Maras

Frederick Forsyth explained to the perpetually outraged readers of the Daily Express yesterday why, 55 years after he started travelling, he has given up on the Third World.

"It is not about north and south, nor east and west. It is not about black and white, and it's certainly not about Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist or Hindu. It is about a very basic national mindset. A marriage of effort to logic, order, discipline; a refusal to tolerate corruption and chaos...Mr Bono can sing his songs until he is giving his gigs over a Zimmer frame, but if he thinks he is going to abolish poverty he must be daft. The rich West can go on pouring aid, technology, investment, chances into the Third World (and we will) but, across great swathes of it, chaos will always win."

This politically incorrect topic of "national mindsets" is one I shall return to once I have polished off Jared Diamond's Collapse later in the year. Forsyth's theory is that if the local airport is a clusterfuck, the best thing to do would be to get straight back on the plane and leave. The funny thing is, Guatemala City's Aurora International airport isn't all that bad. It's no microcosmic appetiser to the main chaos outside. (Ok, the policemen that patrol the terminal have been known to conduct the occasional stick-up.)

Last week, a bit of grenade tossing in three of Guatemala's prisons (including the one affectionately known as El Infierno, hell.) resulted in 35 fatalities. This was a face-off between two of the leading maras (street gangs; the word itself deriving from a kind of ant prone to infestation), the Salvatrucha and Mara-18. Since then members of branches in neighbouring countries like EL Salvador and Honduras have been pouring across the border to join in the fray, which has resulted in tightened immigration controls.

Possibly to no avail, as the US government is also in the midst of a deportation frenzy, determined to offload hundreds of mareros on their countries of origin (Possibly the equivalent of the Home Office packing disgruntled Muslim youths from Leeds off to terrorist camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan.) Ironically though, maras like the Salvatrucha originated on the streets of LA before spreading to the cities of Central America.

Our current obsession with Islamo-baddies may be cloaking the parallel advancement of this equally unpleasant side-effect of the globalised world. The mareros' methods occasionally make Al Zaqawi's followers in Iraq look like the Women's Institute by comparison. (Click here, only if you are not in the least bit squeamish.)

On Christmas Eve last year in San Pedro Sula, Honduras gunmen linked to Salvatrucha sprayed a public bus killing 28, an act distinguished by its nihilistic mindlessness.

Along with El Salvador and Guatemala, the Honduran government has been experimenting with a mano dura approach to the maras, essentially a shoot-to-kill policy. International organisations point to a failure of the elites to deal with the "underlying causes" by which they mean social and economic. (But in my own view not exclusively so.)