California Fractured and Fading

Coleman explained that MS-13’s military-style attack decapitated and drove out the rival black gang and allowed MS to run a chunk of L.A. turf near the city center. “I’m sure some of those guys were either from the El Salvadoran military, or maybe even our own,” he said.

And the U.S. government knows how militaristic these gangs are. In her Jan. 26 Wall Street Journal article, “Drug Gangs Have Mexico on the Ropes,” Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote that the U.S. government’s newly produced “National Drug Threat Assessment for 2009,” written by retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey (former U.S. drug czar), exposes the startling fact that Mexican drug-trafficking organizations now “control most of the U.S. drug market, with distribution capabilities in 230 cities.” Her article goes on to report that inside Mexico the government is in jeopardy of falling to insurrectionist drug-cartel fighters who can “outgun Mexican law enforcement authorities and who employ sea-going submersibles, helicopters, modern aviation, automatic weapons, RPG’s, anti-tank 66 mm rockets, mines, heavy machine guns, [and] 50-cal sniper rifles.” Her piece makes clear that, among the vast numbers of violent Hispanic gang members inside the U.S., there is now, ominously, a cross-border coordination with the militarized Mexican drug cartels.

Later that night, I traveled with Sgt. Jessie Garcia, the other Southwest Gang Enforcement Detail supervisor, who explained to me that L.A. Chief of Police William Bratton had provided the department, which is composed of 365 square miles and 20 divisions (each with its own Gang Detail), with a potent weapon: the ability to seek and obtain an injunction against any gang operating in their jurisdictions. Getting an injunction involves convincing a local court of a gang’s criminal activities. Virtually all the identified gangs in the Southwest Division have injunctions imposed upon them, meaning that known members can be taken in and questioned for congregating in groups of two or more or for various activities such as putting up gang graffiti, even on one’s own home.

Shortly, we heard over the radio that some new gang graffti had been spotted nearby and that a couple of officers were already there. When we arrived at the scene, a side street in a residential area, we met Officer Guillermo Espinosa, who illuminated me as to why decoding graffi ti is serious police work. “This was put up by a new offshoot of the Harpies. [See photo on Page 56] In the beginning of this string you have the ‘DE’ that stands for ‘Dead Enders’ and the ‘X3’ shows any other gang member that this group is under the protection of the Mexican Mafia.”

Espinosa explained that the group calls itself the “Dead Enders” as a reference to their long-ago peaceful beginnings when they congregated in neighborhood cul-de-sacs, fi xed up old cars and played soccer. The “X3” refers the 13th letter in the alphabet, M, which in turn refers to the Mexican Mafia, now a powerful overlord of Southern California Latino gangs, an organization that traces its beginnings to a prison in Tracy, Calif., during the 1950s. Its charter claims allegiance to the Aztec civilization. And it has gained a stature similar to the elders of a distant tribal past, a gangland overlord status enforced by ruthless, murderous force. It arbitrates disputes, issues execution orders and governs the criminal enterprises of much the Southern California Hispanic underworld. It would seem that, as Dan Stein envisions, under the right circumstances, the Mexican Mafia could also provide a catalyst for a massive insurrection, issuing a call to arms to join in a Latino populist revolt aimed at challenging U.S. jurisdiction and recapturing the stolen Aztec homeland.

Wandering South Central by Day

On my second day of immersion in South Central, I drove and wandered around the neighborhoods and back streets of South Central Los Angeles and neighboring Huntington Park and Maywood in an attempt to uncover the defining elements of the new Spanish-speaking America. Having seen poverty in Mexico and Central America during my vagabond years, what I observed in L.A. was very different in numerous respects. Off the main commercial thoroughfares, in residential back streets, one sees endless rows of small, very tightly spaced homes, many with bars on the windows and made of cheap, aging construction, but unlike much of the impoverished Third World, there are very few homes littered outside with refuse and junk. Moreover, the streets are clean. In short, it’s clear that, even in the most gang-dominated “hoods,” there is among the inhabitantsa pride of ownership.

Also, unlike the Third World, in Mexifornia, people are not going hungry. It was obvious that a large percentage of the young people, especially the males, were not only not hungry but overweight.

