World’s deadliest gang MS-13 ‘heads to Australia’ in bid to top global murder league

MS-13 is known for its barbaric fighting, contract killing, drug trafficking, gang rape, people smuggling and desire to be known as number one for clocking up the most murders.

The Central American gang’s members are recognisable by the extensive and symbolic tattoos covering their faces and torsos, although newer members are eschewing the markings to avoid police detection.

Gang members use hand signals such as the symbol for a devil’s horn to greet each other and initiation to become a “homeboy” or full gang member involves being brutally beaten.

The gang already exists in 42 US states, throughout the Central American countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Puerto Rico as well as Spain and Canada.

Reputed to have 100,000 gang members worldwide, the gang recruits members as young as eight and punishes disloyalty with murder or maiming.

Gang weapons include every type of firearm, although some members prefer killing with a machete.

Notorious for their use of violence to inflict retribution and revenge, the cruelty of the Salvatrucha (MS-13) earned them respect and recruitment by one of the world’s most powerful organised crime groups, Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel.

While the core membership of the gang originated in El Salvador, whose capital San Salvador is considered the murder capital of the world, the gang sprang up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and has since spread from the inner-city to the suburbs.

In the US, MS-13 has an especially heavy presence in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Washington, New York, New Jersey and Houston, Texas.

The gang has become such a threat that US authorities began deporting as many members as possible back to Central America.

The Salvatrucha is so powerful in El Salvador that MS-13 inmates have their own segregated jails which prison guards are too frightened to enter.

The gang’s name is said to come from the Salvatrucha guerillas who fought in the civil war and the slang word for gang taken from the marabunta, a fierce type of ant.

The original membership included young men brutalised by the Salvadorean conflict who said they simply “loved war”.

As the gang expanded, refugees from other Central American countries were permitted membership.

In October 2012, the US Treasury Department announced a freeze on American-owned assets controlled by the gang and listed MS-13 as a “Transnational Criminal Organization”.

Central America has continued as a breeding ground for MS-13 gang members.

The Penas Ciudad Barrios is a prison exclusively housing inmates from the Mara Salvatrucha gang.

The prison, built for 800, now houses 2,500 lags who run their own society complete with bakery and hospital.

According to United Nations, El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world with a 2012 murder rate of 41.2 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants and a projected murder rate of 91 per 100,000 by 2015.