that took four people to handle safely when we weighed and measured it. he snake constricted one of its favorite prey animals—a local kind of duck—with incredible strength and stamina. The strengths we measured indicated that anacondas can easily squeeze hard enough to take down much larger prey animals with little chance of their escape or retaliation. In fact, if a big anaconda managed to ambush a person, the results could quickly be lethal! It probably wouldn’t matter how big the person is or whether a partner was present to attempt a rescue, because a big constrictor becomes a ball of muscle that feels like solid rock and is just too strong to peel apart. And our anaconda wasn’t especially large—the largest individuals reach lengths of nearly 30 ft and diameters over 12 inches. These gigantic constrictors remain to be measured, but we now know that they must be incredibly strong!