One of the most telling traits of Mexifornia is the language. In Huntington Park, I saw the largest concentration of store-front signage written in Spanish. There is even an all Spanish-speaking shopping mall, Mercado del Pueblo (the Town Market). It’s a collection of businesses housed in what is a converted industrial warehouse with mechanical chain-operated roll up doors. I stopped in a restaurant, El Ranchito, where the patrons were speaking Spanish and watching a Mexican soccer team play on a Spanish-language television. After ordering a quesadilla and a Coke at the counter, I sat down at one of the booths. When the waitress arrived with my meal, I made an attempt in my rusty Spanish to strike up a conversation.

“Cómo se llama?” (What’s your name?)

“Estella,” she said with a smile that let me know that she was amused to have a gringo like me come in, order a meal, and speak to her in Spanish.

“Vive aquí en Huntington Park?” (Do you live here in Huntington Park?)

“Sí.” (Yes.)

“Estella, cuantos años vive aqu?” (How many years have you lived here?)

“Once.” (Eleven)

“Habla inglés?” (Do you speak English?)

“No.”

The Best Ride Ever

At 4:30 p.m., I arrived at the Southwest station for my second night “ride along.” I was told that most of the Gang Detail, including the supervisors, were out at a crime scene where there had been a double homicide. So I was escorted to their meeting room where I looked at the walls full of mug shots of tattooed gang members for a while. After they all returned, Sgt. Garcia approached me with two of the youngest officers of the unit following him. “You’ll be riding with these guys tonight,” the sergeant said. He then turned to them and said emphatically, “Don’t get involved in anything.” From this I took him to mean: With a civilian along, especially a reporter, don’t get into anything that might get dangerous.

We promptly left the building and got into the squad car that was parked in a back parking lot. With Officer D at the wheel and Officer B riding shotgun, I sat in the back seat. (The officers’ full names have been omitted for reasons that will shortly be apparent.) Immediately after we exchanged introductions and pulled up to the electrified gate, Officers B and D became riveted to radio communications, audible inside the cab. A couple of plainclothes officers had spotted and were tailing a guy who was wanted for a murder he allegedly committed inside the Southwest jurisdiction.

A couple of seconds after the electric gate had opened to allow us out onto the road, Officer D floored it, sending the squad car roaring down the four-lane Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard at rush hour. With the dispatcher updating the location of the suspect’s white GMC Yukon over our radio, Officer D was coolly transformed into equal parts urban warrior and NASCAR driver. As we sped toward major intersections where cars were stopped in front of us at a red light, Officer D swerved left into the empty on-coming lanes, speeding toward the intersection where he fi red up his siren and lights, thus freezing the cars that were coming toward us on our right and left. At high-speed, tires squealing, he wove through the stopped cars at the intersection and roared off down the empty right side lanes. At other moments, Officer B would spot an empty side street and say tersely, “On yer left, take that one.” Next, we’d swerve into a side street, roaring down it with sirens blaring, on a shortcut that allowed us to avoid a stoplight.

When we made it to the freeway, Officer D opened it up, taking us down the inside shoulder of the median. When we pulled up near the white Yukon, we were in the city of Hawthorn, 20 miles from the Southwest Division Headquarters, having made the trip in about 15 minutes at rush hour. From the calm demeanor of Officers D and B, this was just another day at the office.

We were the second squad car to join in the pursuit, causing the suspect to realize he had drawn the heat. Suddenly, he stopped his car in the middle of the street, leaving a sack of drugs and his girlfriend in his truck, and ran into a house that we later found out was his parents’ home. Officers D and B parked at one corner and, with the help of other arriving squad cars and a whole lot of crime-scene tape, set up a perimeter, closing the whole residential city block to cars and foot traffic. Soon a police helicopter was loudly circling at low altitude overhead with a huge spot bathing the house in bright light. Next, the canine units arrived and a crowd of spectators and temporarily homeless residents gathered. Officers D and B politely explained to those who were wishing to return to their homes that, for their safety, they needed to remain behind the tape until the suspect was apprehended.

During the two-hour standoff, Officers D and B told me that the guy they were pursuing had been at large for about a year and was a member of 18th Street, a particularly violent Hispanic gang that had gone to war and driven out of South Central a black gang called the “Gear Street Crips.” “These guys got a hold of automatic weapons and killed a whole lot of Crips,” Officer D said.

With the dogs poised to enter the house, one of the units was able to get phone contact inside the house and convince everyone in it to surrender. First a grandmother, then father, brother, sister and lastly the “perp” came out the front door with hands raised. Each was cuffed, searched and led to a squad car outside the perimeter.

