By Ben Fox, The Associated Press
SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) - Police in El Salvador are establishing better contacts with their counterparts in California to gain leverage against gangs involved in smuggling, extortion and other crimes in both nations, officials said Tuesday.
The national police chief of El Salvador, Ricardo Menesses Orellana, is meeting this week with law enforcement officials in Southern California to arrange a new system to share information about notorious multinational street gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha and the Mara 18.
Menesses said he has directed his intelligence officers to provide U.S. law enforcement with quick access to his agency’s detailed database on 10,500 gang members, including many who have been deported from the United States, while his officers will be able to get information from American police that will help his nation fight gangs.
He also said that he would expand the program to include any other U.S. cities that also have problems with Central American gangs.
“They may have information I don’t have or I may have information they don’t have,” he said in an interview after a meeting with Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona. “The important thing is that we exchange information so we can put the criminals and the leaders in jail.”
Menesses said his country is also working closely with the FBI and Interpol to investigate rumors that al-Qaida has sent agents to Central America and is seeking help from the gangs to enter the United States. So far, they have found no evidence that terrorists are in the region or that they have established any links with the Mara Salvatrucha or other groups active in smuggling.
“We don’t have terrorists in the Central American region,” Menesses said. “There was some information but it wasn’t confirmed ... it was pure rumor.”
The Salvadoran police official met Monday with Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters and has meetings scheduled this week with the California Highway Patrol and the sheriff’s departments of Riverside and Los Angeles counties.
California police agencies regularly confer with their counterparts from other countries, particularly in cases of organized crime, and it can sometimes help investigations to have access to foreign databases, Carona said.
“We may not need it for two or three years, but then it might provide the Rosetta Stone that helps you solve a case,” he said.
Gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha emerged in the United States in the 1980s as thousands of Salvadorans fled to the United States to escape the civil war in their country. They banded together first for protection from other U.S. street gangs then evolved into criminal enterprises on their own.
As U.S. authorities deported large numbers of convicted criminals back to El Salvador, crime in the Central American nation skyrocketed, with an estimated 80 percent of all homicides in the nation of six million linked to the gangs.