From the L.A. Times:

Federal prosecutors Tuesday accused members of a Latino street gang of a violent campaign to drive African American rivals out of their South Los Angeles area neighborhood, resulting in at least 20 killings in the last three years.

Capping an undercover investigation conducted over that period, authorities issued indictments that charged more than 60 members and associates of the Florencia 13 street gang with a long list of felonies. Prosecutors say the gang was trying to dominate the area’s drug trade as well as extort “rent” from prostitutes, vendors, drug dealers and others.

Much of the violence occurred in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood, a working-class unincorporated community of 60,000 north of Watts that went through a rapid shift in population starting in the 1980s. Once mostly black, the area is now home to many Mexican immigrants.

Officials said Latino gang leaders in recent years had sought to drive the remaining black gangs and their supporters from the neighborhood and had repeatedly ordered members to attack black rivals — in some cases shooting them on sight.

The indictment’s description of sustained, deadly racial gang fighting provides evidence of a type of violence that is often discussed but seldom documented. Homicide statistics indicate that the vast majority of killings take place within racial or ethnic groups.

Florence-Firestone, however, appears to have been a murderous exception. Killings in the neighborhood peaked in 2005, when 41 homicides sparked widespread community outcry. As violence rose, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department sent more than 60 additional deputies to the area and conducted several mass arrests aimed at reducing racial violence. The district attorney’s office devoted a special prosecutor to handle only Florence-Firestone homicides for two years.

Last year, homicides plummeted to 19.

Another piece of the stepped-up law enforcement effort was the undercover investigation. Officials said Tuesday that they had determined that 80 shootings since early 2005 had resulted from the gang violence.

In some cases, African Americans with no gang ties were caught up in the violence, prosecutors said. “In their attempt to intimidate African Americans in the community, they targeted innocent citizens,” said U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O’Brien.

In one instance, an African American couple were robbed at gunpoint by gang members who were trying to send a message, prosecutors say. In another, a man waiting at a Florence Avenue bus stop before work was critically injured in a drive-by shooting by Florencia members who apparently mistook him for a rival gang member, according to the indictments.

The gang would “target African American individuals for assault” and leaders made sure “that all the F13 cliques were participating in the assaults of African American rival gang members,” the indictments say.

Florence-Firestone is a collection of factories, stucco homes and mom-and-pop stores that has gone through dramatic demographic changes every 15 to 20 years since it formed in the early 1930s.

Poor Southern whites, middle-class blacks and poor Southern blacks have all entered Southern California via short stays in Florence-Firestone.

In the late 1980s, the neighborhood was about 80% African American. But most black residents have moved away. Today, the area is 90% Latino — mostly Mexican immigrants.

“The last five years has been the greatest influx” of Latinos, said Pastor Chris LeGrande of the Great Hope Fellowship of Faith on Compton Avenue, one of Florence-Firestone’s largest black churches.

The L.A. Times goes on to whitewash the story with the obligatory “Blacks kill Blacks more often than Latinos kill Blacks” without mentioning that much of the Black on Black crime is the result of gang rivalry while the Latino gangs murders are motivated by anti-Black racism imported form Latin America.

Surprise! The above gang is a Mexican Mafia affiliate. Also from the L.A. Times:

Florencia 13
* Founded in the early 1950s around Florence Avenue in the Florence-Firestone area.

* Has at least 30 cliques, or subsets.

* Has more than 2,000 members.

* Is active in about three square miles in and around the unincorporated neighborhood.

* Is controlled by senior members, some of whom are also members and associates of the Mexican Mafia, a prison gang.

Sources: Federal prosecutors,

L.A. County Sheriff’s Department

The rise of violent Latino gangs is not a problem just in L.A., six of the ten largest gangs in New York City are Latino gangs, with MS-13 considered the most bloodthirsty. The authorities in Portland, Ore have just woken up to a gang problem that has been growing unchecked for years. From Gangwar:

When you mention the topic of gangs in Portland, most people think of Bloods and Crips, the overwhelmingly black gangs that arrived here in the late ’80s.

Officials in Oregon were slow to recognize the problem, but once they did–following Portland’s first drive-by shooting death, of Joseph “Ray Ray” Winston in August 1988–the response was overwhelming. Mayor Bud Clark kicked off major reforms of the Police Bureau to tackle the problem. Gov. Neil Goldschmidt hired a full-time aide to combat Portland’s gang activity. Community leaders, nonprofits, government social-service agencies and businesses such as the Trail Blazers poured millions of dollars into Northeast Portland to attempt to knit back the fraying threads of society, create job programs, employ role models and give young black kids choices by creating alternatives to gangs in Northeast Portland.

To an extent, it’s worked. “Kids are able to walk about on the streets and play where they couldn’t before,” says Dave Barrios, a recently retired gang cop.

As the African-American gang problem has slowly been brought under control, its Hispanic counterpart has quietly grown. In the early ’90s, African-American gang members outnumbered Hispanic gangsters in Oregon by a ratio of 9 to 1. A decade later the ratio is reversing: At last count, the statewide Hispanic gang membership of roughly 1,500 was estimated to be twice that of Crips and Bloods combined, according to the Portland Police Bureau.

Much of this is a matter of demographics: The local Latino population has tripled in the last 15 years, bringing to Portland’s streets vast numbers of immigrants’ children as well as hardened gang members from California and Mexico.

Ms-13 has expanded into almost every state on the eastern seaboard and it is widely believed that the Newark Murders were an MS-13 initiation. Hanity and Colmes ran a short piece on MS-13 just recently:

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Expect more arrests, and more crimes, as America replays the violent 80’s gang wars this time with a cast of Latino racists who will export their violence outside the boundaries of the barrios.