On our way back to Southwest Headquarters, we chatted about the nature of Hispanic gangs, and both officers agreed that what is different about them now, especially in contrast to the black gangs, is that they are much more organized than they used to be—more structured, disciplined and lethal than ever before. “Murder is the way they gain respect. Sometimes they even kill their own gang members because it makes them feared and respected,” said Officer B.

“We talk to these gangsters, and we can joke with them,” Officer D added. “But we know if they could kill us, they’d do it in a second.”

What Next for SoCal?

By the mid-fifth century, the Roman Empire was losing jurisdiction over its provinces. Small farmers and merchants abandoned their lands and businesses in order to escape the Roman army whose primary function was reduced to imposing crushing taxation upon those citizens still loyal to Rome. The provincials fled to the breakaway proto feudal estates of powerful generals who maintained their own armies, law codes and even prisons.

Sgt. Coleman told me that when he grew up in South Central, if a single homeless person was seen wandering the streets, police were called. Now, as the city of Los Angeles rapidly becomes majority Hispanic, there are 57 gangs operating in the city limits, 40 of which are Latino, with new mutations forming new gangs at an ever-increasing rate. What will greater Southern California become when there are 100 gangs in L.A.?

Is it possible that a new Che Guevarastyled revolutionary could arise, rallying his Hispanic gang-linked brethren to conduct massive civil disobedience, combined with pockets of sporadic armed insurrection? In Mexico, the drug cartels already control an estimated 200 counties where they have set up new “narco city states” with their own armies and, through extortion, have set up parallel tax systems that replace the government’s ability to levy taxes.

In these vast balkanized, Spanish-speaking areas of the American Southwest, the Mexican drug cartels, the Mexican Mafia and myriad other U.S.-based Hispanic gangs could be mobilized to reject “Gringo” rule in favor of establishing a new Republica del Norte, a breakaway state promoted by a wide coalition of the pro-Aztlan groups. Such a state, nominally aligned with an enfeebled Mexican government, is a nightmare scenario that becomes much more likely if and when the old majority of white European, Asian and African-Americans in larger numbers give up on the region and migrate to safer zones where a more traditional American culture still exists.

As Dan Stein at FAIR points out, at some point, any central government must do a cost-benefit analysis as it determines what to do about a hypothetical breakaway province. In 2002, a study determined that each family of four in California paid $1,200 a year in taxes just to house, educate, medicate and incarcerate the state’s illegal alien population. How much blood and treasure will or could our cash-starved government expend to prevent the secession of a region that is already a net drain on its treasury?

But There’s Hope

As Hanson writes in Mexifornia, “California has always been a risky experiment.” Southern California has been, for a couple of generations, a prime mover of America’s ubiquitous pop culture, which is dispensed by Hollywood, the music industry, video games, television, colloquial language and fashion and which, despite its nihilistic glorification of the hoodlum, nevertheless has a unifying effect on our young. The pop culture is so pervasive that it tends to overpower the mores and customs of both traditional America and Mexico. In this regard, Hanson concludes that, in a strange way, we’re lucky to have pop culture because it buys us some time in our attempt to alter the many destructive trends attendant to this massive migration across our southern border and our failure to educate and assimilate Mexico’s unwanted poor.

There is hope for assimilating Spanish-speaking Southern California, because America is both a place and an idea. It is a place where there is no defined class structure, where racism and ethnic hatred are now mostly fictions peddled by increasingly marginalized race hustlers and where success can be had without any preconditions, despite the fact that our political class imposes an ever more oppressive taxation upon the middle class. America is a place where millions still try to break in and few wish to leave.

Our pop culture can still produce pro-American films such as The Patriot and Saving Private Ryan. Southern California is still an American citadel that produces men and women such as the heroic officers of the Southwest Division’s Gang Detail, defenders of the land of the free and the home of the brave, the bold blue line that exemplifies our core values—one of which is courage under fire. Before any kid growing up in South Central joins a local gang and kills a rival gang banger, he will have encountered many times men and women such as those I met in the LAPD, those who personify the reason for preserving our civil way of life, men and women who are living proof that, unlike Mexico or Cuba, America is still the last best hope for mankind.

NOTE: Published in Townhall Magazine